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I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing t

I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of Runescape was bad; people were willing to pay $10 of real money to remove 4-6 hours of gameplay from the game. Well frankly, that's 4-6 hours of gameplay should never have been in the game in the first place. Players should not feel bored playing your game for that long, certainly not bored enough to pay money to get out of it. I have no doubt that learning how to exploit these systems was really fun for people, because learning how to exploit systems and build macros and read economic signals and avoid detection from a company is genuinely really interesting, fascinating work. It's just a shame that the only way Runescape could (inadvertently) enable that experience for people was to make a crappy grind process for an even larger portion of their playerbase. I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase. And I think that perspective is worth keeping when we look at play-to-earn games. These are boring games, and some people are doing some fun economics stuff on top of them. That doesn't make the core gameplay any less boring though, and the fun economics stuff only works because a lot of other players are having a miserable time with the intended mechanics. I don't like praising a design ethos that says that a nontrivial portion of your players will be bored and will pay someone else to play the game for them.

unkulunkulu 5y ago
> I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase. I can’t stop myself from reading this as an argument about the real world :) The grinding pricess certainly gets boring sometimes so we begin hacking a more exciting game on top of it for sure ;)
pjc50 5y ago
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? The difference between now and then is that people had to go to third parties; nowadays the game developer themselves will sell you the skip. Or a chance to gamble at a boost. Some of these mechanics are "compelling", in a very visceral sense - they compel people to spend time or money, in a way that isn't quite describable as fun. And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular.
- kibwen 5y ago
  > And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular. Now that the veneer of such "games" is dropping away to reveal that they've just been casinos all along, the bright side is that society might finally find the gumption to start taking gaming addiction as seriously as gambling addiction.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    You mean, take it not seriously at all, and exploited by the government (lottery) to rip off its own citizens? Sports gambling via apps is getting huge and deregulated and advertised on major TV broadcast networks.
    - oblio 5y ago
      It depends on where you are. In many places sports gambling is starting to be cracked down on. Plus having a single state owned lottery is better than 1000 shady companies competing, and lottery revenues can even be used for state budgets.
nohr 5y ago
Runescape never intended folks to hit that high a level. Two brothers made the game and they just kind of filled the endgame levels never expecting anyone to reach it. Later, they added more and more content to fill those later levels. So it also suprised them I guess.
cardosof 5y ago
I believe this is what happens with any open world MMO. There's no storyline to finish, there's no ending, and game devs have incentives to keep players playing forever (the more hours a player plays, the more likely he will spend more money). There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics. Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just change names - a lv10 tree, a lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires imagination, development, testing. So most open world games will have a high grinding/content ratio. But, as lame as it sounds, some people do like it. I'm guilty of playing a RuneScape-like game for mobile (Ancients Reborn). Things are slow and you need hours and hours to raise skills but, even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing. And there's pvp and talking to fellow players to keep it fun. So, in the end, I agree with you it sucks to have a game some players pay to not play it and others have fun cheating it, and it's a cheap design choice, but there are some people find it relaxing to watch a little toon chop down a magic tree.
- thombat 5y ago
  Now you've made me wonder: those hours I spent mesmerised by watching the colourful display of Windows 95 defragging the disc, would I have paid a monthly subscription for it? What if they'd added achievements, or leveling up? "Congratulations! Your wizard can now restructure directory chains!"
  - Lammy 5y ago
    http://progressquest.com/ http://progressquest.com/
    - musicale 5y ago
      Apparently the original idle game (according to wikipedia at least) although modern idle games are probably influenced by Cookie Clicker and others as well. I've occasionally been tempted to play Idle Champions which seems similar.
      - 5y ago
redisman 5y ago
That’s a very romantic view of the goals of game design. For a live service game the metrics to hit are mainly retention and monetization. Whether something is subjectively fun doesn’t really come into the picture
- thih9 5y ago
  If this was 100% true for all live service games, then they would all resemble casino games; a lot do, but some don’t.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Which ones don't?
TameAntelope 5y ago
