Grinding : The health warning about evil twins

I wrote about this over at mmocrunch and thought it worth repeating here.

It's basically the issue of where someone psychologically cannot distinguish between something they like and something they don't enjoy, because they call the thing they like and the thing they don't enjoy, the same thing. Namely, grind. And so they keep repeating the activity, because they can't identify it as something they don't like, for calling what they do like the same thing.

Imagine if there were two twins, one evil and one good. You go out with the good twin that you know as, say, Grindina, have a great time. Okay, you go to go out with her again, but actually this time it's the evil twin, who's name is Grindhella, but don't know there are twins, this is just Grindina to you. Now you have a not so good time - you can't put your finger on it, because you keep expecting that Grindina fun moment to come and it IS Grindina after all and you like her.

Now, imagine putting up with more and more Grindhella visits. More and more. Because your sure this is Grindina, who you've had fun with. And sometimes Grindina shows up, yet more and more rarely. But you don't know that.

Are you ever gunna split with Grindhella, given how you keep thinking it's Grindina? You keep thinking there's a good thing there, when actually it's been replaced with bad?

The inability to seperate the good activity from the awful activity is essentially crippling. You can't think of a fun time, because your idea of fun, Grindina, has basically been merged with Grindhella.

Grindina is what I want, you think - so you start to want what is actually Grindhella.

Or perhaps for the guys out there, if I started watering down your beer, just a little each time, perhaps a year on when you think beer, what you actually thinking of is incredibly watered down beer. But you will say that IS beer. That's all beer can be.

Hey, no one was going to listen anyway, so it was fun to play with an evil twins analogy for awhile...mmmm, beer and evil twins...

Pavlovs grind

The other day I was reading some post about gathering in runes of magic mmorpg. It's been a continual thorn as long as I've been playing or watching ROM. It's that you have to keep clicking to gather all the resources from a node.

Actually that's probably a subject in itself, since some people might say "But it's only a click, don't be so lazy!" to which I would say "Okay, if it's just a click, what if they made it that you have to click five times to get one resource out of a node? How about ten times? Is it starting to feel pointless to do that? Well, it was pointless at clicking once for each resource (it should be one click to gather everything from one node)"

BUT, what I wanted to get at is that some people actually find gathering soothing or calming. And I've heard similar things from people about grinding, before.

Now I'd lay into that, but I'll tell you one thing - if I was going to earn real life money from doing that gathering (or grinding), I would find it quite soothing and calming as well. I genuinely would.

What I'm proposing is that the mmorpg has managed to emulate, for some people, the same reasons they think their job is important - not because of the outcome, but because they think certain repeating actions and rituals matter or advance them somehow. It has the same sort of stimulus of doing an actual job...except it doesn't pay any actual money. But these people associate job == doing an important thing. Even though it isn't important and doesn't lead to making any money.

What do you think? Comments welcome, and sorry for the review before - that'll happen from time to time. As many people do, I would like more income in my life.