While I personally agree with your view that gameplay should always be actually fun, I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers.
Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game-like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In fact, the harder your life is, the more rewarding it can be.
These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world and life that's more rewarding than reality. The parallels with real life are direct and intentional: "grinding" is like real work that earns you fungible profit that you can then trade to skip other types of work that you don't like to do. This is a proven loop of reward in reality and it works in games too, being consistently "fun" isn't the only way for a game to satisfy players. I can't speak to Axie Infinity which seems like it's not even well developed to that extent, but for other games in the field these grinds aren't exactly a failure of design, they're effective at constructing a life-like reward system that doesn't solely rely on "fun".
Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial, hence the whole article about this being a bullshit job. I personally avoid these types of games (basically all MMOs) for this reason and I don't see how web3 makes any of it better. But I find it hard to criticize it objectively. I think real life is bullshit anyway, so the cheap imitation of life that these games offer isn't always completely worse. I can see why many people willingly buy into it.
I used to play WOW until I realised what I was doing. I still remember the day I quit because I was supposed to show up for some massive raid and just didn’t. I have not logged in since.
The whole MMO and Freemium space is a bit grim if you ask me since you are essentially manipulating the feelings of players with no worthwhile rewards.
I think this is why I have gravitated heavily to board games. You meet up once a week or so. Play against real humans. No grind. And they can help sharpen your thinking.
I can't stand this kind of thing, but I do enjoy a lot of games that basically punish you until you develop enough skill to beat them. This is its own form of "grinding," I suppose, but one I find much more rewarding than essentially being rewarded for the number of hours I'm willing to do monotonous tasks.
The distinction is that you would never pay someone to learn how to beat the Orphan of Kos for you; the pleasure is in getting your ass kicked to the point where you throw the controller across the room, only to pick it up again a couple hours later. That's exactly the experience these Bullshit Games aren't creating.
I don't think it's true that nobody would pay to learn it. A friend made significant money as a dota tutor, and there's whole sites full of people selling tutoring time https://www.superprof.com/lessons/gaming/united-states/. Similarly, people pay for cheats/unlocks/walkthroughs.
That's true for a lot of players but the problem is that like any real-life skill, many players will hit a low ceiling of mastery in certain skills for whatever reason. Regardless of whether they're unwilling or unable, these low-skill players will not feel rewarded by the game. That's a problem if you're targeting a broad audience of players (which tends to be the most profitable strategy).
> I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers.
I don't doubt that some people are enjoying this, and I think that's great; meditative games are fine. But I've never played a meditative game and been tempted to pay real money to turn it off.
I think there's a little bit of wishful, optimistic projection about player intention that happens during these conversations, because if everyone playing the games felt the way you describe, then the monetization model wouldn't work.
We have games that have chores in them (Animal Crossing springs to mind). And we have repetitive games. And we have MMOs where people like to grind. None of that is a failure of design. But what you notice is that in the best instances of these games where people actually like the grind, they pay money to play the game, not to stop playing it. When a player is earning $10 every 4-6 hours by automating chopping logs, that's a sign that some of your playerbase isn't enjoying what's happening to them. They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.
We can talk about the people who do enjoy the grind or get something out of it, but I feel like we're all kind of lying to ourselves if we say that's the primary experience happening with the vast majority of players. Games wouldn't make money from microtransactions unless a nontrivial portion of their playerbase thought it was valuable to skip gameplay. You won't make very much money giving players ways to skip gameplay unless you're confident that a nontrivial portion of your playerbase won't find that gameplay rewarding.
> When a player is earning $10 every 4-6 hours by automating chopping logs, that's a sign that some of your playerbase isn't enjoying what's happening to them. They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.
Unfortunately, in the scope of Runescape, this misses the point in a big way. Runescape has a robust economy where every action can be measured in gold and experience per hour (when played efficiently). Someone might be buying magic logs for gold because cutting them down is a poor choice for them from an opportunity cost perspective (i.e. they can make more gold per hour via other activities their character has access to).
Zooming out, the system is actually incredible if you get a chance to analyze it a bit more. For the hardest of the hardcore players, there's a resource called CrystalMathLabs[0] that shows exactly how much time and gold it costs to max your character. And the devs are constantly optimizing new content around these "max efficiency" rates.
> Runescape has a robust economy where every action can be measured in gold and experience per hour (when played efficiently). Someone might be buying magic logs for gold because cutting them down is a poor choice for them from an opportunity cost perspective (i.e. they can make more gold per hour via other activities their character has access to).
I don't think this holds up when real-world money enters the equation. I don't think this can be accurately descriped as player optimization or class specialization if people are paying real money to skip it.
