Farming and grinding

A lot of games feature some form of farming and/or grinding (that is, advancing by performing the same repetitive action over and over again). Some series make an effort to hide this, while others openly embrace it . What are your thoughts on it? 

My first instinct whenever anyone mentions 'farming' or 'grinding' is to groan in disgust. This is especially true now that I have less free time than I used to before I started full-time work - and so, any game that relies on grinding is going to be a very hard sell for me. However, when I thought about this some more, I realised that perhaps I'm not as anti-grinding as I thought I was. After all, take that circle city I built a while back in Cities: Skylines. There was some challenge involved in building it, but for the most part, it was a very repetitive task of terraforming land and building roads. Isn't that grinding? If so, what kept me coming back to it? And what about all the time I spent on Farmville when it was popular eight years ago, or all the time I spend mining in Minecraft? 

I think, in the case of Cities: Skylines or Minecraft, what keeps me going is the 'building' element. In Cities: Skylines, I was grinding to build and expand a city; in Minecraft, I'm grinding to build and expand a base. It somehow feels more meaningful, because when I admire my city or my base, I can plainly see the cumulative end result of hours of hard work. I don't get this appeal from, say, grinding in a first-person shooter to unlock a new gun. Besides, there's much more satisfaction in saying "Hey, look at this castle I spent hours building!" than "Hey, look at this gun I spent hours unlocking!". After all, the work involved in unlocking the gun isn't even visible: anyone who isn't familiar with the game isn't going to know you don't start with it. By contrast, even a person who's never played Cities: Skylines can plainly see that I didn't throw my circle city together in five minutes . 

As for Farmville, there was a kind of competitive aspect to it: I could see the farms my Facebook friends had built, and the 'challenge' there was to build a bigger, fancier, and more impressive farm. (At least, until I realised that people were just bragging about how much time they'd sunk into the game, and the only way to 'win' that competition was not to participate to begin with. At that point, I abruptly stopped playing Farmville )

So, what are your thoughts on farming and grinding? Do you love them or hate them?

In terms of RPG grinding I just think sometimes it's a weirdly soothing repetitive task. There's no real need in doing it but you get to shut your brain off for awhile.

I like grinding on games for kind of a weird reason, and that's the ability to multitask. I don't want to multitask while playing through a story, or exploring an area, or fighting bosses, but grinding is so repetitive and easy that it BEGS for multitasking of some sort. I can happily grind my team of Pokémon against weak wild Pokémon for hours if I have a good audiobook to listen to or YouTube videos to watch (or podcast, TV show, documentary, etc.). Sometimes I look forward to grinding sessions because it gives me a fun thing to do while listening to things. Sure, I can always do a puzzle on Jigsaw Planet or color in a coloring book, but grinding makes me feel like I'm progressing in something in a way that those don't.

Then there's the other kind of grinding, the designing/building thing, and honestly I don't even need to multitask for that. I don't know what it is about repeatedly gathering and selling items or decorating my house/island/town on Animal Crossing, but I find it some of the most fun part of those games, which is why I never multitask with Animal Crossing. That kind of grinding IS the main gameplay. And it's a lot of fun.

Some people are weird about what they consider "grinding" too. I once read a thing that said all the NPC battles in Pokémon other than the Gyms and E4/Champion were "grinding". That's literally the main part of the game, though? Grinding is when you battle the same low-level wild Pokémon over and over, not exploring the land and taking on other Trainers you meet along the way. (One reason why I HATE it when let's players skip all the Trainers. It's like, why play the game if you're not going to play the game? Would you play Spyro without taking down a single enemy?)

It's a great way to build up your hit points and leveling up more. I've done it when I first played Dragon Warrior and it shows.