 Alright, I'm ready. I'm Scott. We are the Hoosome Geetnines and we're here to talk about grinds. If you enjoyed this all, there's a QR code there. I recommend you check it out on your phone or something. And today we're talking about grinds. Who here has ground in the past? Who here will grind again? Who here enjoys grinding? Like, you know it. You're like, yes, there's a grind. I want to do it. Yes, let's go. Let's go. How many of you hate it, but do it anyway? So everyone raised their hand for everything, pretty much. So let's talk about some grinding here, right? Not this kind of grinding. Not that kind of grinding, right? We all know which kind of grinding, but because we're going to be talking about this for an hour, we need a more specific definition. And if you go around the internet and do some research, which I did for about ten minutes, you will not find an actual, correct, agreed upon definition of what counts as grinding, what doesn't, right? Now, it's your guard fields about characteristics of games and other people, but they talk about busy work and this concept of busy work. And while it's very similar to grinding, and he uses examples of that, of grinding, isn't that? He talks about busy work as a thing you do in a game that's just sort of like mindless labor, which is definitely related to grinding, but isn't necessarily always grinding. You get a busy work that isn't grinding, you get a grinding without busy work. So that was close, but not quite what we were looking for. So I came up with some definition really quickly that we're just going to use today and may or may not be correct, so you pedantic people do not argue with me, right? Grinding is a game mechanic in which player success correlates directly with time spent. That means that if you spend more time in the game, you will succeed no matter what. All you have to do is spend more time. If you spend less time, you will succeed less. Nothing else matters than determining whether you will succeed or fail other than how much time you spend playing this game. If I keep playing Counter-Strike, I get better and better and better at it. So in a way, isn't practicing grinding aren't all things grinding? That is not true. That is not true at all because skill is not grinding. In Counter-Strike, it is conceivable, though unlikely, that somebody who has never played Counter-Strike in their entire lives could walk up to a PC, lay their hands at pound, the mouse and keyboard, and lay waste and destroy everyone with headshots abound. It's possible. It could happen, right? It's not going to happen, but it could. It's also possible, and actually this does happen frequently, that somebody could spend much of their lives playing Counter-Strike and still suck dick at it and never get past the silver ranks. It's also possible that your reflexes could get old as you are no longer 24 and are not 34 or as Shaquille O'Neal says, they're not a 29, bro. And can no longer headshot anybody, which is the case with me. But simultaneously, if you play and say Final Fantasy I, you're not going to beat the final boss of the game at level 1. If you work there at bottom, there is literally no way you can win. No amount of luck, no amount of skill, no amount of nothing. You have four options, fight, magic, item and run, and no combination of those four items will beat the final boss if you are level 1. You can do it, you can do it faster, you can't do it better, you can't click fight harder. You just need to spend time grinding, and if you do, you will succeed, guaranteed. But yes, our definition isn't perfect. It's just for the purposes of this discussion. It's the purposes of shutting up people in the audience. Alright, so grinding didn't really become a thing until statefulness became a thing, right? And not this kind of state, right? The kind of state where you have a state in the game, right? You have some sort of... Like Alabama or Mississippi. Right? Stats maybe? Some sort of numbers, some sort of values in the game that increase as you play and are saved. They are held there. Maybe within one game, maybe between games. Alright, there are some kinds of times where, you know, you'll play a game and then you come back to it the next time. There's still things saved from the previous time and your state continues as you grind up, but sometimes you can still grind within a single game, right? You play a MOBA and you level up in the MOBA and then it's over and then you're level 1 when you start the next round. But there's still a statefulness and there's still a grind there. Now, statefulness is a relatively new thing in games. Like, that didn't exist in a lot of old games. We have saving, like, a stack between plays of a game. Pretty new in terms of games. Video games have only been around for 40 years. Right, yeah. We look back in time, you know, and the first time we see this really is like the old D&Ds, right? Is this thing updating? Oh, I got the slides, they're going. It wasn't updating, I thought you were... They're going. Right? I couldn't find a big example of a game where there were stats that kept increasing as you spent time before D&Ds, right? But D&D didn't really have grinding. You spent more time playing D&D to succeed at it, right? If you can even succeed or fail at D&D, right? But it was just the... You know, this was where the mechanics of modern grinding all came from as far as we can tell. A number that correlates to your ability to do better at the game that can go up mechanically in the course of the game might even be the objective of the game. That's unrelated to your actual abilities as a human, right? You can give any character sheet to any person on Earth, right? Regardless of how good or bad they are at things. I make a character sheet for Elm Minister the Wizard and if I give it to you, congratulations. You're the most powerful wizard. So think of it this way. You can't get better at D&D fighting. Now there is a narrow ban. You might not know the DPS and the average damage stuff. But at a place like D&D, older D&D, you're going to play the combat pretty much the same. You can't do it better than anyone else. You can just level up more than that. There's also so much randomness you can't do better, right? You can mitigate that randomness, but spells... A little bit. And what about other things? You can't get better at casting spells. Those just don't exist. Magic Missiles is good. You can't be like... When you go to the GM and they're like, I cast Magic Missiles. It's like, I did a better Magic Missile than Ram because I'm better than him. That doesn't happen. Everyone has to say Magic Missiles. That's the next step for D&D. Quick time events. Yeah. On the table. Let's do it. I'm down. So now, not every stateful game has grinding. It is possible that they have a stateful game without grinding, right? So here's a... You get a nice shmup, right? You get state. You go through the level. You get some upgraded weapons. But you're not getting this because you spent more time playing Gradius or Darius or whatever. You get this because you got power-ups within the game and you didn't die so you held on to them, right? There's no grinding involved. You didn't succeed because you spent time. You could easily spend a hundred hours on the shmups and not beat them because you're not any good at them. There is no way to grind even if you wanted to. You can't stay in level one and kill guys over and over again. You level up, you continue. Otherwise, they might as well start you at the game with max levels on all your abilities, right? But that's not how it works. There are also games where there's grinding without state, right? There's no state in Desert Bus. No, pedantically, there's a state. How many miles you've got? Yeah, sure, whatever, right? But the real stat is how many hours have you played without failing to do the one thing you have to do? Right, you know, this game doesn't take any skill. It's just how much time you spend. You guys know what this is, right? It's Desert Bus and Drive and Drive. If you don't know what it is, just look it up. Also, give them money. But if they were stateful, what if you could level up? Like, once you beat it, you get a brick that you can put on the accelerator. Yeah. Level up again, you get another brick that would hang from the steering wheel and veer it away from the egg. So, I was doing a bunch of research and we were trying to find the earliest examples of grinding and most of what we can find are examples of busy work. So chess is a very good example of this because many of you might not realize this. Chess' rules have changed a lot. There's going to be one guy in the audience who knows this better than you and is going to call you out. Oh, yeah. So I was looking for, I was going to do this whole thing about ambassade, you know, the fact that in old chess, pawns only move one space. There was no way to move two. And over time, you started moving pawns two, having that option to speed the game up. If you can only move pawns one, there's all this pawn pushing that happens at the beginning of every game in chess. It means nothing. It's boring. And chess people just want to get past that and get to the good stuff. So they added a skate, a cheat code, just