I wouldn't think of a game like Runescape as one thing, but more of a collection of many things. What you pay for is the ability to skip the parts of the game you don't like, so you can focus on the parts of the game you do like. Ideally everyone would like everything you make, but that feels more like a naive way of thinking than to worry about people wanting to skip parts of your game. As long as "pay to skip" doesn't become "pay to win", I'd say a game is probably fine, overall, if people are enjoying substantial portions of that game, even if they're not enjoying all of it.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  I don’t know if it is possible to have “pay to skip” not become “pay to win” in an MMO. The whole point of an MMO is that your character progresses and gets better as they do more things in the game. If you are paying to skip something that makes your character better, your character will be better than if you didn’t pay to skip that. If what you are skipping is not making your character better, you wouldn’t be doing it in the first place. MMOs are be definition pay to win. You either pay with time or pay with money.
  - syvolt 5y ago
    People getting around games ToS' will always be a thing - since Runescape is the example being used, it is expressly banned to both purchase and sell gold coins. This is not a problem exclusive to MMOs, it's a problem with any game with a leveling system, currency, or items that are tradable between players. Examples: FIFA packs, Runescape/MMO gold, League of Legends accounts/boosts (names as well) , Valorant accounts/boosts, CS:GO items (names, accounts and boosts as well), Neopets items and gift boxes, Diablo 3 boosts/accounts, and on and on...
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    Then maybe it's fine to be "pay to win"? Seems like millions of people are enjoying their time spent, and are willing to spend more time to continue to win. Who are we to judge?
    - 5y ago
themacguffinman 5y ago
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.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  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.
  - themacguffinman 5y ago
    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).
jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
Grinding is boring but it's also extremely satisfying when you finally achieve your desired level. It feels like a real achievement, and it lets you show off to other players because they know how much time you had to spend. If it was also fun, it wouldn't be as impressive. In that way it's sort of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin. If it wasn't a total waste (that is, if the work itself produced something useful that was worth something) then it wouldn't do its job as a disincentive to cheat the system because you're not actually wasting anything by doing the work.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  > In that way it's sort of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin. It’s not sort of like PoW, it is basically exactly the same. People play games for fun, but they also play for status. Status, like Bitcoin, has a hard supply cap so there is no limit to the amount of energy that individuals might expend in pursuit of it.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > It feels like a real achievement I've mentioned this elsewhere, but if people can pay money to skip something, then I don't think doing it is a public/social achievement. At best, it's a personal achievement, which could hold value for some people. But you're not really signaling anything publicly by going through a grind if someone else can pay to skip it. This is also why I'm kind of skeptical of NFT games as being about "earning" something in-game, or about showing off status. Why should anyone care about or respect someone for having an asset in a game that can just be bought?
  - jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
    You can buy your way into a prestigious school. I don't see how some people paying to skip the work denies the achievement of those who don't skip it.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > You can buy your way into a prestigious school. And is that something our society encourages? Are we rooting for prestigious schools to offer more pay-to-enter mechanisms like that, do we have a contingent of teachers arguing that this is the future of schooling? Or do a lot of people get really mad about those bribery scandals, and do those prestigious schools actually loose a small amount of social prestige in the public eye whenever a new scandal comes out? People aren't happy with Harvard when they engage in nepotism, no one goes around calling that a bold new innovative model for college admissions. Of course, paying money or hacking your way through an experience doesn't rob other people of the intrinsic personal achievement of doing something hard, and it doesn't mean their experience was less meaningful. But common shortcuts certainly make all of these achievements less valuable as a social signal, which is something that NFT-based games claim that they can provide. In your earlier comment you write: > it lets you show off to other players because they know how much time you had to spend But no, it doesn't, because those other players don't know if you legitimately got the achievement/asset, they have no idea how much time you spent on it. If you personally find it rewarding to get that asset then great, but in a play-to-earn game or a game with tradable NFT assets, most of the achievements that are publicly displayed by players won't have been earned, so you're not really socially/publicly showing off anything to other players unless you're also adding a text box underneath them saying "don't worry, I did actually earn this."
58x14 5y ago
