Thank you Wyatt! This video is a great explanation of the meaning of grindy and how we can solve it by design. Keep those great contents coming!!! I want more!

It's definitely about the moment to moment gameplay, if that is good enough I generally dont notice grind or even care about it. The first 30 hours of Genshin Impact do this pretty well, since the game is so fresh and new, you enjoy searching for chests or gathering materials to level things up. The issue comes from once that stuff becomes "old" content, you start to resent it. MMO RPGs have gotten better at this over the years too, although some people enjoy the grind in those games. Runescape has made itself famous for this feeling, where grinding & just the act of leveling up is the reward.

This might be particular to only certain gamers like myself, but grinding in a JRPG (such as Dragon Quest, Etrian Odyssey, or Final Fantasy) puts me in a very zen-like state. Plus there's also the quasi-social (role playing) aspect where you are "hanging out with your friends (the other party members)" while you defeat the evil monsters. It's like being on a grand adventure where you have to also put in the long, hard work of getting stronger. Granted, I take a very role-playing heavy approach to my gaming, but I don't see grinding as necessarily a negative aspect of a game.

I really like grinding in games, always just loved the feeling that I can spend extra time and resources to be way stronger than I am supposed to be at that point ... that was always a strong motivation, to kind of get ahead of the curve and have this op experience as a reward ... also channel looks super interesting I really like the topics of the videos and they all look quite helpful and well made also some edit after watching the video more, the times when I really enjoy grinding are when I can freely decide when to stop the main basic gameplay and progress and go do a grindy activity that is separate from this, for example in wow I really loved grinding older reputations whenever I wanted a break from dungeons, raiding and any other stuff I was doing at the moment ... and it was fun to me precicely because it was always available to me and I could choose when to go and do it

many RPGs today doesn't consider player's free time while adding grinding mechanics, for example, some ARPGs out there in order to achieve some cool builds and get the right equipments, you have to play so much that you basically need a lot of free time during your day, in many cases people doesn't have that much time available, basically this player will not be able to complete his build and lose interest, moving on to a different thing. this hurts player's base. Other games decides to create some kind of level scale to determine the power of enemies, by doing that you can't go back to a previous place and grind to get stronger, also it forces you to always update your character, which in many situations you just want to keep the stuff you found for a little longer and enjoy other aspects of the game.

Hey Wyatt, good to see you on yt! I've been tuning into your LD stream every now and then for some years now with another account. I believe that many games that feel grindy are not actually lacking in rewards or goals. The issue often lies in the lack of good short-term rewards and how they mitigate the core and optional risks that the player is facing. Rewards that do not mitigate risks are not actually rewards. For instance, if a player is forced to grind weaker enemies after failing to beat a boss, they will be spending a lot of time engaging in low-risk activities, which makes the rewards uninteresting and devalues the overall gameplay experience. The reason the rewards would be uninteresting is that they do not relate directly to the risk the player is facing. To make those mundane activities more interesting, you can increase the amount of optional risk to emphasize the moment-to-moment action. Let's say killing low-level enemies without taking damage increments a temporary buff on you - by doing this, you slowly increase the player's risk (even during "low-risk" activities) and create a reward that is directly linked to the risk they're facing. By designing rewards that mitigate risks, you can create a more engaging and satisfying gameplay experience. This requires a deep understanding of the game's core risks and the use of rewards to decrease the factors that increase them. It's a big topic to explain in a single comment. I'll try to link a blog post I wrote a week ago about the subject in a comment below, but I'm not sure if KZfaq allows you to post links.

i dont understand how you have so few subscribers. your channel feels like a hidden gem and i love every vid of yours!

Well made video! Good visuals, audio, and editing cuts. I agree with a lot of the opinions here, though I think that mostly across the board in most game genres is that giving the player constant agency, choice and control is the best way to go about solving this problem. Some genres have an easier time achieving this, like first person shooters or other PvP games. You have the choice to duck behind this obstacle or that one, go prone here, or wait a few seconds before moving for example. You are in a constant moment to moment scenario and matches are usually around 10-20 minutes depending on game so it caters to a wide audience. PvE games are a harder problem to solve, especially ARPGs. Skill and experience should be a factor, but you want the game to encourage new players to come play, and also want to make it so the veteran gamers are excited too. If you make it too simplistic, the veteran gamers will say they have no choice but to do what the devs say they should do and will get bored quickly. If you make it too complex, the new comer won't try it out at all. Finding that middle ground is very difficult. I am probably biased here, but leaning towards the veteran side of things I think is better in the long run.

