Knowledge Base / Time / Grinding

Grinding

Written by Alex

Posted: 2025-5-25

Grinding is a ubiquitous term in gaming, representing the length of time it takes to accomplish a task or progress in video games. Not all games that have grinding are deceptive; learn the difference between grinding as an intended game design and grinding as manipulation, meant to drive sales.

Defined

Grinding is the act of completing low-variety tasks to progress or unlock new content and upgrades.(1) Grinding becomes a deceptive pattern when it artificially increases the length it takes to complete a task or progress and gives the option to spend money to skip it or make “the grind” easier. The design encourages longer play times, incentivizing players to spend money to save their time, make the game more enjoyable, and progress faster. If the player cannot spend money to make grinding easier, it is not a deceptive pattern and instead part of the game design.

Application

Grinding is often used in combination with other deceptive patterns such as pay-to-win, playing by appointment, and infinite treadmill. One of the most famous cases of grinding involves Epic Games’ Star Wars Battlefront II, a highly anticipated multiplayer game in 2017. To unlock iconic and powerful characters such as Luke Skywalker, players had to either spend money on loot boxes or spend “an average of 2,395.97 minutes of pure gameplay time—roughly forty hours of grinding—to unlock [him]”. (2) Because Star Wars Battlefront II is a PvP multiplayer, players are encouraged to spend money to unlock powerful characters faster to gain an edge over other players. This design represents a combination of deceptive patterns: grinding, monetized rivalries, and pay-to-win.

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Gacha games, a genre of mobile games focusing on collecting resources (typically characters), heavily features grinding with the option to pay to progress faster. Genshin Impact, one of the top mobile games worldwide, contains grinding through their loot boxes- known in-game as character/item banners.

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These banners are one of the main methods of progressing power to players. Players can “pull” from these character banners by acquiring primogems. To acquire primogems, players can complete the story, explore the maps, and complete daily/weekly tasks, or they can skip ahead by purchasing them directly. In Doro44’s video “Why Im Quitting my F2P account in Genshin Impact,” he jokes about the differences between his free-to-play account, and his main account: “…my [main] account made me very lazy because if I needed more [primogems], I would just spend more money…” noting the protracted time and effort to achieve the same result while not spending money (3). For a new player, it will take about 31 hours to get a 5-star character guaranteed (the strongest rank of characters) as opposed to spending roughly $178, excluding time-limited events (4). The grind for strong characters incentivizes players to spend money to have an better experience progressing and collecting characters.

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References

Related Deceptive Patterns