I agree with you ideologically but challenge this statement: > [that] gameplay should never have been in the game How many millions of hours of 'pointless' content are uploaded weekly that people watch? No one is forced to play this game, or to pay for it. Why should it not exist? If game developers create something that people play, is that not a success from their perspective? This quickly becomes a philosophical conversation. As others mentioned, how much of life is the boring, grind-y parts? How many of us on HN find clever ways to circumvent, augment, automate the grind? Is it immoral to create profitable, addictive systems of human engagement? Does 'good' game design have a quantifiable definition?
- danShumway 5y ago
  There is a valid conversation to be had about whether art needs to be edifying. However, I think we're talking about an entirely different level of exploitation when we talk about making something so unpleasant that people are willing to pay to get rid of it. Millions of hours of pointless content gets uploaded to Youtube, but if people choose to watch it, fine. That's a conversation about edification and people choosing to waste their own time. What we have here instead is a system where people are signaling with real money that the experience is unpleasant for them. We're not talking about deciding what's best for people against their will or forcing art to have emotional/intellectual value, we're talking about building an experience that's monetized around players openly signaling that they dislike what we're doing to them. Not that the deeper conversation you bring up about addiction or "junk-food" stimulation doesn't have value, but I think exploiting pay-to-skip mechanics is a more obvious form of exploitation that's just on another level of harmful. The comparison here isn't giving people junk food or hooking them on useless Youtube videos -- the comparison is the ads that roll in front of those videos. It's giving someone a meal and putting something gross in it, and then forcing them to pay you to remove it or to pick it out themselves. It's taking something that people want, and then breaking it or obscuring it, making it so cumbersome to get at that valuable core that the act of playing the game is no longer satisfying to the player.
taurath 5y ago
It’s a bit disheartening when you look at how many people deal with the numbness ever present in their lives by playing games that mete out little rewards in easily quantifiable bits. This is not what humans need, or, if we’re honest, want.
- gedy 5y ago
  Isn't this the same as many of us do even outside of games?
  - oblio 5y ago
    Yeah, but we're not in the matrix yet, so optimizing for real life has other beneficial side effects.
syntheweave 5y ago
The reason grinding exists is also economic in nature: the "consumer value for money" equation is often reduced to maximizing hours of playtime. This has led to extremely padded gameplay all throughout when we compare to arcade games, which are premised on "operator value of time" and therefore always endeavor to shuttle players in and out of their session in a few minutes. The other day I visited the local pinball joint and the old EM game I was playing got stuck counting up the 3000 point bonus during gameplay. I cradled the ball on the right flipper, thinking "hmm, how interesting!" One of the staff came over and apoplectically remarked "If you don't continue play I am going to have to turn the game off", and when I did as instructed, showed great distress at how I had managed to roll over the score and accumulate two free credits, but also appreciated that he had gotten a bit closer to the mysterious issue of the game repeatedly ending up with 9 credits. I see the impact of NFTs as a pendulum swing towards "item value in context", which has no particular relationship to time or even defined scarcity, but would instead favor broad reusability across numerous contexts. P2E is just the early mimicry every new model has to go through before getting to the good parts, in the same way that early console games took a few years to start relaxing the constraints of arcades in earnest. I think a much more likely early candidate for interesting NFT gaming will be small collectable games, derived from the procedural arts scene. Scarcity sets individual prices within a collectables market, but the value of the collection as a whole is determined by other modes of context. There's no need to squeeze or stretch the gameplay loop or make it addictive or insert monetizing gates; every instance can be exactly designed to be "ideal" on its own. Instead the game has to cater to speculative interests, which is a whole other set of trade-offs and can even favor characteristic flaws. For some reason I have not yet seen the "pay to lose" NFT game, but to me it seems blindingly obvious that being able to lose in an interesting way will command speculative interest.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dustintrex 5y ago
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? If you're designing a free to play game and want to make money from it, this is not just good, it's a design goal -- as long as the developer is the one making the real world money. Clash of Clans perfected this model over 10 years ago: https://gyrovague.com/tag/clash-of-clans/ https://gyrovague.com/tag/clash-of-clans/
popcube 5y ago
your game should so funny that they cannot give up it, but it is so boring result in they want to pay money for skipping it. this is business model.
tomrod 5y ago
> I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? From a business perspective, you're allowing for engagement despite different time valuations by player personas. The savvy game designer would not only encourage this, it would develop a way to capture a portion of the proceeds.