I would LOVE an interview Chris Wilson on this topic specifically. just hearing you 2 talking about this would be brain porn.

I am one of the people that enjoys grinding. I can say that it depends on the game. I really love soothing games so just mining for iron is fun for me.

Good vid man :)

candlesan speaks out of Gamerhearts in the ending♥

Hey! Love the video, what's the game at 0:13?

Thank you. For these videos. I have always wondered why some games are addictive. My favorites being FF12, Dragons Dogma and Toram Online.

Making a game fun to play helps, ways to do this is to give the option to players of facing challenges in different and creative ways. Ways to do this would be to have challenges where they will be put into situations where they have to find different ways or angles to do something. Being able to do everything using same method gets boring, Diablo 3 is bad for this you get a OP set build and the play style remains the same through out the game getting repetitive and boring. Its one of the things that made D2 fun was the amount of different angles and play styles you had at your disposal to take on the challenge of hell, and the game having monster immunities made it so people would have to come up with many fun different creative ways of going through the content, and what items you could and could not wear was another puzzle to solve which made things interesting as well, as you would have to find out how many stat points need to be invested to use them and the important of stats played a big role as well, mana to spam attacks more often, HP to survive and dex for blocking/ attack rating and so forth. D2 in no way a perfect game but these are some of the elements that made it fun because of all the options and angles you could come at the game with made it interesting. Games do not do this much anymore as they mainly dumbed down to point like D3 where you just spam a few buttons and kill everything with not much thought needed for builds as the sets limit you to what builds you can do and the limitation of amount of skills and such just did not make for much creativeness to it, especially when sets made you do 100x more dmg using huge multipliers on skills. Nor was there any elements in the game like monster immunities that had to make you think of how to come up with interesting or creative ways to face such obstacles. Warframe was also a fun game when I played it when it first came out. Many creative ways to come at enemies from back fliping off a wall to sliding through them to wall running, making for many creative ways to come at enemies. I stopped playing cause they just made the game very grindy with no real risk for reward situations, so u just end up with constantly doing easy content over and over with no real challenges. Not sure how much its changed since I left.

I’ve pinged you on Twitter with the blog post (for some reason I cannot even reply to the last comment)

Minecraft is incredibly well structured in this respect.

the grind is important i feel like games water dow rewards with real money cosmetics

matchmaking systems are the main reason why the most played games are grindy. player is focused on rank gain and trying to improve. matchmaker is programmed to keep the player at same rank as much as possible so that he will keep playing to keep grinding mmr ( see dota 2 matchmaking etc). And while it's true that people will keep playing in the near and medium term, in the long term people will quit because this is frustrating. When you lose because of matchmaker matching you with much worse players, and you play enough games to start seeing this pattern happening.. really frustrating. As a gamer, the main thing is that the matchmaker should be fair and not have invisible "walls". Also developers should focus on making games as much varied as possible, because it turns the brain off when you do the same thing in the same map over and over.. as a society we should make stuff that doesn't turn people's brain off. games can develop a brain in a young mind, or they can fry it and the value in the game differs a lot based on this too

500 VIEWS not nothing.

focus and restraint is not just a river

ok bro, the first minute was excellent but im getting sleepy cant lie. now ill visit everyday and get shot down in every pathetic attempt to get a crush. RIP at least theres donuts... Tell Veraneka my heart and thoughts were with her, but we couldnt do it so she too goddamn poor and far away. or i am, depending on who is the sugar momma.

Hi do you by chance play Path of Exile? if so what do you think about it?

i really think oen of teh things most devs get completely wrong finds itself in your description of "grind" grind is when you do something that makes no sense to exist but to extend the time you get the reward. if you need 10000 wolf pelts for this epic equipment piece the thing that gives that equipment piece is the effort you had to putz into it but what you put your effort in is solely the gain of the reward and 10000 pelts make no sense whatsoever to be gathered and in no way ever are going to physically represent the equipment piece. also if you make it 5 pelts 3 rare gems that reflect the 3 gems in teh shouidlers and in the breatsplate implemented and the ore amount that needs to be enchanted by the essence of an extremely hard boss, then the boss essence is probably around 90% of the effort that also feels grindy and unattainable by effort of your own. while that scenario on top would be perfectly fine for the gem of your collection liek you weapon doing that amount of effort for every singlöe equipment piece again becomes a mindless grind. rather gathering essences of elements which are in harsh environments where you need resistence to even go there would make for a fenite progression to the equipment that has resistances forveer opening these areas to you if you didnt already do it and are way smaller little archievements and feel less grindy overall.