During my childhood gaming years, I spent an inordinate amount of time marching my poor avatar in circles. He’s just lucky he wasn’t self-aware, that stocky knight draped in plate armor, walking the same tedious circuit for hours beneath the heat of a sun that no one had programmed to set.
I didn’t have a choice. In order to progress through these role-playing adventures, I needed cool weapons and armor, which cost gold. If I was going to finish Dragon Warrior, I’d need to raise my character’s experience level so that he had a fighting chance against the dragons and wyverns and wolfmages who lurked in the woods across the next bridge. The only way to amass gold and experience was by fighting legions of enemies, and enemy encounters were randomly generated as you walked along, so I walked, and walked, and fought, then walked some more. For some reason, this tedium never grated on me. Level-grinding (or “rebuilding,” as my brothers and I called it) was part of the contract we entered into with the game.
I never stopped to question why these creatures left gold pieces behind when they died. Maybe their entire diet consisted of townspeople, whom they gobbled down whole, wallets and all, digesting everything but those pesky gold pieces.
Looking back now, it would appear that my favorite game at the time, Final Fantasy, was attempting to groom me for the 9-to-5 workday tedium of the real world. There’s a key point early in the game, after you board the ship you won in a barroom brawl and sail it south to a wooded Elfland area populated with Ogres and pink-colored baddies called Creeps. You effectively can’t progress beyond this point in the game without visiting the local elf village and buying a powerful silver sword, which costs the hefty sum of 4000 gold. I remember spending dozens of hours walking around in hopes of bumping into those deep-pocketed Ogres. If you happened to hit a group of three or four, you felt like you’d scratched a winning lottery ticket.