jkhdigital 5y ago
People play games for all sorts of personal reasons. “Boring” gameplay is apparently in demand. If you don’t like that kind of game, don’t play it. If you don’t understand how anyone else could possibly spend time on it, then maybe you should open your mind and talk to some of these people to try and understand what is undoubtedly a much more complex phenomenon than you believe it to be.
- danShumway 5y ago
  This is ignoring the reality that people are paying to get rid of this gameplay. I do understand why people like boring games, I've sunk my own share of time into therapeutic experiences like Animal Crossing, and even a few pure idle games. I've grinded out 100% soul collections in old Castlevania games. That kind of repetitive action and optimization can be personally rewarding and emotionally satisfying. And I've no doubt that some players of these games genuinely enjoy the minute-to-minute process of chopping logs. But you're just kidding yourself if you say that's the primary thing going on here. If people enjoyed the grind, they wouldn't pay to remove it. The difference between grinding in a game like Castlevania and grinding in a game like Runescape is that there's not a Castlevania real-world monetary economy based entirely around shortening the game. We can't really seriously say that everyone playing Runescape enjoyed the grind if there was enough demand for gameplay automation to make botting a reliable income source.
ashtonkem 5y ago
At a certain point these look less like games, and more like status symbols being pursued. I suspect that this explains much more of the economic and social aspect of things like Runescape more than trying to think of them like a game.
aww_dang 5y ago
If people care enough to exploit your game or buy items in your game economy, your game is a success. If it was truly boring, they wouldn't bother.
sva_ 5y ago
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? The things that people are willing to spend money on in games are usually interesting for people for the exact reason that those things are scarce. So it is, from my experience, all about showing off. Saying this as someone who exploited a lot of games and made some large passive income from that, "back in the days". I'd say 95% of -- "end-customers" (as opposed to resellers which you need if you move a lot,) bought stuff just to show off. So if those things were readily available and didn't require grinding, people wouldn't desire them. It's almost a bit of a paradox, I guess.
josh2600 5y ago
I have to say that many of my fondest memories from all kinds of systems; games, work, play, all of my favorite times were when I was finding an unscratched edge in a model. There’s something superlative about finding a hack, a way to obtain something that the designer of the game did not intend. The feeling of “I know your game better than you do” is something I shall never forget. Those fleeting moments where you have a temporary advantage gained without malfeasance but with pure cunning and skill (or cleverness if we’re being bold), those are the happiest times in my life. Finding the little edges where things just don’t quite add up, shining a light on them, and wielding them as your own; that’s the stuff from which real hackers are made.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  You make it sound so posh but there is other, much more real face to all this - breaking the game for everybody else. You are basically having fun at the expense of literally everyone else involved. Sure, you achieve it by being clever, and theoretically you report your finding to creators and don't abuse your position of power, but thats not what usually happened. Behavior like this is the core reason why I don't play online games of any type anymore - the idea of proper fun looks distantly different to this constant 'finding metagame' for which I have less polite names. Plus its a waste of life and ones talents but thats another topic.
meheleventyone 5y ago
I agree with most of this including pay-to-earn, more worryingly there are other types of to-earn being floated like learn-to-earn. It’s almost like people are rushing headlong into dystopia and ignoring all the downsides of extrinsic rewards. That said a successful game like this will always have a non-trivial part of the player base willing to pay to skip parts of the game. They want the success now not later and aren’t willing to work for it. Even if the journey is actually fun. Most games take this quite seriously though and work against gold farming and cheating as it ruins the experience they set out to make. Where it becomes evil is when you set out to make it horrible intentionally so a bigger part of the player base has to pay to remove it and continue playing.
jrootabega 5y ago
In my experience, plenty of people will want to skip even the most fun game experiences to get to the farming/grinding endgame just to watch their numbers and loot collection expand.
foxyv 5y ago
This kind of grinding is probably the part I enjoy most about games. It's almost meditative. I usually play games to kill time anyways. I guess that's why I enjoyed games like FF8, WoW, and Maple Story.
alsetmusic 5y ago
> … from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? This was addressed brilliantly in a South Park episode, “Freemium Isn’t Free.” In it, a character, Stan, blows a ton of money advancing a by-design boring game. The game is revealed to be a sham to bleed players of cash. It likens addicted gamers to alcoholics. This mock commercial appears in the ep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_n5nbx0Z9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_n5nbx0Z9s

