The Psychology of “The Grind”

Grind culture is very real in today’s world, especially with the advent of certain popular social figures — looking at you, Andrew Tate… I will not name any names, but you all know who I’m referring to. Admittedly, though, this has existed in games for nearly as long as games have existed, from grinding for high scores in classic arcade games to the modern era, grinding for gear or ranks in MMORPGs and competitive titles, respectively. In a vacuum, a lot of these activities aren’t particularly fun and take an incredible amount of time and effort, yet we still put hours and hours into repetitive and tedious tasks, and I want to look into why we do this when it’s inherently not all that interesting.

To preface the main part of this, a lot of games nowadays are built specifically for people to grind. Many monetisation models, such as battle passes and other timed content and rewards, are built to trigger the inherent fear of missing out (FOMO); people want to experience all the content in the games they’re playing, so they will often grind specifically to not miss that shiny new item at the end of the battle pass. If they are running out of time, the panic sets in, and people would rather spend money on catchup mechanics to be able to get all the rewards on the pass rather than potentially never being able to earn it again. Battle passes, and live-service games have a lot of tricks to make people spend just a little extra, such as selling their currencies in uneven packages, making people have to buy bigger bundles to afford cheaper items, and rewarding not quite enough currency to buy something substantial, making players buy small bundles of currency to top up to the next big reward.

Grinding is often most seen in common with MMOs, and none embody the grind mentality more than Old-School RuneScape (OSRS). While I don’t personally play OSRS, it’s always entertained me from an outsider's viewpoint. Many of the primary motivators I’ve witnessed simply consist of making numbers bigger and bigger, even when there’s no use for such high numbers. Traditional MMOs have you grinding to increase your power, making the upcoming raids and high-end content as doable as possible, and making sure you don’t lose to things outside of your immediate control, such as being under-levelled. While RuneScape does have endgame content, such as a few raids and PvP, the most popular end goal seems to be “maxing” an account, which consists of increasing all the game's abilities to a max level of 99, which requires, you guessed it, an utterly insane amount of grinding. Taking into account the most efficient ways to grind, it can still take upwards of 3000 hours, even longer in Hardcore Ironman (HCIM), where once you die, there’s no coming back.

This is an insane amount of time simply to make some numbers bigger, but there are reasons that people dedicate themselves to this. For the most part, it comes back to dopamine. For the unaware, dopamine is the hormone that makes you feel good, and anything that makes you feel good is the result of it causing a release of dopamine in the brain. For many, this consists of completing different tasks, whether that's chores, work, or even videogames. In this case, OSRS tasks you with increasing your stats, and doing this (maxing out an individual stat) contributes to a release of dopamine in the brain, making you feel good for the grind you’ve spent potentially hundreds of hours on. For the people who play HCIM characters, this is elevated by the feeling of stress. Knowing all this time can be deleted with a few simple mistakes leads to massively elevated stress and tension, and not only does the typical completion of tasks contribute to a dopamine rush, but adrenaline has an effect, too. This can admittedly be more harmful than helpful in certain people, as often the release of dopamine can become addictive. While dopamine itself isn’t addictive, the pursuit for higher and higher releases can get people stuck in the loop of chasing that rush, which some only find in videogames.

Other MMOs emphasise the requirement to grind with other motivators, even just the ability to grind more. Final Fantasy XIV has much of its pinnacle content locked behind high-level requirements, meaning it is practically impossible without grinding to get geared up or paying for a story skip. Despite this, FFXIV’s primary motivator leans more towards more personal decision-making; there is an array of rewards locked behind high-end content, from unique fashion options to mounts and minions, that can only be obtained from such activities. Being able to own these is a strong motivator, but being able to show them off like trophies drives many people.

Competitive games have a more direct motivator behind the concept of grinding: the pursuit of skill. It takes time to get good at anything, and many games are incredibly complex by their nature, requiring a lot of knowledge and muscle memory, which can only be gained by an immense amount of time. No matter the game, reaching the upper echelon of players requires a lot of time, even for a skilled player. Winning matches traditionally only earn a small amount of whatever ranked points the game utilises, meaning that there’s a lot of grind, especially when ignoring the requirement of being good enough to hit these levels. On top of all of that, some games require a lot of practice outside of the ranked sphere anyway, such as training modes and aim training. For example, traditional fighting games will often take you hours to learn individual character matchups, from practising against them in training mode to studying replay. For some, reaching certain ranks is enough of a motivator to put the time into learning a game, yet for others, being the best is the goal.

Grinding is often incredibly tough to moderate and can easily lead to people losing days and days to games while making very little progress, yet it can be a positive and relaxing way for many to spend time on a game, being low-risk yet still very rewarding. Grind culture in real life, however, has the potential to be incredibly dangerous, leading to burnout and other negative impacts on both mental and physical health.