Originally posted on Little Jurassic People Developer Blog.

One of the main advantages of the entire Little Jurassic People project is to be able to experiment and look for alternative solutions to the grinding and leveling mechanics that pervades, and have always pervaded, the MMO genre. All of this, with no commercial pressure.

From Wikipedia:  “Grinding is a term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive and/or non-entertaining gameplay […] in which it is often necessary for a character to repeatedly kill AI-controlled monsters, using basically the same strategy over and over again, in order to advance their character level to be able to access newer content.”

Why are these mechanics so widespread? For several reasons actually…

• It is tied to well-known stat-based game systems: RPGs, both offline and online, make intensive use of stats based systems and leveling mechanics. While these undoubtedly work and designers can start from an existing layer of mechanics and improve on them slightly, these gaming rules are a “relic” of traditional RPGs.
• It is a mean of creating content: creating game content usually consists of setting up enough new challenges/levels/problems to keep the player interested. While this is still true for grind-based games, having the player repeat the same action over and over just on incrementally harder enemies (stat-tweaking) is an easy and effective way to stretch the lasting appeal of the game. Also, think of tool, weapons, objects. There are just so any types of these and having “sword +5″ is an effective way of creating a variation of a base sword.
• It is an effective way to control content distribution and balancing: choosing a level-based progression allows the designer to control with a good degree of precision which contents are delivered to the players all along their evolution. Knowing that X area or Y object is from level 20 is equivalent to breaking up the experience in full fledged game levels. The volcano area is the level 30-39 for example, and so on.
• Using XP points/leveling/grinding is simpler to design (?): having every action taken by the player have an effect on one and only XP counter (I’m simplifying for clarity’s sake of course) is simpler than creating meaningful and coherent consequences to a bigger number of player actions. For example: a character completing a fetching quest or a combat quest is rewarded with the same kind of XP points. While this is practical for a designer, it is quite abstract.
• It’s addictive: I guess no designer will publicly tell you that, but that’s a big plus when you want to keep your player base coming back for more (or not leaving at all!). Game mechanics that prove addictive are a huge help towards providing the player with many playing hours despite providing minimal content.
• Leveling is a well-known system and thus provides a low entry barrier for new players: you want your game to be played by lots of gamers right? Many “casual” games tend to include a leveling system as occasional players have increasingly less problems dealing with it.

In part 2 of this article, I’ll explain why I think we should all look beyond this lvl/grinding thing and look for ways to induce a form of character progression that feels more natural to the media we’re developing for, and how that ties with Little Jurassic People.