unkulunkulu 5y ago

> I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase. I can’t stop myself from reading this as an argument about the real world :) The grinding pricess certainly gets boring sometimes so we begin hacking a more exciting game on top of it for sure ;)

pjc50 5y ago

> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? The difference between now and then is that people had to go to third parties; nowadays the game developer themselves will sell you the skip. Or a chance to gamble at a boost. Some of these mechanics are "compelling", in a very visceral sense - they compel people to spend time or money, in a way that isn't quite describable as fun. And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular.

kibwen 5y ago
> And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular. Now that the veneer of such "games" is dropping away to reveal that they've just been casinos all along, the bright side is that society might finally find the gumption to start taking gaming addiction as seriously as gambling addiction.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  You mean, take it not seriously at all, and exploited by the government (lottery) to rip off its own citizens? Sports gambling via apps is getting huge and deregulated and advertised on major TV broadcast networks.
  - oblio 5y ago
    It depends on where you are. In many places sports gambling is starting to be cracked down on. Plus having a single state owned lottery is better than 1000 shady companies competing, and lottery revenues can even be used for state budgets.

nohr 5y ago

Runescape never intended folks to hit that high a level. Two brothers made the game and they just kind of filled the endgame levels never expecting anyone to reach it. Later, they added more and more content to fill those later levels. So it also suprised them I guess.

cardosof 5y ago

I believe this is what happens with any open world MMO. There's no storyline to finish, there's no ending, and game devs have incentives to keep players playing forever (the more hours a player plays, the more likely he will spend more money). There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics. Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just change names - a lv10 tree, a lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires imagination, development, testing. So most open world games will have a high grinding/content ratio. But, as lame as it sounds, some people do like it. I'm guilty of playing a RuneScape-like game for mobile (Ancients Reborn). Things are slow and you need hours and hours to raise skills but, even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing. And there's pvp and talking to fellow players to keep it fun. So, in the end, I agree with you it sucks to have a game some players pay to not play it and others have fun cheating it, and it's a cheap design choice, but there are some people find it relaxing to watch a little toon chop down a magic tree.

thombat 5y ago
Now you've made me wonder: those hours I spent mesmerised by watching the colourful display of Windows 95 defragging the disc, would I have paid a monthly subscription for it? What if they'd added achievements, or leveling up? "Congratulations! Your wizard can now restructure directory chains!"
- Lammy 5y ago
  http://progressquest.com/ http://progressquest.com/
  - musicale 5y ago
    Apparently the original idle game (according to wikipedia at least) although modern idle games are probably influenced by Cookie Clicker and others as well. I've occasionally been tempted to play Idle Champions which seems similar.
    - 5y ago

redisman 5y ago

That’s a very romantic view of the goals of game design. For a live service game the metrics to hit are mainly retention and monetization. Whether something is subjectively fun doesn’t really come into the picture

thih9 5y ago
If this was 100% true for all live service games, then they would all resemble casino games; a lot do, but some don’t.
- oblio 5y ago
  Which ones don't?

TameAntelope 5y ago

I wouldn't think of a game like Runescape as one thing, but more of a collection of many things. What you pay for is the ability to skip the parts of the game you don't like, so you can focus on the parts of the game you do like. Ideally everyone would like everything you make, but that feels more like a naive way of thinking than to worry about people wanting to skip parts of your game. As long as "pay to skip" doesn't become "pay to win", I'd say a game is probably fine, overall, if people are enjoying substantial portions of that game, even if they're not enjoying all of it.