move pawns twice in the beginning. All right. But that introduced a problem and that now that was a move. So they added an ambassade. They added another rule where if someone does move two past you, you can yank and kill them. Even though they moved past you. So the game naturally was involving busy working out of itself. They went so much deeper than that. In older, older chess, the queen basically didn't have any powers. The queen moved like one space and was way weak. And it was in fact a social controversy when players started using a powerful queen because it was a powerful female more powerful than the king. And that sounds dumb, but that was a legit concern in the Middle Ages. So some chess people, they'd call it Joan of Arc, and they'd do different stuff. But the powers of chess used to be way weaker and pawns moved way less and the game was way slower. And over time, as Richard Garfield points out in characteristics of games, busy work evolves out of classic games because people don't actually like doing it. They want to get to the good part. Right. They realized that in this game of chess the only interesting part was after you moved all the pawns, then you were making the real decisions. The beginning part was just like, all right, and now we're playing a game. So they changed the game to remove that stuff. Nowadays, everyone's doing the opposite. Now, there is leveling in chess. You get to the other side, you level it up. You can level up. So it is stable within chess. There's a little bit of leveling up. We'll get back to that. Backgammon is a much more fascinating example because backgammon, that's the game, you know, you play like when people play in the yard and your role dies. Basically, the game is you move checkers around in opposite directions and when you get to the end your role dies and follow rules to bury your pieces off the board. And once you get all your pieces off the board, you win. Now, if you played modern normal backgammon, you start with all your pieces on the board. There's a row of five and a row of two and a row of three and another row of five, right? In original old-school backgammon all your pieces started off the board. You rolled to put them on the board. Then you went all the way across and then you took them off the board. And the beginning part where you keep rolling dice back and forth until all your pieces are on the board is really slow and boring nonsense that everyone hated doing and that's why they got rid of it. So you had to play this random mini-game of getting your guys through and getting them all into the state before the real game started. So over time, again, that evolved out of backgammon. First they moved from burying pieces on the board to have all the pieces just on the board at the edge to start. And then they did something clever. They moved on further to having all the pieces not only on the board, but on the board in an immediately interesting situation. Right, the reason they are, the way they are on the board is because that's a situation where no matter what you roll on the first turn there's some sort of the most interesting decisions to make, right? They're like, the game will be most interesting but also fast enough if we start the game this way and they tried a bunch of different ways and that's the way they landed on. But there's the interesting conundrum of Turkey because in Turkey, backgammon is extremely popular. That's a picture of a bunch of old Turkish guys just playing. I think it's an Istanbul. And they play backgammon. That's a very popular game there. It's huge. They play with the old rules. They play with all the busy work and all the randomness. So they're even, you know, up to this point we're saying, yeah, humans naturally evolved busy work out of their games, at least these classic games as we've seen during all of history. But yet in this case, the randomness was rediscovered and brought back. So that randomness, that grind, that extension of the game. Or maybe they never got rid of the randomness. But there is some reason they choose that there. So that little busy work grind, there's a utility in having that in the game for those people. I keep pointing over there. You can't see that screen. You can see that screen. All right. So the first time we see real leveling up, real sort of, you know, characters with some sort of stats is in old school war games, right? Which is where D&D comes from. It came from Chainmail, which was a very later on war game. But the earliest war games like this, that, you know, Prussian dudes would play with sticks and moving troops around, right? You could level up dudes. If a dude, like, survived three battles, he became like a veteran unit and was more powerful and, you know, could maybe take a hit and not die, or would have better marksmanship, or could have, you know, his troops would have better morale. Because these things, they tried to make accurate simulations because they're big nerds, right? So, you know, this leveling up aspect is where the leveling up in D&D, you know, eventually came from, right? I couldn't find anything earlier than this, a game where something levels up besides chess, where a piece goes to the back and levels up. Now, it's fascinating because a grind could happen there in a situation where you want a battle, but there's a further battle, and maybe you extend the battle and move your guys around to make sure they all level up. Any of you who've played like Final Fantasy Tactics, or a modern war game, that's the kind of thing that you often do. And if it's a multiplayer game, everyone hates you for it because it's tedious. You're grinding. You're playing World of Warcraft off in the corner, and they just want to start the next battle. Right, now, this still wasn't grinding, right? People who played these things were trying to accurately simulate wars and, you know, get their war simulators. Yeah, if I was in Prussia and I started grinding out levels in my Kriegsfield that I was practicing with for the army, they'd probably just have me killed. Right, it's like, why are you wasting time? We could be using those pieces to have fun. Anyway, so then, the table top RPG came. We've discussed this a bunch already, but even there, where you had the characters and the leveling, you still didn't have the grinding, right? You weren't going on with random encounters on purpose, like walking back and forth between the two towns until you got enough XP. Has anyone ever, literally, tried to get more random encounters from your Game Master in a Game of Dungeons and Dragons? Okay, that's sad. It's not sad, it's interesting. Yeah, I've never done it. We just tried to avoid them. We're like, no, don't. Don't roll. Right, this is where the first oldest grinding we could find. Now, obviously, not Final Fantasy I specifically, we just used that screenshot, but older PC RPGs, right? The text-based ones, some of the ultimate types, right? In gaming. Right. In America, especially. Either Final Fantasy I or Dragon Warrior I. Those were the two games that introduced people to this concept of standard JRPG or RPG grinding. Right, so all of these games got all their mechanics from the D&D and the tape-all-top RPGs, right? You have stats, strength, wiz and whatever, right? And that's how much damage your guy does when you choose fight, run, magic and such. But to make the games interesting, when you walk from town to town, they put random encounters because that's what you do in D&D. It rolls for random encounters. They just took the rules from the book and applied them straight to video games without thinking about how that would affect things, right? Because imagine how it would be if you just walked from town to town and nothing happened or if they had to manually, like, you know, hand-craft everything that happened between each town along the path. That would be amazing. That would be incredible, but they couldn't do that on a NES or even on a really old PC, right? So they had random encounters where it's like, oh, you fight drachies and slimes and you fight and maybe a different colored slime if you have enough memory. Now, this is where we see things start to get interesting. This is where we can sort of really kick this talk off. So you're playing this game, right? So you're a vlogger, you're doing your thing and you basically don't have to, like, grind and level up. If you just sort of play, you'll keep experiencing knowledge. You'll see all these new monsters. You'll see it. If you just walk straight from town to town, there'll be random encounters, but there'll only be a few. Interesting enough, right? You push attack until all the bad guys are dead. You get to town. You have to go to the inn because you had random encounters. You lost some health. You'll naturally level up enough to beat the first boss, like, before you get to him and that's Elf Land. You'll never have to sit there and spend time leveling up like this, right? It just doesn't happen. But then, you get to Elf Land. You eventually get to Elf Land. That's like, when you get over the water, you beat the pirates, all the baby stuff, you get to Elf Land and you can't beat anything anymore. Yeah, the bad guys, you try to go past Elf Land after you finish all your Elf Land biz and the bad guys in the next area are just like, you're dead and then you're back in Elf Land. And you go to the store and that's there. Silver sword. And what are they doing? 