I recently played some Fallen London, because the action doubling caught my attention. Also, it was a long while ago that I last played it, and time had dimmed my memories of exactly how awful the game’s design is.
Really, really awful.
I spent most of two days writing short stories. Not real short stories; just abstract items called short stories. They’re not even about anything. Here’s how the game play works.
In the first phase, you need to create pages of manuscript. You do this by choosing from several actions. One costs 5 actions points, and always gives you 5 pages of manuscript. Another costs 4 action points, but there’s a chance that it fails. There are also some ways to spend only 3 action points and some resources. Since your action points are only limited by how long you wait around and how often you log in, there are no serious tactical or strategic decisions here. It’s just a matter of whether you are impatient enough to take some risks.
Once you have enough pages of manuscript, you can start editing your story. Here you have a choice between a simple edit and a daring edit. Both can raise the “potential” of your story, but the simple edit can only raise it to 25, while the daring edit can raise it to 75 or so – in little steps of 2 or 3, I think. The daring edit has a smaller chance of success, though the only price for failure is that you lose a page of manuscript. Of course, you can get more pages of manuscript by spending more action points on making pages of manuscript …
… in other words, we’re looking at GRIND spelled out in extremely blatant letters. There is no serious decision here, ever; nothing that has to do with either skill or story; nothing that requires thought or daring or imagination. To get to a certain potential, you need exactly one thing: enough patience and logging in to make enough manuscript to do enough edits.
Once you reach the potential you need, you get to choose how good you want your story to be. The higher classes of goodness require more potential; and there’s also a chance element involved. (So that the question becomes: do I take this risk, or do I GRIND even more in order to lower the risk of failure?) If the dice fall in your favour, you’ll have written a high-quality short story.
Again, that story is not about anything. It doesn’t express anything about your character, or about you. As far as I could determine, the only thing you could do with it is sell it, and use the money to buy other items. Items that might improve your scores so that the next time you write a short story, it all goes a little faster, and you need to grind a little less!
This type of game design makes me want to smash my head against something hard. It rewards only one thing: stupid, dull, repetitive persistence. Fallen London continually tries to lure you in with the promise of “stories” – it introduces characters, places, plot elements – but these never actually become stories. They just function as a little colour to make you forget that you’re wasting your time on a game that consists of grinding, grinding, grinding, a continuous and never-ending attempt to increase the value of dozens (maybe hundreds) of variables by clicking on the same links again and again. Add to that the action point system that is expressly designed to make sure that people need to play the game all the time (to be efficient, you need to log in every 3 hours), and you have an evil piece of software that was apparently written to make your brain die.
Those are my feelings about grinding. I’m sure Fallen London is not the worst, but it’s nevertheless really, really bad. Or am I too harsh? Is there something beyond the grind? Is there ever a legitimate purpose for grinding?