Epic, Futile, Infinite: The Strange Beauty Of Desert Golfing

A thousand holes into the desert, a small cloud appeared in the sky. It hangs there still, motionless, a pixelated decoration in the Martian-coloured purgatory of angular sand dunes. It was a jolt, a sign of life in a game defined by its emptiness, much like the solitary cactus that appeared a few hundred holes earlier. This is Desert Golfing, a game with a name that serves as a complete description.

The rules are simple: get the ball in the hole. Move to the next one. Repeat. Forever. There is no menu, no reset button, no leader board. The game boots directly into your personal wasteland, your score an ever-accumulating, meaningless number. After a few days and several hundred holes, the futility becomes palpable. There is no end, no glory, only the next hole and the one after that. It is profoundly boring and overpoweringly addictive.

A Simpler Time

The appeal of such a primitive experience will likely be lost on many. Its almost amateurish 2D world might seem appalling to those raised on vast multi-player space operas. But for a certain type of person, there is comfort here. It speaks to those who remember waiting forty minutes for a cassette tape to load a game where you guided an egg past pointy objects. It is a world away from the modern expectation of charging through a spaceship while a teenager from Nebraska screams insults over a microphone.

That simplicity feels like a necessary corrective. As the messy GamerGate movement continues to unfold, revealing the unpleasant side of a billion-dollar industry, Desert Golfing feels like a relic from a different era. It harks back to 1987, when gaming meant swapping cassettes nicked from Woolworths or writing a lottery number picker in BASIC. It was a time when games were written in bedrooms, not boardrooms.

An Antidote to the Industry

Modern football often feels just as bloated and incomprehensible as modern gaming, governed by its own impenetrable assortment of add-ons and game modes. The endless pursuit of commercial growth and the complex structures of ownership can feel just as draining as any high-definition franchise. Desert Golfing offers an escape not just from gaming’s excesses but from a wider culture of constant, competitive noise. There is nothing to share, no one to beat. The game is a quiet, solitary act.

Your score is entirely devoid of meaning. You might calculate your average, notice it is 0.005 better than yesterday or 0.0012 worse, but no one else cares. There is nowhere to post it.

Perhaps that is the point. It could be seen as nostalgia porn for those reaching an age where they start lamenting simpler times, sounding like their parents. Or maybe it is just a stupid little game, so basic it creates the space to contemplate what it all means, when it means nothing whatsoever. It is something to think about while driving the ball deeper into the unexplored wilderness, on and on and on. For the record, my average is 2.581532416502947. Not that you care.