> they can make more gold per hour via other activities their character has access to
If this was actually true, no real-world money would be entering the system, because all of the players would be making enough gold in-game via those other activities to pay for the logs. If they're being forced to spend real-world money, then the other activities they're engaged with are not giving them enough gold to sustainably fund themselves in-game.
The problem isn't having an in-game economy, in-game economies are great. The problem is people paying to get rid of gameplay. People who do that are signaling very clearly that they believe there is monetary value in removing a section of gameplay from the game. Designers should pay attention to that signal.
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I don't doubt that there are people legitimately having fun playing Runecraft. But it can't be everyone, or else people would not pay $10 to remove less than a day's worth of grind.
Like I mentioned earlier: it's not just about fun/enjoyment, it's about being rewarded by the game. In both real life and games, people will overcome challenges they don't enjoy because it is rewarding in a way that isn't necessarily just "fun". Eliminating a day's worth of grind in real life is surely very rewarding as well but it's very difficult and rare to do. In a game like eg Runescape, such an impactful and rewarding feat is rather achievable, it only costs $10 and almost everyone can afford it. If you don't have $10 to spare then you can achieve it with time. The grind is just a challenge to overcome, and that doesn't have to be fun but challenges are often rewarding to overcome.
> such an impactful and rewarding feat is rather achievable, it only costs $10 and almost everyone can afford it.
There are a ton of problems bundled up in this sentence, but I'm not sure I have time to unpack all of them.
But this is not an attitude that I think a game designer should ever have. I don't think we should be building experiences that boil down to teaching players that spending money is the equivalent of overcoming a challenge, I think players should be extremely suspicious of any game or experience that has that attitude towards challenge. Spending money is not the same thing as achieving something or earning a reward, I think it's really bad for us to encourage that kind of equivalency in a player's mind.
Well ok, that's just like your opinion, man. Like I said in my original comment, I avoid it personally but I find it hard to criticize objectively. Like so many things these games do, it's just a cheap imitation of real life where this stuff is everywhere. People can and do spend to overcome challenges in real life all the time while the proles meagerly grind away, there's so many meatspace mechanics like this but it takes a lot more than $10. Since many people will never achieve that kind of substantial wealth in their entire lives, these games offer a fake world where they can. Using fantasy worlds to escape the shitty reality we live in is such an old & boring concept.
Meh, it's a free country and games like Runescape are a known quantity that players can choose. I would say that if you want to change minds then make your case, but clearly you don't have the time to do that.
>They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.
For them, personally. There's a good deal of microtransactions where the person spending the money still wants everyone else to have to grind for it. MMO's tend to breed a lot of prestige-seeking behavior.
> There's a good deal of microtransactions where the person spending the money still wants everyone else to have to grind for it.
I'm not sure that having a system that's unpleasant for a portion of the playerbase and letting people pay to pretend that they've gone through it is all that better.
I've commented to the same effect elsewhere, but public prestige systems that can be paid to be bypassed are sort of self-defeating. They only work if a very small portion of the playerbase is cheating, which... I still don't think it's good design to set up gameplay incentives or monetization around a minority of the playerbase pretending to the majority of the other players that they've legitimately earned something.
> Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial
It's only artificial in a sense that it's one level deeper than our current economy (and is smaller and subject to the whims of the developers), but in the grand scheme of the universe our current economy is just as artificial.
These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world and life that's more rewarding than reality.
You could look at the existence of these games as a triumph of capitalism. We have raised productivity to such heights that the real world does not provide enough grind to sate the need for reward, so people literally invent fictional realities to create more opportunities for grinding your way to a reward.
What is missing here is purpose. The reward could be more than just meaningless progress in the game. For example, why couldn’t you have a game were the grind is designing tailored-for-one phone cases, which then get printed and shipped in the real world. People could be ordering an NFT-backed guaranteed unique phone case, and many people would be willing to pay real money for that.
That these games have a grind that amounts to meaningless work disconnected to physical reality seems like a failure of imagination and a waste of opportunity.
Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game-like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In fact, the harder your life is, the more rewarding it can be.
These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world and life that's more rewarding than reality. The parallels with real life are direct and intentional: "grinding" is like real work that earns you fungible profit that you can then trade to skip other types of work that you don't like to do. This is a proven loop of reward in reality and it works in games too, being consistently "fun" isn't the only way for a game to satisfy players. I can't speak to Axie Infinity which seems like it's not even well developed to that extent, but for other games in the field these grinds aren't exactly a failure of design, they're effective at constructing a life-like reward system that doesn't solely rely on "fun".
Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial, hence the whole article about this being a bullshit job. I personally avoid these types of games (basically all MMOs) for this reason and I don't see how web3 makes any of it better. But I find it hard to criticize it objectively. I think real life is bullshit anyway, so the cheap imitation of life that these games offer isn't always completely worse. I can see why many people willingly buy into it.