The 7 Elements of a Satisfying Grind
A good grind can be a relaxing activity that delivers a satisfying sense of accomplishment. So what exactly makes a grind good?
I think a lot of people misunderstand grinds and the role they play in game design. Yes, the player is wasting their time clicking on a few pixels and, yes, it very much could be considered lazy game design to copy-paste a bunch of enemies or give players a simple task to repeat for the sake of increasing a number.
But for a lot of players, a good grind is a relaxing, low-intensity activity that delivers a satisfying sense of accomplishment — often while doing something else like watching YouTube or Netflix. It helps them take a breather from the challenges of everyday life.
I think this playerbase has been underserved by modern games, to an extent that many of them have chosen to stick around with dinosaurs like Lineage, Dungeon Fighter Online, and Old School Runescape. It’s an untapped opportunity, and the key to tapping it is learning exactly how to navigate the fine line between a chore and a satisfying grind.
That’s what this post is about. It’ll walk you through 7 of the key elements that I think makes or breaks a grindy game.
1. The player has ways to optimize for more value
The first insight comes from coupons, which have long been used to get us to spend more because the thrill of using one to get a better deal distracts us from how much we’re actually spending. This same behavioural quirk can be leveraged in games to distract us from the pointlessness of whatever task we’re currently doing.
Let’s say you give players a quest to kill 10 boars. That’s pretty boring. But what if, all at once, you gave them a quest to kill 10 boars, a quest to collect 5 weeds from the vicinity, and a quest to kill a big bear boss that’s protected by the little boars?
Now it no longer feels like as much of a chore since they get a chance to exploit the system for value. Players will (usually) go to the big boar first and, in doing so, killing his boar henchmen and simultaneously freeing up the 5 weeds from boar protection. That’s value, baby. After that, they get to go back to the quest giver and turn in multiple quests at once for even more value. That’s how World of Warcraft manages to keep people playing despite having some of the most mundane quests out there.
The same idea applies to Black Desert Online, where players pull in a bunch of enemies and perform the right area of effect combo to maximize value, and Destiny 2, where players seek value by aiming for weak spots and timing abilities for when enemies are clumped up or are position for a big collator.
Players can also learn level layouts and master the movement system to speedrun through levels in Warframe and, in Fortnite and Rust, decide to hit glowing spots while gathering resources to increase efficiency. Repetitive tasks get a whole lot less boring when there’s space for mastery and exploiting the game’s mechanics and system for value.
2. The player always has a clear short- and long-term goal to work towards
In any progression system, the most important thing is manufacturing a constant stream of achievable goals — be they directly given to the player or simply presented as options amidst a list of others.
That’s because we get demotivated whenever we’re forced to do tasks with no overarching goal, if the goal we do have seems too far away, or if we’re barraged with too many goals at once. Conversely, having a clear, achievable goal to work towards is great source of motivation, with that motivation generally increasing as we get closer to accomplishing it. That’s why loyalty programs tend to have clear point thresholds to aim towards and often start you off with some points — that way it feels like you’re already part of the way there so you might as well keep going.
In Runescape, for example, the player might decide to start chopping wood because they want to get to the Woodcutting level they need for a quest or achievement diary task. But that’s pretty far away, so in the meantime, they’re drip-fed a bunch of goals ranging from unlocking the next type of tree or axe all the way to just getting their Woodcutting level to a round number or finishing off this last level because they’re so close to hitting the next one.
There’s always some goal they’re already part of the way towards completing, which motivates them to keep clicking on the same set of pixels for days or even months on end. Key here is that there’s a clear end-goal to work towards and complete (i.e., level 99), which makes all your effort feel valuable and permanent.
Compare this to professions (non-combat skills) in World of Warcraft or any number of minigames which just involve increasing one number or getting more of [x] by repeating the same task with little in the way of thresholds to target. They become boring chores pretty quickly.
The same goes for uncapped systems where there’s no end-goal beyond just increasing the number infinitely. ‘Number go up’ may be enough to maintain the player’s attention for a couple hours, but you aren’t going to hook most players for months unless there’s the prospect of reasonably completing the goal at some point (to then start on the next one).
3. Rewards have variability, but the pathways to those rewards do not
Adding variability to the rewards for tasks is a guaranteed way to make them more satisfying, which is why people collectively throw away half-a-trillion dollars on incredibly simple, rigged games of chance each year. This variability can be in terms of (a) the number of actions required to get a reward or (b) the size of the reward itself, with the key idea being that we don’t want to stop if our next attempt could possibly land us a big pay-out.
