The Gym Is A Bad RPG
Earlier this year I wrote about why grinding in RPGs is good actually, and I stand by it. There's something oddly soothing about running around a field battering skeletons and watching numbers satisfyingly tick up. But that's because you don't have to do any of the legwork. Cloud, Vaan, or whoever it is might be busting their ass slaying monsters, but all you're doing is sitting semi-motionless on a comfy chair jabbing at buttons. Imagine having to actually grind, repeating an arduous, exhausting task over and over again for incremental gains. If you go to the gym, you don't have to imagine it.
Related: Grinding In RPGs Is Good Actually
I've been a regular at a local gym for about a year now, mainly so I can eat burgers and Ben & Jerry's and only feel half guilty about it. Sometimes I enjoy my early morning sweat-a-thon, other times it's a dispiriting chore and I wonder why I'm putting myself through it. This morning, experiencing the latter, it suddenly dawned on me: when your motivation is at its lowest, the gym is a really shitty RPG. A tiresome, repetitive grind-fest that you can play for an hour and feel like you've made no progress. If you already think this is a laboured analogy, buckle up: it's about to get a lot worse.
The gym is the world map and the machines are the enemies. This morning I decided to test my might against a higher level monster: the dreaded assault bike. I did 15 minutes of high intensity interval training, watching the numbers on the screen—distance travelled, calories burned, and so on—slowly increasing. In a very loose sense this data translates to me 'levelling up' by getting healthier, but man is it hard work—and boring too. At least when you're grinding in an RPG you get to see little
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