alltom.com,
Archive,
Currently Reading,
Have Read,
Micro.blog
Subscribe with RSS or @tom@micro.alltom.com
If there’s nothing to do—if nothing is meaningful—then you are free to self-direct. … Grinding is, in essence, the purest distillation of self-directed play. There’s no diegetic authority telling the player what to do or how to do it. There’s just a vague incentive and the player’s own discretion about how to get there. … Adding more structured activities can make it feel like there are fewer options. … Even if self-directed free-form play boils down to only a few viable options, the fact that there’s nothing telling you to do it does a lot for the illusion of openness.
…
You can, in [modern World of WarCraft], level up by running around in circles, endlessly killing Murlocs, but the whole time that you do it, there’s the overhanging knowledge that there’s so many better, more efficient, structured, organized, sanctioned, fun ways of doing it… so why are you bothering? In Classic, well, everything sucks, so you’re free! Do whatever you want! Is aimless grinding better experience than questing? Generally, no, but it’s not that much worse either. There is a kind of freedom in the lack of structured options. Anything you choose to do is about as good as anything else.
World of Warcraft Classic And What We Left Behind by Folding Ideas, 36:04