4,000 guilds. Is it 4,000 guilds? Pretty sure it's 4,000 guilds. That's a lot of guilds. So, you go outside and you kill some monsters. Like, man, I need to buy the Silver Sword that's really the only way I can get stronger here and the Silver Sword, and you kill a bad guy, you get like 20 guilds or something. Now, look at this very distinct transition. Up to that point, you're seeing new monsters and even when you're seeing like the same monsters over again, these random encounters, you're not trying to encounter them. In fact, you're trying not to encounter them. You're just trying to get to your destination. They are obstacles in your way and they provide a certain interesting experience. Once you get to this point in the game, now you literally go outside of a town, walk back and forth and fight giants for four hours. In fact, if you got two fighters, 8,000 gold you need. Fighter, fighter, red mage? 12,000 gold because they all can all have a Silver Sword and if you could get three Silver Swords, why wouldn't you? Now, you might think there must be some way around this. No, there's no way around it. If you watch speedruns of Final Fantasy I, they take eight hours minimum because, and you will see even the top speedrunners, they all grind it out for that Silver Sword. But there's no way around it. They grind to the right of Elf Land and they grind in the Castle of Ordeal fighting zombie dragons by throwing them over and over again. At least if you get one Silver Sword and you need two more, you can actually go to a better place to get more XP and gold. But think about that for a second. A speedrun of Final Fantasy I literally involves grinding out levels. So we're going to show you some data to back all this up. So this is a website that I found all this information on. So I can send you links to these graphs and you can verify the sources yourself. But let's talk about mechanically what this is doing. So in Final Fantasy I or any RPG like that, basically your level is the, it effectively amounts to the level of challenge you are capable of beating. So if I have a chat, sorry. So as I play the game more and level up more and more and more, the kind of challenge that I can take on goes up and up and up. And Earthbound nicely just makes things automatically lose to you and your level's high enough that games don't. So let's say I am a little bit better than you in Final Fantasy. Like I know how the RNG works or I have basic heuristics like there's the fighters in a proper way. Yeah, you could be bad at Final Fantasy I. You could just keep healing when you have full health, right? Or you could attack the wrong monsters unless let them get more attacks on you, right? You could play it suboptimally. But once you're high enough level, you're going to kill things in one shot and then it's not really going to matter how bad you are at it. It looks like that. Now by the same token, this is kind of in a style. Right. RIM can beat the first boss at level one. I can beat it at level three but we're still going to beat it eventually. Yeah. Now they obscure this by adding randomness and luck. So that way you're not really 100% sure. It's not like a direct correlation like I am level 60 and now I can beat this boss. Right? It's like you're now level 60. You have a 50% chance of beating it. I'm level 59. I got like a 25% chance of beating it. Now what's cool with this is that because it's obscuring all the time, you'll start to invest. The way human psychology works is when you succeed, you'll think it was some skill that you had. You'll think that you're good at Final Fantasy and if you fail at it, the random numbers just screwed you. So that's kind of an aside but think about how randomness can obscure what is actually a very direct relationship. But by the same token say you suck at Final Fantasy. You're still going to beat the Lich. If you get to level 20 in the first town you're eventually going to beat Garland no matter how bad you are at this game. Your four unarmed black mages will eventually pummel into that. A monkey will beat Garland before he types a Shakespeare. It doesn't take that long. So say we've got a challenge. That is a challenge that we are going to go after in the game. Some boss along the way. So the grime just means that if you're good at the game, there's a set amount of time before you're allowed to take on that challenge or capable of beating that challenge. So old games didn't have these modern like adaptive AIs or systems to like tune the difficulty as you go on or matchmaking or anything. So grime gives a real nice way to have the difficulty be self-tuned. A little bit worse at the game. It just takes you a little longer. You're constantly leveling up. So if you try to beat this boss four or five times and you keep leveling up as you're wandering around between those tries, you'll eventually get better and just beat him. And you might not realize the leveling is the only reason that happened. By the same token, even if you suck, you will eventually beat the game. Eventually, you're level 99. I mean, even Honjo down at the end is probably going to eventually beat Garland. Do you guys know the Honjo story? Don't tell the Honjo story. If we have time at the end, I'll tell the story. Don't tell the story. But this is a dude who tried to get the lowest possible competitive rank in Overwatch. It took a lot of grinding. He ground more than it would take. Negative grinding. Look at that again. So nowadays, every single game, just about every single game has grinding, right? Not every single game literally, but almost every game that's popular these days says grinding or some sort of leveling or some sort of statefulness in it somewhere. They use it different ways. They use it for different purposes, but it's there somewhere. It's there somewhere. Even with dual glitz, it's freaking grinding. You get the power-up jammies and then you got to get boosts in the next level to get a higher score. Kidding me? Anyway, why? It used to be only the RPGs had the grinding and it spread to every other game. Even the FPSes have the grinding. Why did this happen? And it's an extra weird question because as we just saw with games that have existed for 1,000 years, 2,000 years, humans evolved the grinding out. We were trying to remove grinding ever since chess. We were removing busy work and removing anything boring and distilling games down to their core essence. So they took less time and were more exciting and only had the good parts. And then as soon as the RPGs and those sorts of games started appearing, we went totally backwards. So this gentleman? That gentleman. This gentleman. This is VF Skinner, a controversial and well-known famous dead person. And I'm sure you're all familiar with the concept of a Skinner Box. He invented this thing called the Skinner Box, which is a device that you use to do experiments and operant conditioning of animals, usually rats. Basically, the way it works is you have a rat in a box. You can signal things to the rat with lights or sound or shocking it electrically. You can give it food and it is a lever for the rat to pull. So you can do different things. So you could, for example, whenever the rat pulls the lever, make a food come out. Or whenever you turn the red light on, if the rat doesn't pull the lever, shock it. You can do different patterns and then see if the rat learns different behaviors and what will the rat do if I do this? Maybe if I give it a food, if it pulls the lever 10 times, will it figure that out? Will it pull the lever 10 times? Now, this doesn't have to be a physical, literal Skinner Box with a rat. It's just a concept. I mean, if you all remove your VR headsets and go back into the real world. So in operant conditioning, there's something called reward schedules. The idea of how you reward your test subjects based on their behavior. This is where grinding starts to pack our brains. This is why so many of you raised your hand saying that you do you play grinding games and we'll play them again and also hate it. So as an aside, I was doing a lot of research for this panel and what you find more than anything is wonderful images of horses and horse memes. Right? Because if you look up operant conditioning, this is how people train their horses to do what they want, right? And it's like, that's the term that the horse people use. People training dogs don't use that word. They use other words. So if you Google search, you won't find much about dogs. You'll find something that's like, that's the name on my Twitter at the time. But like these memes, we don't trust your words. We trust your actions. Horse trainers using operant conditioning have their own memes that you've never counted before. Hippologic.nl, I don't know who they are, but I give you credit. Well, these guys, can you see the pattern? Your horse does. I'll share the slides at the end. What that all boils down to is this graph. This is why you'll see if you go to Wikipedia and look up like operant conditioning. And there's different ways to reward people depending