What is the Unbearable Plague of Grindy Video Games?

Once upon a time, video games reigned as linear straightforward pieces of entertainment. A person could simply play and enjoy their time, whilst still being able to finish the video game. Then one day, video games took a dark turn and began transforming. Content within a video game shifted into a wretched “grindy” mess, causing people to spend hours of their lives just to finish the game. Finishing a video game became more of a chore than having fun.

Have you noticed that most video games today take hours and hours just to complete? You cannot simply start a game and drive your gameplay experience in a straight line. Instead, a video game has barriers and walls that prevent you from progressing forward. To get past these barriers, the game provides side quests, collectibles, and small nonchalant side objectives to finish a game.

The hindrance of having to complete side content becomes annoying, often leaving you forgetting the main story altogether because you were busy focusing on the nonchalant activities. Then there is the possibility where you have to repeat scenarios over and over for in-game experience points, items, currency, and more just to progress with the story. All of this is referred to as “grinding” within the video game industry.

Grinding is a huge problem altogether within the video game industry. Grinding can be fun in certain video games, but grinding itself has been implemented deeply into many video games as of late. Video games have become more like part-time jobs, involving consumers to do chore-like activities or spend time doing repetitive actions instead of having fun. A good analogy of this is watching an episodic series, but you are only watching the filler episodes on repeat.

What was the cause of grinding being facilitated into video games nowadays? The answer lies with the consumers. According to the YouTube video Game Quality or Game Length by GamingBolt, video games today should be massive, densely immersive, open world, and expected to be 20-30 hours long. That is a long time to complete a video game!

That expectation is massive in scale to create as a game studio. Creating content that provides that much detail and gameplay experience takes a long time. Which is where the side content and activities becomes an issue. The video game industry standardized video games to have main content and side content for a person to experience.

If the average length of time to complete a video game today is roughly 20–30 hours long, then the first problem of grinding becomes apparent. The game is not just 20–30 hours of main story content that a person has to complete to finish the game. That is 20–30 hours of gameplay for main story content, side content, and subsequent activities that a person has to complete to see the ending of the video game.

Going further with the problems with grinding, according to the YouTube video The Decline of Quality Grind in Modern Games by trophytroll, grinding is a form of adding more playtime without game developers needing to put more hours into creating content. To match the 20–30 hours of gameplay, developers have been adding grinding-like elements to lengthen their games instead of just shortening their content altogether.

The consumer is really being tricked into thinking that the game is 20–30 hours long with the grind-like elements in place. Because the consumers prefer video games to be long, immersive, and detailed, the video game industry has standardized main content and side content with grindy elements to match expectations. A scenario where everyone loses and the fun in video games is being removed.

Grinding in most games is not a bad thing. Some games work well with the grind-like elements to really make a game shine. However, because the consumer market demands expectations of the video game industry, the video game industry will provide content in a way that will benefit itself. Thus leaving the future of video games to be plagued by the wretched “grindy-ness”.