cortesoft 5y ago
I don’t know if it is possible to have “pay to skip” not become “pay to win” in an MMO. The whole point of an MMO is that your character progresses and gets better as they do more things in the game. If you are paying to skip something that makes your character better, your character will be better than if you didn’t pay to skip that. If what you are skipping is not making your character better, you wouldn’t be doing it in the first place. MMOs are be definition pay to win. You either pay with time or pay with money.
- syvolt 5y ago
  People getting around games ToS' will always be a thing - since Runescape is the example being used, it is expressly banned to both purchase and sell gold coins. This is not a problem exclusive to MMOs, it's a problem with any game with a leveling system, currency, or items that are tradable between players. Examples: FIFA packs, Runescape/MMO gold, League of Legends accounts/boosts (names as well) , Valorant accounts/boosts, CS:GO items (names, accounts and boosts as well), Neopets items and gift boxes, Diablo 3 boosts/accounts, and on and on...
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Then maybe it's fine to be "pay to win"? Seems like millions of people are enjoying their time spent, and are willing to spend more time to continue to win. Who are we to judge?
  - 5y ago

themacguffinman 5y ago

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.

emodendroket 5y ago
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.
- themacguffinman 5y ago
  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).

jallen_dot_dev 5y ago

Grinding is boring but it's also extremely satisfying when you finally achieve your desired level. It feels like a real achievement, and it lets you show off to other players because they know how much time you had to spend. If it was also fun, it wouldn't be as impressive. In that way it's sort of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin. If it wasn't a total waste (that is, if the work itself produced something useful that was worth something) then it wouldn't do its job as a disincentive to cheat the system because you're not actually wasting anything by doing the work.

jkhdigital 5y ago
> In that way it's sort of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin. It’s not sort of like PoW, it is basically exactly the same. People play games for fun, but they also play for status. Status, like Bitcoin, has a hard supply cap so there is no limit to the amount of energy that individuals might expend in pursuit of it.
danShumway 5y ago
> It feels like a real achievement I've mentioned this elsewhere, but if people can pay money to skip something, then I don't think doing it is a public/social achievement. At best, it's a personal achievement, which could hold value for some people. But you're not really signaling anything publicly by going through a grind if someone else can pay to skip it. This is also why I'm kind of skeptical of NFT games as being about "earning" something in-game, or about showing off status. Why should anyone care about or respect someone for having an asset in a game that can just be bought?
- jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  You can buy your way into a prestigious school. I don't see how some people paying to skip the work denies the achievement of those who don't skip it.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > You can buy your way into a prestigious school. And is that something our society encourages? Are we rooting for prestigious schools to offer more pay-to-enter mechanisms like that, do we have a contingent of teachers arguing that this is the future of schooling? Or do a lot of people get really mad about those bribery scandals, and do those prestigious schools actually loose a small amount of social prestige in the public eye whenever a new scandal comes out? People aren't happy with Harvard when they engage in nepotism, no one goes around calling that a bold new innovative model for college admissions. Of course, paying money or hacking your way through an experience doesn't rob other people of the intrinsic personal achievement of doing something hard, and it doesn't mean their experience was less meaningful. But common shortcuts certainly make all of these achievements less valuable as a social signal, which is something that NFT-based games claim that they can provide. In your earlier comment you write: > it lets you show off to other players because they know how much time you had to spend But no, it doesn't, because those other players don't know if you legitimately got the achievement/asset, they have no idea how much time you spent on it. If you personally find it rewarding to get that asset then great, but in a play-to-earn game or a game with tradable NFT assets, most of the achievements that are publicly displayed by players won't have been earned, so you're not really socially/publicly showing off anything to other players unless you're also adding a text box underneath them saying "don't worry, I did actually earn this."