on whether or not the rewards are based on time or based on what you're actually doing. So some reward schedules don't have anything to do with that button. Hit the button all you want. It doesn't actually make the treat count. And this red line right here, that's pretty much why everyone's added grinding to games. Right, so let's start with the black line, right? You'll see all these are flavors of grinding. Right, so the fixed interval, the fixed interval is where we give you a reward on a fixed interval. So every five minutes you gain a level no matter what. Right, so when that happens, cumulative number of responses, can we get the person or the subject to do stuff? Even though hitting the button has nothing to do with whether or not you make a level. They're going to get a food every five minutes. They're going to push it a little bit, a little bit. And then as you get closer to the five minutes they push it more then the food comes out and then they stop pushing because they're not hungry anymore. And it goes a nice even curve. It's basically a linear progression of little curves. You get desperate for that level. You start clicking and you go, ah, I got the treat. I did the good thing. I hit the lever enough times. Right. It tricks you into thinking that you actually have an impact on it. Right, then you get the variable interval. The variable interval is it still doesn't matter how many times they push the lever, right? But you're just going to give them rewards at random times. It might be two rewards in one second because luck and then it might be another reward like five minutes later. Just sort of food just comes out at random whenever, right? The rat will push the lever sort of at a constant and there isn't really that much connection. So you're probably still really curious about this right now because that's the most important one. Fixed ratio is just every time they hit the lever end times, give them a treat. So, beat 10 monsters, get a level. Beat 10 monsters, get a level. Beat 15 monsters, get a level. But then beat one more monster, get another level. But then beat 20 monsters, get another level. Very, what the actual relationship is between what you're doing and what the reward is that the machine does. You go to a slot machine and you pull the lever and there's a chance a bunch could come out, there's a chance a little could come out, there's a chance nothing could come out. It really doesn't matter too much what the odds are even though you can fine tune it but you put that in front of a mammal or even maybe some other kind of animal it's gonna pull that lever like crazy nonstop, like exponential, right? It will never stop pulling the lever. Now we have the advantage being up on the stage now of having adult brains so we see these things, like you play a game but you see like I'm in the matrix this is what this game is doing to me but when I was a kid I didn't know any better and I had plenty of time to kill so I didn't care. I mean Final Fantasy I every year that was just a thing I did I don't even know why. And it didn't take me eight hours I'm not a speed runner it took me like 40 hours. And I wanted it that way I had so much time after school to just do nothing right? I wanted a game that took a long time right? A game that was short and just was short and sweet was like oh I wasted 50 bucks on this cartridge and it was real bad because before this like modern statefulness when my parents come in and yell at me it's time to eat dinner the game gets turned off and I just have to start over but now I can save my game in Final Fantasy and come back to it right after dinner I'm thinking about that schedule the entire time but the scariest thing we've run into is that you see this a lot but I saw it already in particular and in our own forums where someone was talking about like this game is just a skinner box and heroes are rewarding you and like your skill doesn't matter or whatever and this dude posted but I like it that way right it's one thing to you know people like us who see the box recognize it and say not gonna grind it's another thing to be a rat in the box not realize you're in the box you're just in the matrix so you don't know it so you stay in there and you're happy that's understandable right you don't realize you're trapped to understand that you're in the box and you know the outside of the box exists and you understand it yet you say no I want to stay in the box I like it here the box is the best I don't understand that in fact who are you who is telling me I'm in the box now I'm a little angry because now I know even more about the box the more you tell them the matter they get yeah he doesn't he's like he doesn't want to remember nothing right it's not just that he wants to eat the delicious steak the fact that he knows the outside of matrix exists ruins the steak he doesn't want to know about it he wants to go back in the box so we asked you why why does every game have grinding and then we went and talked about psychology for some time but it's not just in a vacuum does the addiction and all those things all these reasons why this works is why we do it because it makes money cash money if you make a grindy game you are going to make bank if you make some non-grindy game it's harder to make bank right more grinding more money right how does more grinding make more money that kind of money like this well first of all you can advertise that your game is longer 24 hours of a month for Game Boy Color does not take 24 hours to play I hope it takes 70 hours Game Boy Color's batteries will not last that long but right if you go to the store to buy a game if it advertises being 70 hours 100 hours and it's the same price as another game it takes 5 hours it seems like a better deal game companies want to write on the box that the game is longer and people not just video game media people but actual customers complain when a game is short they'll say oh that game was short it wasn't worth 50 bucks if your game is shorter you have to charge less for it all they're just doing what we want we're asking for this we're demanding this we're telling them they're doing what Cipher wants he wants to be on the box we are but yeah you are people raise your hands before right you know but so that's one reason you can make more money because you can just advertise that your game is longer if you just artificially inflate the length by adding some grinding and then sell more copies you can keep people playing if people invest a lot of time in a game to get their state really high up you know they have the sunk cost fallacy right they're like 40 days of my life on this if I just stop playing now and delete your character it's like this guy's gonna do right this is from a YouTube video of a guy deleting all his World of Warcraft characters and then closing his account right so I feel like some events led up to that moment maybe and he's gotta look at his characters on the left those are all like level 90, 80 something right those are all way up there anyway you know to get to this point it's basically like you're telling yourself you're in the box like you've realized it it's like wow right so I guess here's a real open question how many of you have a World of Warcraft account that is active but you haven't played it in more than six months who restarted their account because it's a new expansion that came out like a few days ago yeah okay that's the people that's the people have any of you actually deleted World of Warcraft characters? yeah some people okay felt it was a little hard though wasn't it just a little bit right you're admitting to yourself that you know you wasted or spent a bunch of hours I wouldn't say wasted you're admitting to yourself that you were in that box and you stayed in it right you're recognizing that you were in there right but you can keep people playing if you have a grindy game yeah it works you keep people in there now this is where the interesting discussion comes out though because you know how many people keep playing because of some cost but they're also enjoying themselves but many of you raised your hands earlier not over the World of Warcraft but games in general where you kept playing games you weren't having fun it's not even like you thought you were having fun but you weren't you knew you weren't having fun the state wasn't delicious yet you still didn't want to know it wasn't really safe it's the state you get at a diner and I'm talking like like a flyover state diner like in the middle like in Montana somewhere and not the good one in the town that's like the only kind of restaurant like on the highway alright let's keep going you bring in your friends a lot of not every game does this but like in early days of Facebook remember there were all those like mafia wars and farmvilles and things before Facebook killed them all thankfully right all those had mechanics where you were grinding but if you brought in your friends you could grind faster because time is the only thing that matters they just added one more factor which is number of people working together also matters and now you got all your friends grinding and they're going to play longer because they don't want to quit on it and so forth