Grinding: The world's newest hobby?

by Seraphina Brennan Jan 13th 2009 at 6:00PM

Kill Ten Rats just put up an interesting, if not verging on controversial, take on some of the more repetitive and mundane parts of our MMO experiences. The main point of the article looks at MMOs not from the standpoint of a game, but rather that of a hobby.

Ravious, the article's author, defines a hobby element of an MMO as something we may do in our gameplay that's not fun, but aids you having fun in future gameplay. Things like grinding to get that awesome new sword, all the looting you do to make potions for that next big raid, or perhaps just sitting in battlegrounds and getting all the honor points you can take.

Ravious makes one important part at the end of the article -- too much "hobby element" in your game just makes for a sour game. He uses salt for his metaphor in this context. Salt makes food taste better, but too much salt or salting the wrong thing leads to ghastly consequences.

Tags: battlegrounds, crafting, grinding, hobby, honor-points, kill-ten-rats, potions, raids, ravious, time-waster, world-of-warcraft

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Ernest said on 6:51PM 1-13-2009

Seems like a self-indulgent load of crap to me. All the author did was piss his pants over a crappy new phrase he wants to promote as a synonym to grind. "Hobby elements." Perhaps someone needs to look up the definition of hobby.

lethality said on 10:12PM 1-13-2009

I've been saying this forever, it's nothing new. MMOs are a HOBBY they are not games. Many times they are frustrating and require lots of effort to excel at, just like a hobby.

OrganiClockwork said on 4:25AM 1-14-2009

Meh. It's a good point, I suppose. There are many elements of a game that seem more like a hobby than an actual game. But I personally don't think that they -should- be a part of games. Games should be games. Not hobbies. As usual, I'm commenting at an ungodly hour of the morning, so I've got nothing further to contribute.