I have been playing Runescape for more than 11 years, and I have enjoyed every minute of it. Though I play it more casually than others, and my levels are nowhere near maxed out, I am still very active in the community and have made a lot of friends through playing the game. The more time I’ve spent in the community, though, the more I’ve noticed people saying one particular phrase which grinds my gears.

“[Activity] is hard.”

No, it’s not.

To clarify before I go on, I realize that there are facets of Runescape which are hard – there are parts which take a lot of thought and skill and memorization to complete, such as quests and bossing and things like that. But that’s generally what people are talking about. What people are talking about is grinding.

If you don’t know, grinding is the most common and widely-known methods of training a skill. If you are training firemaking, for instance, you fill your inventory with logs and keep clicking on them until there’s a small inferno in your town, and then you load back up and repeat until you’ve gotten the level you want to reach.

There is nothing difficult about this.

And yet, when I’m walking around training skills from a low level, I’m told that I’m not “as good” at the game as other people because my levels are lower. That’s simply not true. I’m less experienced, of course, but I’m certainly not any less good because I’ve clicked a square on my screen a thousand fewer times than someone else. Your character’s skill level may increase, but your skill sure as hell hasn’t. You’re not better than me, you’ve just spent more time on the skill than I have.

This “grind until you are done grinding” style of gameplay is popular in roleplaying games, especially among MMOs which tend to emulate the play styles of games like Runescape and World of Warcraft. And I’m not saying that playing grinding games is bad, because it is a good way to pass the time, but you’re not learning anything, you’re not doing anything hard, and you’re not better than me at it because you’ve spent longer doing the same simple task.

Now, with all that said, I don’t doubt much of the community is better at the game than me. They’ve figured out the quests for themselves, they can defeat bosses without any trouble, and they know how to win minigames with ease. That’s all skill, and I have no problem being called worse at that, because I am.

Think about it in terms of the Pokémon games:

You start with a Pokémon. You train it, you love it, you grind it. You sit in tall grass for hours and hours and fight with other monsters until your character is a high enough level to defeat the next monsters. You haven’t gotten better, you’ve just done the action enough that you are now allowed to do the same damn thing with a different looking monster. The game is exactly like this the entire time. All the way through. Over and over for more than a decade, and across many handheld platforms. Now, there is a little bit of strategy, with Pokémon types and knowing what-kills-what, but the types are fairly easy to know and the most thinking you have to do in a battle is mainly restricted to “which out of these four attacks can I use?”

Another of these misconceptions is that as grinding goes on, it gets harder. It doesn’t. It just takes longer.

Hard is what you feel when you play Castlevania. You’ve got to rely on your knowledge of the game’s physics, your own timing, and your own mind to progress through levels without dying over and over. The deaths are not because the enemies’ levels are higher than yours. The deaths are because you messed up, because you haven’t learned enough or because you didn’t execute a strategy well enough. Castlevania is hard. The levels get harder each time because they test your reflexes and mental capacity more and more with each level. The distance between the first level and the last in Castlevania is hard. The distance between level 1 and level 99 in Runescape is time consuming.

Of course there are games which do not follow these conventions. There are hard roleplaying games out there, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

The point is: there’s a difference between skills accrued and time spent.