and if you bring in more people you bring in more money and they also used it as social pressure to keep you playing because if I slack off you know my levels are falling behind I can't join the race with all my friends anymore suddenly there's this right if you were the only person playing farmville and none of your friends did it with you you weren't playing farmville anymore right you only kept it playing because you had other people pressuring you and saying I need you to wash my plants while I'm on vacation oh my god pay to win right it's hard to pay to win in a skill game right well it's real easy not doing it's hard to implement even in 1919 you couldn't get away with paying to win the world series right even in 1919 and nowadays you definitely can't get away with paying to win you can cheat to win you can't pay to win right so if you have a game where the only thing that matters is not skill but time of course you can pay to win will decrease the time it's just numbers in a computer it's not anything real it's not like this baseball we're going to magically make the baseball fly out of the park because you give us a hundred dollars right but if you give me a hundred dollars I can go uh update level equals a hundred you know where user name equals rim semi-colon enter and now rim's level a hundred right and he paid me a hundred dollars for typing one SQL statement thanks that was great I made a ton of money on that it cost me nothing this works particularly well you get a player base they're not paying you anything they're playing it for free mostly kids with their kid brains and we have our adult brains so I look at the game and say that game's fun but I don't want to spend a hundred hours of my life playing it but if I give them a dollar they're going to give me that treat right now and I make more than a hundred dollars an hour so spending a dollar to save an hour of my time is actually good use it's real good use yeah so I'll spend to give you a dollar to save an hour of my time poof and now that company made money because they made a grand so you know fake it until you make it is kind of a real thing with humans like if you're having trouble with motivation if you're depressed now obviously I'm not getting medical advice by any stretch but if you just force yourself to do something and start to experience a little bit of success even if it's synthetic so they can play the game and you're not winning but the game is giving you some synthetic success along the way you feel that success you attribute it to yourself at least subconsciously and I can motivate you to keep playing keep doing things and this can be a very powerful tool it can be a very dangerous tool just as we've shown but it can also be a very powerful tool the core mechanic of getting up to getting skill getting abilities getting whatever getting something just based on time put in means that you're guaranteed to feel some level of achievement no matter what right someone who starts playing Super Mario Brothers if they die in the first goomba a few times they might keep trying but if they keep dying on the first goomba over and over they're gonna quit but if spending time equals success someone who just keeps trying you know as early enough we'll just keep playing and keep playing and keep playing because they're gonna start succeeding and feeling good about it no matter what right so you can use this grinding mechanic in other ways to motivate people to keep trying at things they should keep trying at and not just pushing A over and over again attacking all the bad guys and to use kind of a good example like go to a different RPG like Chrono Trigger very famous game for obvious reasons but while yes it has those same mechanics you don't really get better at the game you just level up but you don't have to grind out the silver sword to progress through that game you're still rolling even run past monsters if you know where they're hiding in the bush like it's still a grind mechanic in the end but you pretty much constantly get novelty and new experiences over the course of that as opposed to stopping the narrative and doing something unrelated that you probably don't enjoy until you get the silver sword alright escapism right so most people are playing games or doing things outside of work because they want to escape from reality right so while you read fantasy novels why read fantasy novels right grinding lets you escape from the even harsher reality that you're no good in anything or at least you're not any good at counter strike right it's like if you go play counter strike and you lose a whole bunch which is what's going to happen when your old man's Scott right because you can't move your arm anymore yeah you also just don't know your corners I just can't move my arm anymore I can't click even if they're even the training mode I can't do it I used to be able to right you face the reality which is I Scott this person is not good at doing this thing and some people like me could admit it and they feel like it's because you're better than they are or you're smarter than they are or at least better at that game than they are that upsets them that they have to face the reality that they're not as good at a thing as someone else like yeah I'm not even though Tiger Woods isn't what it used to be I'm not as good at golf as Tiger Woods it doesn't mean I'm going to be sad about it so our friend Hamjo from that story the guy trying to get the lowest possible rank he says something very interesting because he was trying to go down through the ranks the ranks were from 1 to 100 back then they already changed it and he said once he got to 30s the high 20s he met quote the angriest people in the world right because these people were people who were good enough at the game to understand all the rules they knew how to play they were playing well but their rank wasn't going up they were still losing a lot because they had to face the reality that they just weren't good at this game and it made them very very sad but if you play a game with grinding a game with leveling where success is guaranteed when you spend time it will make you feel good no matter what it will make you feel powerful no matter what you will feel like a winner like you're good at something no matter what no matter who you are no matter how good you actually are you will feel like you're good at Final Fantasy there's no one who's bad at Final Fantasy who feels like they're bad at it because everyone who plays it beats it eventually so there's another way to do this in that you can't get good at some of the things we do in games I cannot become a cyber hacker I cannot become a wizard so there is no way for me to practice and get better at being a real wizard even at real things I can't be as good at basketball as Michael Jordan I guess I can't be as good at FPS because my arm is slow RTS is even worse I can't get that many APMs I can't even get like two APMs or if a game is more narrative driven or has something different like Deus Ex Human you know all those Deus Ex games the modern ones because I knew it just came out if you play that sure you can get better at FPSing like that's sort of the main skill and there's a couple other skills in the game but the rest of it there's a whole leveling up mechanic in the game because that's a good way to simulate the experience of that character getting better at hacking and at all the cyber nonsense even though it doesn't take any skill for me to pick up a refrigerator and throw it at someone but the character has to go through that arc so it lets you experience the arc of a character that isn't you and isn't tied to you because if you had to like lift weights or like do some sort of crazy minigame to be able to lift the fridges some players would never be able to lift the fridge they could never that'd be great a game where your character has to lift the fridge so you have to lift a weight in order for it to happen yeah oh that's the peripheral we do sell yeah put it in the VR there's like a giant weight on the front of you and you're playing VR it's like where is it here it is oh my god but it means you can have those narrative arcs in a character where you don't require the player to do the same thing you can have them do an analogy or do nothing because otherwise you unlock people who don't necessarily lift their skills out of that content and not every game is a versus competitive ortho game some games are just fun alright so now we're gonna go over we learned why every game these days has grinding we're gonna go over some the most wanted now these are games that I think present interesting cases tell interesting stories yeah they're not really the most wanted that would have taken a long time alright we talked about the standard RPG a lot you level up and you know you grind and hitting random encounters but that is still one of the most egregious examples of grinding and it's the most common because I really want to watch and see the whole story of these games most of them are really good movies and I can just watch them on YouTube thankfully but before YouTube there was no other way to see them alright so that makes me angry so they're first and the most wanted but it did lead to