Grind is in the eye of the beholder (Destiny)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Sunday, June 30, 2019, 21:29 (1983 days ago) @ Claude Errera

You are denying yourself a certain experience in favor of an experience anyone can have the second time through.

Um... if the experience you're 'denying' yourself isn't an enjoyable one (to you)... what's the relevance of this sentence?

Cruel's been pretty clear that he doesn't really enjoy the discovery phase - so 'denying' himself that phase seems... prudent.

I'm actually not the best puzzle solver so I'm not the best evangelist for the pleasure you get from solving puzzles. It doesn't really matter to me if Cruel doesn't like blind raiding. To be clear blind raiding and raiding are two separate activities. Let's be generous and assume that preferring one over the other isn't insisting that everyone has to enjoy the one you enjoy. Bungie obviously hopes that someone likes solving the puzzles they build into their raids. I think it's fair to defend the value of that experience in this discussion.

However, Cruel and Cody moved beyond puzzles in raids to storytelling, which I know more about. Cruel described being distracted by discovery or curiosity about what's going to happen next to the point that he couldn't focus on other qualities of storytelling that he appreciates. I think that's fair assuming that stories are to be experienced onlyonce--but in many cases they're not. I think it's C.S. Lewis who tells an anecdote where a woman stands in the stacks in library reading a book for 20 minutes before she realizes she's already read it and puts it back. Yes, the aspects that Cruel likes to focus on have value, but so do the discovery and curiosity that distract him. It's as if a person says they don't like salt--a chef might want to drill down into that, suggest that the value of salt might not be casually dismissed--I mean, have you ever had salted chocolate?

There's also the fact that Cruel does have that moment when he discovers what happens next--he just doesn't choose to have that within the experience that the creator was building for him. An aside: my mom loved books but at a certain point got on the Readers' Digest condensed books bandwagon. I never wanted to read them because, as an aspiring writer myself, I knew the work that went into picking the exact words and just enough of them. I wanted the full experience that the author intended. Whenever people debate things being spoiled, someone usually says it doesn't or shouldn't matter--it's the journey, not the destination. That's true, but it's also true that the frisson you get when you're surprised is sometimes vital to the experience of a narrative.