The Grind Ennobles Us
First published in GRIND Ediția Definitivă, pages 72–80.
PERSPECTIVE
GRIND
ENNOBLES
US
COME TO THE SIDE OF
THE GRIND!
We live in a world dominated by instant gratification: as long as you have money, any joy or pleasure is just a few clicks or screen taps away. When it comes to games, you can see how real-world trends and digital multiverses have merged into an ambiguous augmented reality.
While governments print money as if they were playing SimCity in god mode and inflation had no consequences for the economy, smartphone-wielding investors buy shares as if they were orchestrating the collapse of the Lifeinvader social network in GTA 5, and car manufacturers allow “engine upgrades” that unlock from an app through a $2000 electronic payment (yes, worse than in NFS), games are going through a strange phase of their own.
On the one hand, we have “free” titles that monetise attention or impatience: want another go? You can watch an ad or buy extra lives. Want the ads to disappear? A microtransaction sorts that out.
But the picture becomes rather less honest and a good deal more dubious when you look at the games we pay €60 for (€70 these days, for next-gen console titles) that still charge extra for content. Remember when extra characters unlocked after you completed an objective, or by punching in cheat codes found in Cheatbook or DLH? Well, all those bonus bits are now prettily packaged and go by the names of DLC (Downloadable Content), Expansion Pack or Season Pass. They're no longer a bonus that shows the developers care about the project and want to add value – they're a fresh attempt to fleece the player.
I paid 300 lei for Super Smash Bros. on Nintendo Switch. But if I want Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII or Steve from Minecraft in my roster of fighters, I have to shell out another 120 lei for Fighter Pass 2. In other words, before I'm even given the chance to unlock the fighters, I have to buy a special pack. The only difference from Ubisoft or Activision-Blizzard is that at least I have to put in some work to unlock them – and that work means beating the characters in battle.
The gratification isn't entirely instant, but it still doesn't hold a candle to the days when we gathered all the Chaos Emeralds in Sonic 2 to get Super Sonic's powers, or bred chocobos in Final Fantasy VII to get the gold chocobo that could fly to Round Island – the place where you find the Knights of the Round materia, which has the most devastating attack in the game. Kids today won't get the joy of finding hidden packages on the rooftops of GTA 3's buildings only to discover that the save point now hands them weapons or armour too. Instead, they can buy virtual currency in GTA Online or Fortnite to skip hours of grind… then go to school and tell all their mates about the advantage of having permissive parents with above-average incomes. Sad!
But at the heart of these mercantile phenomena sits the grind, and a huge catalogue of games that arrived complete in their day, making no compromises. In these magical realms now on their way out, rare items, hidden characters and secret maps can only be earned through graft. And these are the games I recommend for mind and spirit – because behind the effort sit rewards that no other method can give you. At best, you can download a save file or install a trainer (does anyone still remember trainers?).
While I was working on the magazine, I discovered how the grind I put into Final Fantasy X had made me more patient. It even helped me think strategically and pay more attention to my day-job tasks – without feeling the urge to check my phone or scroll social media. Hitting repetitive objectives in a game led me to rediscover my focus and improve my attention span. And that discipline of deliberately investing a set number of hours to reach a clear goal has become something obscure and old-fashioned. In an age when any piece of information is one search away, and access to knowledge and entertainment is limited only by your own curiosity, we need ways of ordering our thoughts more than ever.
The grind means knowing your own limits and chasing a goal while holding on to the hope that, eventually, the attempt will succeed. It calls for uncommon perseverance and a strong will. And at the end, once the goal is reached, we can say we've successfully projected meaning onto our efforts.
If John Lennon told us back in the 1970s that time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time, then GRIND magazine turns up some 50 years later to tell you that time spent on a difficult and well-defined objective is the very meaning of life. Without grind we'd never have built imposing monuments. Without grind we'd never have bent nature's whims to our will and become the dominant species on the planet. And without that same grind, nobody would ever have got a Demonspike Coat in Diablo to stand up to every attack coming from the Evil One.
Whatever its nature, the grind purifies us, sharpens us and ennobles us. And while “casual” gamers roll their eyes and say the grind isn't for them, we'll use our patience and our will to rack up more impressive achievements both in everyday life and in games. Come to the GRIND side!
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ENNOBLES GRIND MAGAZINE TM GRIND ROMANIA'S ONLY GAMING MAGAZINE PATREON
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The GRIND magazines released so far have been written, edited, beautified with graphics, uploaded to the internet and promoted in our free time, drawing funds from our own coffers. But being a project born of passion, we were determined to produce the best-quality magazines, as if our readership were 100 times bigger and we were trading blows with the ghosts of giants like LEVEL, PC Games, XtremPC and Game Over.
If you like what we do, we hope you'll support us. You don't have to donate money – for the GRIND project it's just as important that you read our magazines (which will always be free in digital format) and spread the word that there are still some lads out there writing and printing. A simple share of the content we put out can make an enormous difference to the project's long-term success.
In the future we hope we'll be able to reward the people who write the articles... even if it's just with modest sums. We hope there'll be a reward for the people doing the graphics too. And maybe we'll have a budget to bring a few other ideas to life as well. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
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