And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option.

This suggests a model of why the RPG genre is the way it is. The character customization and resource management metagame fatigues willpower, so that you take the default action of grinding rather than the non-default action of quitting the game.

Similarly, Minecraft fatigues with creative decisions such as about architectural design, and offers the default of digging for ores.

(Random drops probably also contribute to the decision to keep grinding.)