an interesting situation that I never envisioned when I was young but when I was a kid I always sit around and usually someone was playing some sort of RPG like even in college like our friend was playing Final Fantasy 8 I think I don't know 8 or 10 I saw a lot of 9 being played I think I watched him play all of Final Fantasy 8 that was our freshman year it was 9 it was 9 yeah 9 came out our freshman year I barely remember God so long ago but what was interesting is I realized then I watched him play this whole game over the course of a while he was hanging out in his house I felt about the same as if I played it myself so watching someone else play a game that is primarily grind driven you get the same level of achievement at least you feel a very similar level of achievement as if you actually did it thanks tWitch and I think tWitch and YouTube and streaming is sort of turning that into its own genre of games washable games and you'll never play yourself I've met a lot of kids who have never played Minecraft and get watching nothing but Minecraft streams alright so here's an MORPG I don't know if anyone read this article that was on Vice recently I never heard of this MMO until recently it's a really old one obviously and it's still around but it's called Tibia it's an MMO you can still play it it's one of those really brutal ones that kills you all the time and is not fun but there was a door in this game and you could not open this door unless you were level 999 some dude of course decided to open that door it took him what 4.9 years I think it was 9 years or 7 years or some ridiculous 7 or 9 years he spent years of his life doing this and not only was it a ridiculously hard game to get to that level it took as much experience to get from 998 to 999 as it took to get from like 900 to 950 something ridiculous it was a really hard game even playing it on his own but people knew about this guy and went out to the place where he was grinding and would try to disrupt him and kill his healers and stuff like that and yet somehow he made it since he went in that door we haven't heard from him since but think about some things you know he said there was a hardcore MMO you'll hear a lot of MMO fans people who play multiple MMOs as opposed to most people who play one and then they learn them less then they have their fun and they move on some people play a lot of MMOs and when people say hardcore MMO they almost always mean the same combination of a very high level cap egregious PVP a horrible community of people who hate each other seems to kill your healer but also extreme punishments for dying so it takes 8 hours of your life to level up at one level but if you get killed you lose like 20 levels you lose like all your gear they punish you severely the games not only are just like this horrible grind but they're very openly grind and the players don't just they don't say like oh they're not presented or whatever they love it they talk about it they express themselves like yeah that was a real MMO that was a hardcore MMO so if you want to see the people who know they're in the matrix and want to eat the steak they're all in that game and other games like it so people don't know this but in the old D&D you got experience differently than in the new D&D in the new D&D you mostly get experience from killing monsters and then you divide it amongst the party and everyone sort of gets equal levels and whatnot but in the old D&D if you get an old D&D book like the BECMI ones basic, expert, master I forget immortal I forget whatever companion, something master immortal anyway if you look in the red book the first one the basic one if you look at the XP charts killing a monster getting past a monster encounter in a dungeon is like worth like hundreds of XP it's like chump change right the XP is all about getting the loot it's all about the loot you go into the dungeon just because you want treasure you don't care how you get past the monster you don't have to kill it you can just talk your way past it you don't even you can just dodge the monster going through a secret tunnel or something you get the loot and get out that is how you get the XP so those games played very differently you couldn't if they had made Final Fantasy and there's other PC RPGs based on that you'd be playing them very differently you'd run from every encounter almost as money at least you'd try to level up your running if you could so that you could just get to the treasure chest open it you want to like ultimate level up your walk and then you run now going an older like D&D level level used to me you got to the sixth level of the dungeon so your characters are now all sixth level that's why it's the word level and not something else because these sorts of games have this incentive where generally if the game is focused on the mechanics as opposed to story and role playing and all this stuff there's not the topic of this panel if there's a disparity in levels between your characters that generally causes drama unrest and bad feelings so the games are sort of tuned to keep you all within the same level so no one can go off on their own in a typical D&D group and grind out levels and get ahead of everybody the Game Master is going to keep that in check for a reason has anyone played a game called Candy Box alright so Candy Box you know the certain genres of game that are just named after a game like you say roguelike there's a game called rogue I mean you say roguelike you mean this game is like rogue we use the word Candy Box to refer to all the games that are like Candy Box alright so there is a game called Candy Box this is it this game is amazing but there are many other Candy Boxes like Cookie Clicker is a Candy Box anything Clicker is a Candy Box just play to your brother on your 3DS street pass that's a Candy Box you get a candy one candy every second and then eventually a candy purchase yourself progress quest that's a candy box you can buy lollipops and then you can buy the wooden sword and then you get a lollipop farm and now I'm getting like 10 candies per second but the game is still the only way to level up is to wait alright Adventure Capitalist I think is like the biggest Candy Box right now actually now there is a whole game in here like there are literally dungeons you have to explore you have to fight guys there's all these spells there's puzzles there is a huge game in here I'm not joking this is not a trick it's not like Frog Fractions like there's a real game in here luckily this game is entirely client side so if you open up your JavaScript console you can just be like self.gold equals self.candy equals a billion and then you're good to go I'm eating legit I did not cheat I cheated you know what I did I opened my web browser I clicked on everything I could and then I left my web browser running and worked for a month and then I came back and I played the whole game in one go but I have to tell you that is the face of a stone cold candy killer but yeah the whole thing with Candy Box games is they're still grinding and you have to spend time but you might not necessarily actually have to spend your time you just have to be patient it's like imagine if in Final Fantasy you got one XP per second just standing there so you just leave it running you spend your electric bill grinds you up so instead of looking at the definition as you know things that just get better over time there are some things that it's more like they get better as the result of actions you can take that have no consequences right in a way in a way I'm kind of thankful right for this kind of game because like oh I can just let it run but I'm also not thankful because it's like you could have just removed that whole grindy part I just let me play from the get-go so why not start me off at maximum level there's no point you also feel a weird urge when you play in this game you think alright I'm just gonna wait a month and come back but then like a few hours later you all tab over and look at me and you got a lot of candies yeah and you're like so you click on a few more lollipops you just can't help yourself you're a rat so there is a candy box too and I seriously avoided playing it but Street Pass and I have Street Pass just got updated same game Street Pass is the only candy box I play instead of time it's how many conventions you go to and how many people are nearby so Borderlands is a great example we're gonna go back to our graphs from the internet so the level of channels you can take is basically you know you can be skilled at Borderlands but really your level matters a lot now you could play it as a single player game and sure you're leveling up and getting a loot but you're experiencing whatever you want to experience in the order you experience it and you just play this game we constantly have novel experiences but what if you want to play with your friends and really didn't buy the game when it came out the whole point of Borderlands is that they're promoting this co-op it's like oh you can play with your friends which is not a lot of FPS's do that go on Steam and try to find me a single player FPS that has a significant length to it that you can play co-op and isn't bad and it's like you can play some