Of course, we all know that having a low chance of getting something rare from a loot table is basically how half the video games on the market work. Grinds feel a whole lot more satisfying if enemies can drop a variety of items and especially if this includes a low chance to drop a rare piece of equipment or a chaseable cosmetic like a pet in Runescape or shiny in Pokemon.
But this also extends to the player actions themselves. Fishing and Woodcutting in Runescape grant a fish or log at intervals between [x] and [y] seconds depending on the player’s level, equipment, and the tier of resource. That makes it more satisfying and conducive to repetition than just clicking on a resource node and gathering it with no variability in how long it takes.
That being said, there’s something that should always be kept in mind. If we add too much variability to player progression, players will lose the ability to easily create goals for themselves.
The best example of this is how World of Warcraft partially moved from a loot system where specific bosses dropped specific items to one where players would (basically) get random loot from lootboxes they’d earn from any activity.
They had to roll it back eventually because players could no longer go out and grind for specific items and then feel the sense of accomplishment that comes with reaching one’s goals. Items no longer felt earned because players didn’t feel like they had control over whether or how they got them, making the whole process somewhat unsatisfying and directionless. Getting unlucky and falling far behind your peers also felt far worse than getting a useful drop felt good, which isn’t a great equation for a game.
4. Variation is built into progression
Another key point is variation. Something must noticeably change as you put in effort or else it’ll feel like your efforts are pointless and you’ll get bored.
I think you’ll probably understand how this works out in combat already, but I’ll go through it nonetheless. In most games with some mix of roleplaying elements and a combat system, the time taken to kill enemies decreases noticeably as the player levels up and unlocks (or picks up) items, passive skills, and active skills that they can tinker with to leverage synergies (like raising fire damage for your fire skills) that ultimately create player builds (like a fire mage).
This time-to-kill then slowly and unnoticeably crawls up as the player progresses in the game and enemies get tougher, such that there’s space for the next big, very noticeable, and very satisfying drop in time-to-kill. That’s what keeps players hooked.
But what a lot of games miss out on is adding this progression and variation loop to repetitive activities outside of combat. In the earlier case of Fishing and Woodcutting in Runescape, the interval that the player gains resources at decreases as they level up and as they unlock better gathering equipment. That interval then jumps up when they move up to the next tier of fishing spots or trees, with the time taken to level up scaling exponentially with the player’s level of investment into the game (to maximize playtime, although this wasn’t initially the design intent).
This creates a constant feeling of progression as the player’s continued effort makes their future effort easier until they move up to the next, exciting tier. Plus, each of these unlocks creates a new goal for them to chase — be it a tool that increases gathering speed, an item that increases the convenience of gathering, or the next tier of more valuable resource.
A run to the bank is also built into the process (but often not used by efficiency-maximizing players) to give players a change of pace every few minutes and a moment to see how their pile of resources has grown thanks to their efforts. More importantly, each new tier also unlocks a different environment and sometimes entirely new ways to train the skill, both of which add some variety to the grind. If there’s a lesson to take from all this, it’s that grinds should take the player through some degree of variety both in the short- and long-term.
5. The player can choose their grind
When it comes to grinds, you’ll see a lot of player feedback about how the developer isn’t “respecting their time”. But this is a red herring because they play games to exchange their time for entertainment and a sense of satisfaction, and they’d gladly spend years of their life on something if it provided just that. What I think they usually mean is that either upgrades are too infrequent to keep them hooked or, alternatively, developers aren’t taking into account the player’s sense of control over what they do and how long they’ll do it for.
Learning the wrong lessons from mobile games with incredibly short session times and 2-week retention rates that are below 10%, a few big budget live-service titles have shifted towards dailies or other time-limited objectives that exploit the player’s fear of missing out on time-limited gains to get them to log in every day or every week. This comes at a cost of long-term enjoyment for our grindy-game player (and everything associated with it, like lifetime value and acquisition through word of mouth) as these very same tasks shift from being satisfying grinds to tedious chores.
There are two reasons why this happens. The first is that any task that we enjoy doing by ourselves instantly becomes tedious when someone else tells or compels us to do it and our sense of choice is removed. That’s why saying ‘would you rather clean the bathroom or take out the trash?’ is a better way to get kids to do chores than ‘go take out the trash’.
The second is that our preferences for what we want to do and for how long varies from hour-to-hour and day-to-day. Maybe I feel like doing some dungeons for 2 hours today but tomorrow I might want to spend most of my time grinding for cosmetics to up my character’s fashion game. Being pushed to do the same set of developer-created actions in the same order for the same amount of time every day burns us out over time. It’s more than likely that, on any given day, we’ll want to something else for a different amount of time instead.
