Taken from Cracked;
"Grinding," if you've never heard the term, is the "work" part of a game. You reach some boss you're clearly not strong enough to beat, or you don't have the right weapons. Then you figure out that to get strong enough or to earn the weapons, you need to go repeat earlier levels (or in an RPG, wander around and kill a bunch of random animals).
For somebody like me who got into RPGs with the '90s era Final Fantasy console games, you knew what you were in for: 1) doing a lot of reading, 2) adding a midi soundtrack to your nightmares and 3) grinding your ass off to out-level a bull-_- random monster that was harder than the mother-_-ing end-boss.
No one "enjoyed" it, I don't think. On some level, we knew we were putting the storyline on hold in favor of making our characters powerful enough to see the next cut scene ("What's that? We need this amulet to destroy the dragon that is about to wipe out the kingdom? OK, wait while I kill 300 armadillos."). But it was what the game told us to do, so we did it. You didn't question that.
When my kids encounter a boss that requires grinding, they think the game is broken, or that they're just missing something. I've seen them spend up to two hours trying to kill a Deathclaw in Fallout: New Vegas because they don't consider the idea that they should come back when they're more powerful. It's there, so we should be able to kill it. What's the problem?
Why Do They Do It?
It's all they know. Once more, most games have come around to their way of doing it. Boss encounters in most games are designed to be beaten after about three tries. In some games, the enemies' level is adjusted to the players' level. In newer Nintendo games and in L.A. Noire, they give you the option to just skip a level if you fail too many times.
What Does it Mean?
I'm starting to think it means that the very idea of grinding was a bull-_- trick to begin with in order to pad a game. When I was a kid, games were set up to make you grind the same tasks over and over because it would stretch out the play time. With the right amount of grinding spots at just the right intervals, a developer could easily -- and often did -- turn a 20-hour game into a 40-hour game. And that was a huge selling point to say, "Final Fantasy III has 40 hours of gameplay!"
Now, it's normal to expect the quest to be five to 10 hours long depending on the genre. If you want a long game, get a multiplayer game and go online. Congratulations, you have a game that never ends. Or, you get a sandbox game and spend the next six months in GTA trying to jump out of a helicopter and land in a swimming pool.
But it comes down to the fact that my kids can do what I never could at their age -- they recognize when a game is full of