Sven co-op mods and hope you find some good ones most of them are really bad there's not a lot of choices other than Borderlands so you really want to do this but if you don't start playing at the exact same time at the exact same character at the exact same level either you're going to be going to a place where you're having a fun time and your friend is dying or your friend is leveling up normally and you're having a really boring time because all the bad guys are too weak now the game has some tolerance for this because like you can sort of level up in the course of play but you're never going to surpass the other person so if they started too late there's literally no way you can play together that guy is too great so either Rin has to start over from scratch to play with Scott or Scott has to level up more than Rin yeah that's exactly what I'm doing start over from scratch I spent 30 hours of my life getting to this level and now you want me to go back and do it again from the beginning I don't think so and then your friend Audrey wants to play and now that golf is literally insurmountable and that red line there you know what we call that red line there's a game industry term for that red line and that's Skag going so at the beginning of Borderlands there's a place called Skag Gully you can guess what's there it's the most boring area in any game I've ever seen all this is just a bunch of Skags and then there's one that's bigger it's like the boss and they're so boring and you have to if you play the game and see if you start a new character so you keep going back to this place more than any other place no if you want to level up together you don't have to go back here you just keep seeing new characters you've only seen Skag Gully once and then you forget it and eject it from your mind but when you make like three characters because another new friend starts playing another new friend starts playing you go there five times and then I haven't even played this game since then because I quit after like the third time I had to go to Skag Gully and that was the only part of the game I remember the reason I find it egregious is that this was a game that was not actually an MMO it just had the trappings if I could just pick my level then I would have played this game forever with all my friends and what would be wrong with that why not let me pick my level it's not like an MMO there's no serious competition there's no championship for like best at Borderlands it's like just let me pick whatever level I want or don't even have levels have a no level mode right? alright the two ladders this is like the hype of keeping you in that camp this is the most modern technology that has been invented in the grinding world so when comes to our go and Rocket League and Overwatch all these games there's always two ladders two separate sets of level one you've got the real one don't worry this is how good you are for real cause all these games are games of skill right kind of say go Rocket League they are skill games they're not grinding games but they somehow like every other game incorporated grinding but this meter is not about grinding so if you win that number goes up if you lose that number goes down and you feel horrible if you want to know like most of all the math that people are using to calculate these meters is based on something Microsoft came up because Microsoft true skill so you can go look that up if you want to learn fancy math I can't understand everyone pretty much takes that and modifies it slightly based on their game but yeah if you're a 50 you're a 50 if you're really good you're gonna be much higher than 50 if you're really bad if you're much lower that's how it works it's really telling you how good you are for real and you're not always rewarded sometimes you're rewarded and sometimes you're punished but there's another ladder if you just play in regular mode in casual mode you will always level up you get experience no matter what if your team loses and you were the worst player on the team you still get a whole bunch of experience and you get all these bonuses and it's kind of variable and when you level up get a new box right it's like I'm okay at Rocket League I can't do aerials but I'm really good if the game stays on the ground but I'm like it says in Rocket League that I'm like a veteran or like super vet or whatever it is because I just played it a whole bunch when I was playing it and even if I had sucked and lost every game I still would have this other meter that they were showing me kept going up and trying to use you know the box to encourage me to keep playing Rocket League no matter how good or bad I was so if I measured my success based on that meter I could feel good even though I was losing all the time so if I had them too late leaders if I'm playing competitive and I'm leveling up or I'm staying steady like I'm feeling good playing games in a row and I hit those 30s with the angriest people in the world I can keep playing the game usually I rage quit and I go over here in the box and I feel okay I'm starting to feel like alright I'm getting better at this game I'm getting better at this game I get crushing it later but I keep playing you're still getting a reward of some kind to keep you going right because if it was just the skill based game everyone who didn't have skill would get really sad and stop playing and there's a side effect because we weren't talking about actual skill we're mostly talking about these grounding mechanics by having this here even the terrible players keep playing it's real hard to not get at least a little bit better at these games if you play them all the time so it allows people who wouldn't necessarily get good in FPS to start getting good in FPS and then maybe one day they venture into these waters and they experience a whole new side of gaming they never would have seen before this is the height of candy box technology and I don't know if a lot of fault in it I think it's actually a really good system it works pretty well I mean it gets people as opposed to grinding games it's a good thing like Overwatch I have friends who would never play competitive mode in fact when they found out there was a competitive mode they were like worried about it and convinced them to keep playing I have friends who will only play this ever but I get to play the game with them because these two ladders exist if this thing wasn't there they wouldn't play at all so Hearthstone also has two ladders and it has grinding but it's a little bit different right basically if you start playing ranked Hearthstone and you want to try to get legend you have to grind right because my brother is top 50 legend in the US right he's going to go pro he's going to follow the Hearthstone circus he believes he can quit his job and play Hearthstone and I'm like don't quit please just don't right but he's legit good the thing is if I play against him I beat him a lot right sometimes it's luck of course but I mean it's not that many decisions to make and I'm good at games and so is he because of our grandpa who made us play games right so why aren't I legend 50 or whatever it's because in order to get to legend 50 you have to make podcasts and do all this convention stuff right and if you sit there and play for hours he doesn't do anything else he sits there in front of the TV and plays Hearthstone all day he plays at work right and he gets through all these stars you have to win a certain number of games it's not just ranking you based on your skill you have to and the thing is you can even rank up while losing because they have the at least up to a certain rank you get extra stars for winning games in a row so if you win three games in a row and get six stars right you can lose four games and the record is now three and four you have a losing record you have two stars up from where you started right so it's not really telling you how good you are it's just play enough games to prove that you're invested in this game and now we'll make you a legend and once you're in legend then it's skill based and it's like hang on the candy box and have fun and then suddenly the door opens now granted if you're not any good if you have a less than 51% winning rate you're not going to get there but as long as you have 51% it doesn't matter if it's 90% or 51 51% win rate if you play enough games you will eventually get one star at a time and eventually bust your way in right so that's another kind of grinding that is going on so Pokemon Go many of you are probably playing it the current plague that's going around look at that right now I'm playing it the vaccine is here it's us now I'm going to give you a secret as an aside I'm playing it but I'm pretending it's Pokemon Snap I was when I heard about it I said oh my god that's going to take over the world I downloaded the app on better than you IV training looking up stats I was like promise me you will never do this stop it that guarantee that's going nowhere so this is the screen shot of someone who in the early days used a bot to max out the levels to see what the game looks like that's the top that's literally the best you can do in this game I'm pleased that Dragonite is the strongest Pokemon of course