58x14 5y ago

I agree with you ideologically but challenge this statement: > [that] gameplay should never have been in the game How many millions of hours of 'pointless' content are uploaded weekly that people watch? No one is forced to play this game, or to pay for it. Why should it not exist? If game developers create something that people play, is that not a success from their perspective? This quickly becomes a philosophical conversation. As others mentioned, how much of life is the boring, grind-y parts? How many of us on HN find clever ways to circumvent, augment, automate the grind? Is it immoral to create profitable, addictive systems of human engagement? Does 'good' game design have a quantifiable definition?

danShumway 5y ago
There is a valid conversation to be had about whether art needs to be edifying. However, I think we're talking about an entirely different level of exploitation when we talk about making something so unpleasant that people are willing to pay to get rid of it. Millions of hours of pointless content gets uploaded to Youtube, but if people choose to watch it, fine. That's a conversation about edification and people choosing to waste their own time. What we have here instead is a system where people are signaling with real money that the experience is unpleasant for them. We're not talking about deciding what's best for people against their will or forcing art to have emotional/intellectual value, we're talking about building an experience that's monetized around players openly signaling that they dislike what we're doing to them. Not that the deeper conversation you bring up about addiction or "junk-food" stimulation doesn't have value, but I think exploiting pay-to-skip mechanics is a more obvious form of exploitation that's just on another level of harmful. The comparison here isn't giving people junk food or hooking them on useless Youtube videos -- the comparison is the ads that roll in front of those videos. It's giving someone a meal and putting something gross in it, and then forcing them to pay you to remove it or to pick it out themselves. It's taking something that people want, and then breaking it or obscuring it, making it so cumbersome to get at that valuable core that the act of playing the game is no longer satisfying to the player.

taurath 5y ago

It’s a bit disheartening when you look at how many people deal with the numbness ever present in their lives by playing games that mete out little rewards in easily quantifiable bits. This is not what humans need, or, if we’re honest, want.

gedy 5y ago
Isn't this the same as many of us do even outside of games?
- oblio 5y ago
  Yeah, but we're not in the matrix yet, so optimizing for real life has other beneficial side effects.

syntheweave 5y ago

The reason grinding exists is also economic in nature: the "consumer value for money" equation is often reduced to maximizing hours of playtime. This has led to extremely padded gameplay all throughout when we compare to arcade games, which are premised on "operator value of time" and therefore always endeavor to shuttle players in and out of their session in a few minutes. The other day I visited the local pinball joint and the old EM game I was playing got stuck counting up the 3000 point bonus during gameplay. I cradled the ball on the right flipper, thinking "hmm, how interesting!" One of the staff came over and apoplectically remarked "If you don't continue play I am going to have to turn the game off", and when I did as instructed, showed great distress at how I had managed to roll over the score and accumulate two free credits, but also appreciated that he had gotten a bit closer to the mysterious issue of the game repeatedly ending up with 9 credits. I see the impact of NFTs as a pendulum swing towards "item value in context", which has no particular relationship to time or even defined scarcity, but would instead favor broad reusability across numerous contexts. P2E is just the early mimicry every new model has to go through before getting to the good parts, in the same way that early console games took a few years to start relaxing the constraints of arcades in earnest. I think a much more likely early candidate for interesting NFT gaming will be small collectable games, derived from the procedural arts scene. Scarcity sets individual prices within a collectables market, but the value of the collection as a whole is determined by other modes of context. There's no need to squeeze or stretch the gameplay loop or make it addictive or insert monetizing gates; every instance can be exactly designed to be "ideal" on its own. Instead the game has to cater to speculative interests, which is a whole other set of trade-offs and can even favor characteristic flaws. For some reason I have not yet seen the "pay to lose" NFT game, but to me it seems blindingly obvious that being able to lose in an interesting way will command speculative interest.

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dustintrex 5y ago

> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? If you're designing a free to play game and want to make money from it, this is not just good, it's a design goal -- as long as the developer is the one making the real world money. Clash of Clans perfected this model over 10 years ago: https://gyrovague.com/tag/clash-of-clans/ https://gyrovague.com/tag/clash-of-clans/

popcube 5y ago

your game should so funny that they cannot give up it, but it is so boring result in they want to pay money for skipping it. this is business model.

tomrod 5y ago

> I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? From a business perspective, you're allowing for engagement despite different time valuations by player personas. The savvy game designer would not only encourage this, it would develop a way to capture a portion of the proceeds.

jkhdigital 5y ago

People play games for all sorts of personal reasons. “Boring” gameplay is apparently in demand. If you don’t like that kind of game, don’t play it. If you don’t understand how anyone else could possibly spend time on it, then maybe you should open your mind and talk to some of these people to try and understand what is undoubtedly a much more complex phenomenon than you believe it to be.

