COMFORTABLY NUMB

Here, against an endless horizon of orange sand, progress is practically eternal. You can drive for hours, chugging at a constant 45mph towards a notional Las Vegas with almost no change in the scenery. Or you can drive for hours, hitting the ball into hole after hole across forever-undulating topography. Desert Bus and Desert Golfing are boring games. They’re designed to be numbingly repetitive; they do not reward us with showers of praise or nuggets of story, nor do you find new places to go and new things to do. And yet we play them. We even celebrate them, basing charity events around Desert Bus For Hope – and Desert Golfing got a sequel.

For a medium that’s meant to be about excitement, games can coast awfully close to boredom at times. While Desert Bus and Desert Golfing intentionally play with the notion of being as boring as possible, there are also slow games which trade on the passing of time, like Animal Crossing, games which eke out rewards day by day. Then there are games about grinding repetitive actions for XP and low-drop-rate items. There are games about watching numbers go up; games about waiting for cooldowns to finish.

These ideas aren’t just common, they’ve become an integral part of modern game design, which routinely promises hundreds of hours of playtime stretched out across months or years. There’s Destiny 2’s sprawling drip-fed economy, which asks you to kill hundreds of gribblies a day in order to earn incremental opportunities to buy a chance to win a good gun or piece of armour. There are the mobile game grindfests, from Puzzle & Dragons on down, which wring aeons of time from match- three puzzle mechanics. There’s Clash Of Clans, which strings every action out across hours and days to prolong the experience while encouraging you to buy boosts.

All this is to say that game developers know a lot about boredom: how to skate across its ocean, generating the greatest engagement from the least content that it’s economically viable for a studio to produce. They also know how to use boredom as a medium in itself; how to pace the spaces between excitement and how it can be the