How Gaming Makes Me a Better Grad: Grinding

x-posted at Scientopia

I grew up an arcade girl, and will play the hell out of any fighter/brawler game you hand me. But unfortunately due to the confluence of not owning any consoles, and enjoying beating the pulp out of people, I’ve transitioned to being an MMO girl. I have resisted this label heart and d-list soul and yet I must accept it, because I keep drifting back to the MMO as my primary example in most cases, such as today.

The basic goal of any massive multiplayer online (MMO) game is to keep you paying on a monthly basis (or purchasing play-by-the-hour timecards) for as long as humanly possible. It is not unusual for hardcore players to burn through 3 years of developed work in under two months. So developers have to find ways to stretch content before the ravaging hordes conquer it all and demand new shit. The solution most MMOs employ to deal with this is implementing Teh Grind.

Teh Grind can rear its soul-rending head in a variety of ways. In some games it’s as simple as making you play eleventy billion hours to hit maximum level. For some it comes in the form of Epic Mobs or Dungeon Bosses that will sometimes drop phat lewts. I’ve cut my baby MMO player teeth on the infamous Korean MMOs, which are generalized to be the Ultimate Grindfest.

For example, I spent several years playing Atlantica Online, which was basically a part-time job for me. Their greatest mercy on players was to institute an ‘auto-battle’ function that you could turn on and let your team use its piddling AI to try to kill mobs. So that you could actually eat food and interact with your children, or something. I remember teaming up with a buddy who was also an auto-battle aficionado and we would grind for 14 hrs straight. For approximately one level. The level cap was 130 when I played the game.

Figure 1: I’m not even going to talk about that special sociopathic place you go to when you wipe in some pita dungeon and have to start over

I also spent a serious chunk of time playing Aion Online, whose nonexistent rate of Epic Drops crushed my little gamer soul. For example, one instance that ruled the land once you hit level cap was Dark Poeta, because it could drop some awesomesauce gear. In Dark Poeta, you kill as much shit as you can as fast as you can and depending on your killing shit score and completion time, you either got Awesomesauce Bosses that could drop uber gear or Lamezoid Bosses that dropped candy. Yes candy, like a piñata. Depending on the quality of the group I went with we would finish anywhere from 2 hours to 1 hr 20 minutes. I was a lightweight and only ran Dark Poeta about 45 times. The best thing I ever saw drop was an astoundingly useless headpiece infamous throughout the community**.

I’m not even going to go into all the times I’ve been in a group trying to kill a boss that spawns only once every 2 to 4 days and having a group of Uber Pros slaughter us all and snatch our hard earned lewts (you got scooped!). A lot of MMOs are about grinding all the time, and rarely, if ever, getting rewarded for your hard work. A lot of people think this is insane and rapidly quit to go play something less soul-sucking, but the rest of us soldier on in some sorted of grim, masochistic, satisfaction that we’ve Got What It Takes.

If this is sounding disturbingly familiar, then you are well prepared for Analogy Time! Much of graduate school research is all about Teh Grind. In MMOs, and in research, I must be fully prepared to grind for little to no benefit until I have carpal tunnel and my eyeballs are no longer capable of producing tears, because that’s what it takes. And then sometimes you get some great data and in a twisted way it feels a little sweeter, because you spent so much time getting nut-punched by your experimental setup. And, as in gaming, grinding is a lot less mind-numbing when you’re doing it with friends.

TL;DR you have to smash a lot of lemons and possibly have the acid melt your skin and digest your eyeballs before you get a glass of lemonade

* I also played Asmodian so you little pigeons with fucking Zapiel’s can go suck it.

** I’m sorry for any PTSD that caused former/current Aion players.