danShumway 5y ago
This is ignoring the reality that people are paying to get rid of this gameplay. I do understand why people like boring games, I've sunk my own share of time into therapeutic experiences like Animal Crossing, and even a few pure idle games. I've grinded out 100% soul collections in old Castlevania games. That kind of repetitive action and optimization can be personally rewarding and emotionally satisfying. And I've no doubt that some players of these games genuinely enjoy the minute-to-minute process of chopping logs. But you're just kidding yourself if you say that's the primary thing going on here. If people enjoyed the grind, they wouldn't pay to remove it. The difference between grinding in a game like Castlevania and grinding in a game like Runescape is that there's not a Castlevania real-world monetary economy based entirely around shortening the game. We can't really seriously say that everyone playing Runescape enjoyed the grind if there was enough demand for gameplay automation to make botting a reliable income source.

ashtonkem 5y ago

At a certain point these look less like games, and more like status symbols being pursued. I suspect that this explains much more of the economic and social aspect of things like Runescape more than trying to think of them like a game.

aww_dang 5y ago

If people care enough to exploit your game or buy items in your game economy, your game is a success. If it was truly boring, they wouldn't bother.

sva_ 5y ago

> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? The things that people are willing to spend money on in games are usually interesting for people for the exact reason that those things are scarce. So it is, from my experience, all about showing off. Saying this as someone who exploited a lot of games and made some large passive income from that, "back in the days". I'd say 95% of -- "end-customers" (as opposed to resellers which you need if you move a lot,) bought stuff just to show off. So if those things were readily available and didn't require grinding, people wouldn't desire them. It's almost a bit of a paradox, I guess.

josh2600 5y ago

I have to say that many of my fondest memories from all kinds of systems; games, work, play, all of my favorite times were when I was finding an unscratched edge in a model. There’s something superlative about finding a hack, a way to obtain something that the designer of the game did not intend. The feeling of “I know your game better than you do” is something I shall never forget. Those fleeting moments where you have a temporary advantage gained without malfeasance but with pure cunning and skill (or cleverness if we’re being bold), those are the happiest times in my life. Finding the little edges where things just don’t quite add up, shining a light on them, and wielding them as your own; that’s the stuff from which real hackers are made.

saiya-jin 5y ago
You make it sound so posh but there is other, much more real face to all this - breaking the game for everybody else. You are basically having fun at the expense of literally everyone else involved. Sure, you achieve it by being clever, and theoretically you report your finding to creators and don't abuse your position of power, but thats not what usually happened. Behavior like this is the core reason why I don't play online games of any type anymore - the idea of proper fun looks distantly different to this constant 'finding metagame' for which I have less polite names. Plus its a waste of life and ones talents but thats another topic.

meheleventyone 5y ago

I agree with most of this including pay-to-earn, more worryingly there are other types of to-earn being floated like learn-to-earn. It’s almost like people are rushing headlong into dystopia and ignoring all the downsides of extrinsic rewards. That said a successful game like this will always have a non-trivial part of the player base willing to pay to skip parts of the game. They want the success now not later and aren’t willing to work for it. Even if the journey is actually fun. Most games take this quite seriously though and work against gold farming and cheating as it ruins the experience they set out to make. Where it becomes evil is when you set out to make it horrible intentionally so a bigger part of the player base has to pay to remove it and continue playing.

jrootabega 5y ago

In my experience, plenty of people will want to skip even the most fun game experiences to get to the farming/grinding endgame just to watch their numbers and loot collection expand.

foxyv 5y ago

This kind of grinding is probably the part I enjoy most about games. It's almost meditative. I usually play games to kill time anyways. I guess that's why I enjoyed games like FF8, WoW, and Maple Story.

alsetmusic 5y ago

> … from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? This was addressed brilliantly in a South Park episode, “Freemium Isn’t Free.” In it, a character, Stan, blows a ton of money advancing a by-design boring game. The game is revealed to be a sham to bleed players of cash. It likens addicted gamers to alcoholics. This mock commercial appears in the ep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_n5nbx0Z9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_n5nbx0Z9s