Desert Golfing: the strange appeal of mobile gaming's latest craze

Desert Golfing is a straightforward video game. It is a golf simulation, set in a two-dimensional desert that rolls on forever. Using a catapult-style aiming mechanism, the sort you may remember from Angry Birds, you hit the ball toward the hole. When the ball goes down, you move on to the next hole. Then the next. Forever. There is no end. It has been called “the best worst game in the world”, by US news site Kotaku. Like other smartphone gaming smash hits, it is ridiculously compelling.

Because, although Desert Golfing is a straightforward video game, the emotional journey for its player is entirely complicated. You begin with eager anticipation: the hope that you are about to be challenged, surprised and thrilled. For the first 18 holes, these hopes are quietly met, accompanied (for players of a certain age, at least) by a sense of nostalgia at the game’s eighties Atari aesthetic and impossibly simple control scheme. 

With confidence comes the urge to improve. It’s now not enough to merely land the ball into hole: you have to do it efficiently in as few shots as possible. You begin to read the power meter properly, to better judge the angles, to pull off the odd joyous hole-in-one. With mastery comes the desire to re-set the game and start over with your newly acquired knowledge. But here Desert Golfing defies convention: there is no restart button, no option to exit and begin again. In fact, there is no menu at all. Unlike other video games, which allow us to redo our history till we perfect our story, in this wilderness you must live with your mistakes. Your past scorecard cannot be undone; you only have power to change the future.

So you learn to forgive your past self, that idiot who went for the thunderous hole-in-one when he should have putted his way to lesser, more bankable glories. Now, as you reach hole 150-odd, you find resolve. You’re lining up shots with care but the real game takes place in your mind. You obsessively divide your total number of shots by the number of holes you’ve completed. Can you maintain an average of three shots per hole? Or less? This state persists every time you slide out your phone to get a few tees in while standing at the supermarket checkout till, or in the post office queue, among the phalanx of texters. 

At some point you become weary of the grind. Yet there is the dim hope that maybe there is nobility in the fact you’ve made it to hole 1,687. You take to social media to share your progress. The preening only baits the other Desert Golfers out. In turn they post their screenshots, proving how much farther they’ve travelled down the rabbit hole. You head back into the wilderness and you persist. It is the gamification of survival.

The origin of Desert Golfing

The inspiration for this strange game came to Justin Smith, an independent developer from Vancouver, while playing Journey, the elegiac PlayStation 3 adventure about death and religion in a vast ochre wasteland. “I wanted to add golf to Journey in the same way someone would draw a moustache on the Mona Lisa,” explains Smith. “The terrain in that game was perfect for golf, and I thought golf would add a quantifiable purpose.” Smith let the idea sit for a while before beginning to realise his vision in the bold 2D graphics of 1980s computer games. “The color palette for Desert Golf is actually borrowed from Journey, but I figured it would be best not to call it Journey Golfing,” he says.

At first Smith wanted to create 1,000 holes. Rather than manually design these he wrote an algorithm to randomise their layout, “as a survival technique.” Smith already had the name for the game, and, taking inspiration from Desert Bus, the notoriously lengthy bus-driving simulatordesigned by the American illusionists Penn and Teller, he decided to extend his game further to make it incredibly long and repetitive.

Smith, who taught himself to programme by typing code listings from the back of magazines into the Sinclair 1000 that his grandmother bought him one Christmas, made the decision to prevent restarting the game early on. “Adding a way to start over would sap some of the fun out,” he says. “If you’re doing poorly, the temptation to hit the reset button would always be lurking over you. But with no way to restart, the player feels a sense of freedom and reconciliation with life’s past mistakes.”

That sense of freedom and reconciliation was reflected in Smith’s own process of designing the game – which took just eight days from start to finish. The greatest challenge was, he says, to resist the temptation to add in “indulgent” features such as curved slopes, power-ups and wind. “Not all the holes are enjoyable,” he says. “There are some very repetitive ones. And I did nothing to ensure that an impossible hole wouldn’t be generated. In fact, there’s a hole in the late 2000s that I was certain was impossible, a sudden ending in the middle of the desert. Of course: never underestimate players. They got past it.”

Since the game’s launch players have been “getting past it” in droves. The game has no end because Smith’s algorithm created infinite courses, but he never expected anyone to make it past the hole in the late-2000s. “What comes after is just patterns in white noise,” he says. 

This hasn’t stopped one player from making it past the five thousandth hole. “Nobody should go that far,” says Smith. “I’m saying it now so I don’t feel responsible for more wasted time: there is officially nothing of interest past three thousand.”

Or is there? Because, much of what makes Desert Golfing interesting exists independently of Smith’s intentions. The player’s journey through resignation to resolve is one that takes place in the mind; the desert’s landscape is secondary, a mere backdrop. The story is about perseverance in the face of hostility or futility; Desert Golfing is about the urge that drives any human to endure.