COMFORTABLY NUMB

Games understand the human experience of boredom as well as any psychologist

- Alex Wiltshire

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