Hyper Beam so this game is actually based on another game called Ingress on this side of the left this is how much experience it takes to get to each level so that red line is how much experience you need to get to the next level from where you're left notice to get from level 15 to 16 right from the second highest level to the highest level you need 40 million experience that's like this whole area right that's as much as it takes to get from like 12 to 15 you might notice that gets an exponential curve now on this side that is what you get when you level up getting from level 15 to 16 will take a significant chunk of your life and the difference between level 15 and 16 is almost nothing that's a linear progression so you have a linear progression of ability increase coupled with an exponential experience requirement I'm going to argue and we don't really have time to go into a lot of the details of it that this sort of game Pokemon Go any game that involves this specific kind of real world AR style candy box has to have the exponential curve and the linear curve or the game that comes out and destroys itself because players stop playing when they feel like they hit the end if someone actually sees that they're going to get bored with the game there's literally nothing else they can explore unless they try to be competitive but as other people level up and eventually meet their level there's nothing to differentiate them from anyone else and there's very little skill input you level up by spending time there's no other way to level up in this game so by making it this way and the crazy person who hits this actually hits level 16 probably actually like this is the only game they play and they're going to go crazy about it forever anyway they might be like the whale that you start to monetize if you hit level 16 too easily you're just done you're going to make it as hard as possible and notice how easy it is you start playing Pokemon Go and you're like level level you're like three levels in a day you're really feeling it and then when you're here and it takes you a month because I don't notice like you remember getting all those levels you don't really internalize how much experience that actually is compared to your entire experience real human experience up to that point be wary of these games they're all going to look like that Mario Kart right now that's a random game but it's also a skill game how could there possibly be grinding Mario Kart so if you want to unlock characters you have to meet all these achievement conditions that's not really grinding I mean you sort of do it you have to be pretty good at doing that yeah they're kind of still there so you need to say you need to get the same you need that thing get the same but if you want gold wheels you have to get 15,000 15,000 coins you got to get these coins so if you play Mario Kart 7 you actually have to grind out coins if you want to see all the content in the game you will never get that many coins someone here probably has the coins does anyone have all the coins in Mario Kart 7 okay good yeah every single game that you bought to play with your friends that you own there is content you can only get by playing the game forever playing the game against AIs on the easiest mode to do it as fast as possible they couldn't even keep grinding out of Mario Kart it's in every single game or or you can use street pass do Nintendo other franchise candy boxes the last thing we're going to talk about is forums so you notice some forums but many do where they show you how many posts you've made or how many comments you've done or how many times people have liked your posts you've posted 10,000 times you're now the edge lord they're basically encouraging people to spend more time on the forum and write more posts they don't care about your quality so much right they're just encouraging people to do more stuff and it works it gets people to do more stuff at least they're doing something they're learning to write maybe if you tell a kid they post 11 more times in your forum he gets an avatar increase you're gonna get 11 post post post post post they're gonna get 11 posts alright they're gonna be there so this doesn't just apply to games watch for these sort of candy boxy grindy elements and other things you do and generally avoid them so we love morality we jumped around all over the place and talked about a lot of different things what is the moral of this is there a point or did we just fly you for it point maybe. If you're a game designer, these tools are powerful, and they're useful, and like we said, they have good uses and bad uses. This is just one tool in your toolbox, but just because you have a hammer doesn't mean you should hit everybody with it. So not every single game in the whole world needs grinding. There's still room in the work for games without grinding, and also if you're going to have some kind of grinding statefulness leveling up in your game, do it in a good way that doesn't encourage people to waste their entire lives doing something repetitive and boring, right? Use it in a good way that maybe encourages people to, you know, play a game that they would otherwise quit because it's too hard. So for game players, for the rest of us, if you're going to play these grindings, maybe you shouldn't. Right, you're only going to live for what like 70, 80 years, and you're going to spend with that guy spent seven or not. He spent like what, 10% of his life, right? Every 10 days he spends an entire day playing this game. That's how you're gonna, you're only gonna leave one life to live, and you're gonna spend it pressing A, attack, attack, attack, just so you can see the next like, you know, video in a Final Fantasy game that you could have watched on YouTube, right? Think about your whole life when you're doing this, right? Is it really worth it to be looking at that Pokemon Go screen, right? You spent what, a month of your life on that? Is it worth it, right? Was that a life well spent? So spend it wisely, meaning if you're enjoying yourself, it is totally okay, play that grind, just grind it out if you're enjoying yourself, but take that moment when you're grinding, and you're not having fun, and you know you're not having fun. Force yourself to stand up and turn off the game, and that shock will pass and you're free. Don't play games you're not having fun with if you're not actually doing anything in there. At least in our eyes, it's not okay to be the person in the box eating the delicious steak wanting to forget. That's not right, right? You should all want to escape, right? To where the real world is, and we can live real awesome lives at like a PAX, right? But at the same time, I would not be the gamer I am today. I would not know the things I know about games today if I hadn't spent, God, eight hours, 20 or 40 hours a year playing Final Fencing 1 and grinding it out. Everyone plays that one MMO obsessively. Everyone plays that one AR game obsessively. That's a part of who you are, and when you're a kid, you've got plenty of free time. So while we're saying don't do this, we're also sort of saying everybody gets one, like do it the right amount. Don't regret the time you spent grinding. Don't regret the time you spent in an MMO that you hated the last 40 years you played, because you enjoyed a little bit of it, right? But it was definitely, it wasn't completely an invaluable experience, especially if you learn from it, right? I played Candy Box. I learned a lot playing that Candy Box, because I was really investigating like how does this thing work? What's up with this game? And you do keep playing it. Well, I played the 3DS one. Oh, regular Candy Box. I haven't played regular Candy Box in like forever. You should play Candy Box too. No. I learned my lesson from Candy Box 1. It was a valuable learning experience, and now I'm done with it. But if you're going to remind something out, if you're going to spend a ton of your life on a game, at least do it on a game that's going to level you up too, or you're going to get something out of it other than just the experience. Right? In the real world, we grind to make some characters, some numbers on some sheet go up, so numbers in a database go up. But if you instead grind in the real world, you can make you go up. I'm real good at clicking on Heads and Overwatch now. I can spend a lot of time on Heads. Right, but like you can be good at something else, like playing music. If you just practice, which is grinding, right? But it's useful, like online. Well, no, it's not grinding, because you do level yourself up. You don't just get better by playing a trumpet. I guarantee if I give you a trumpet and play for an hour, you're not going to get that much better. Maybe, but if you keep practicing and you spend enough time, right, you have to spend time doing things to get better at them, right? So level yourself up, however you do it, and enjoy the games you play, and don't play games you don't enjoy. It's okay to not like a game anymore. And we were really out of time. I hope that was enjoyable. Obviously, do not have time for questions. So if you have questions, grab one of our flyers and email us. And play games. Don't go to the next hall all day.