That’s why it’s critical to let players choose what they want to do and when they want to do it, providing a backdrop of goals to pursue rather than a time-limited checklist of chores.
6. Inputs are simple or learnable to the point of simplicity
There is one very, very simple difference between the most hated and most loved activities in Runescape: the number of clicks you need to get the job done.
Agility and Runecrafting are notorious for being mind-numbingly tedious because they include a lot of steps, which translates to a lot of clicks. Plus, each of these clicks has to be in a different spot on the screen based on where your character is in the process. That’s a lot of attention that makes gameplay exhausting and prevents players from allocating it elsewhere, like a YouTube video.
On the flipside, players almost unanimously love skills where they can just pull up YouTube or Netflix and click a resource node once or twice every minute or so.
But it’s also possible to go too far in the other direction. If we make it so that playing our game requires no attention at all, it won’t serve as a relaxing and satisfying filler activity in their daily routine. Instead, that’ll move the game’s positioning closer to a habitual ‘check during a break’ activity that most mobile games provide.
So, there’s a middle-ground there to really match the needs of grind-seeking players. This can mean making inputs simple or, alternatively, adding more complicated but relatively unchanging chains of inputs that can be mastered over time to the point of not requiring much attention.
For the latter, this can often take a satisfying, rhythmic quality like mastering your grinding combo in Black Desert Online, your movement abilities in Warframe, or even the lock screen code on your phone (back when those still existed).
7. Feedback is on point
The last element of a satisfying grind is perhaps the most criminally underinvested component of game development: audio-visual feedback (which should absolutely not be part of the ‘polish’ phase because it’s just as core a part of gameplay as the camera or control scheme and should be iterated on for years to get it just right). Roughly speaking, the more you provide aural and visual confirmation on the successful initiation, completion, and consequences of an action, the more satisfying it’ll feel.
Take Stardew Valley, for example. Players absolutely love using the watering can. The reason for that is that it comes with an exaggerated trickle sound effect, with an audible increase and decrease in flow rate to communicate the successful initiation and completion of an action. The character also has an exaggerated pouring animation to match the sound, plus the soil colour changes as a result of pouring to make abundantly clear what effect the player’s actions had on the game world.
Adding onto that, there’s some variation in the sound effect to avoid making it seem repetitive. This effect also clearly matches the expectation that we have for what a pour should sound like, preventing any dissonance that would stand in the way of our brain confirming that what we just did worked — the essence of satisfaction.
Of course, this extends to a huge list of great examples like the satisfying contrast between clean and dirty areas in PowerWash Simulator, the gratifying percussive tink of headshots in Battlefield V and Overwatch, blood splatter and slash effects in Black Desert Online, the level up splendour of World of Warcraft, or the way orbs dropped by enemies stack up your Greater Rift progress in Diablo III.
If the player has to repeat the same action over and over again, the key is to just spend a lot of time and resources perfect the audio-visual feedback that surrounds it. Otherwise, they’ll just get bored real quick.
Conclusion
To sum this all up, grindy games meet a specific set of needs for a specific group of players. Grinds can make for a relaxing and satisfying filler activity that can be done while watching Netflix or YouTube or just chatting with friends either in-game or on Discord.
Like anything else, games can meet these needs poorly or they can meet them well. Few games nowadays do the latter, but the ones that do all have the following key elements:
- The player is given ways to exploit the mechanics and systems of the game to get satisfying moments of value while completing tasks
- The progression system provides the player a drip-feed of short-term goals while they work towards a clear long-term goal
- Repeated tasks award rewards at a variable interval and/or the type and magnitude of reward varies
- Putting effort into a task leads to periodic, noticeable upgrades in efficiency or convenience that provide reinforcement, serve as goals, and add a bit variety to their experience
- The player is given a list of goals they can pursue whenever they want, rather than being compelled to do anything because of a fear of missing out on a time-limited opportunity to progress
- The inputs needed to perform the repeated task are simple or otherwise unchanging and learnable to the point of not requiring a lot of attention
- The player receives substantial audio-visual feedback on the successful initiation, completion, and consequences of repeated actions, such that they feel satisfying to complete over thousands and thousands of repeats
Games like Old School Runescape, Dungeon Fighter Online, and Lineage all meet the above criteria. That’s why they’re still thriving and outcompeting most online PC games despite having objectively awful graphics and horribly outdated core mechanics.
