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Disguising the grind
Believe it or not, grind is an essential part of an MMO and we might be pretty lost without it. Repetitive content is the cornerstone of the MMO genre but it's not all just smacking monsters over the head for hours on end or completing yet another "kill ten rats" quest. The repetitive elements in an MMO give us predictable gameplay in a form we can digest. We don't feel lost when we pick up a quest because it uses similar mechanics to previous quests we've done. From a development standpoint, the amount of time it takes to create new and unique gameplay for an MMO is quite large and it's just not feasible to churn out unique gameplay with every new piece of content. Instead, developers are forced to re-use the same gameplay mechanics over and over again. So if we genuinely appreciate predictable, repetitive gameplay and it's not feasible to do otherwise, why are we always so up-in-arms about the evils of grinding? In this probative opinion piece, I look at why we need repetitive gameplay in MMOs and the various ways developers disguise grind to keep the game entertaining. Update: Link to page 2 fixed. Thanks Brian!
Disguising the grind, part 2
Other quests may require you to kill a named monster but to get to him you have to go through several passageways full of other monsters. The core idea here is pretty solid -- the quest isn't the mundane task of running from A to B or killing some monsters. The quest has another goal entirely and the mundane tasks of travel and killing monsters are challenges to overcome in accomplishing that goal.
