Golf on Mars for the Android
Previous days' entries can be read HERE.
Previous days' entries can be read HERE.
Gaming the Pandemic is coming to its end soon. Next Monday I’m going back to work and the blog, and the games, will have served their purpose: I’ve made it through furlough without killing anyone, or going stir crazy, or becoming the star of my own personal Roman Polanski style metaphysical nightmare.
I’ve played about 150 games so far, but part of me is wondering if I just could have just played Golf on Mars everyday and achieved the same result.
My mate Dave text me late last night, what his message actually said was a bit of a mess, so I think Dave may have been tired, or, drunk, or both, but I’ll save him the embarrassment of quoting verbatim and just say it was supposed to read: “You should check out ‘Desert Golfing’ or ‘Golf on Mars’ for your blog. I’ve noticed you’ve not given any love to mobile games”
And he’s right. I haven’t. But this is because I don’t keep track of my mobile games - or even consider them a part of my collection. I’ve wrestled (moderately) with this idea on several occasions, and I still can’t find a way to be comfortable with it - and I don’t know why.
People who collect games just for their value, or just to have ‘a thing’, don’t consider any digital games part of their collection. To them, games are not a thing that’s played, they are things that are owned. There’s a word for people like this… wait… I did that bit yesterday.
I do consider digital games part of my collection. To do otherwise is to say that all of the thousands of incredible games that have never seen a physical release have no worth, no value. To do this would be to say that Crazy Cars, a terrible game I own on cassette for the C64 is of more importance to my collection than the phenomenal Ape Out, which I own twice, both digitally, for my PC and my Switch.
But when it comes to games on my phone I just can’t make that jump. It really doesn’t make any sense. Take yesterday's game, for example, I have ‘Lichtspeer’ listed in my collection and I played it, and enjoyed it, very much. However, if I owned, and had played, the exact same game on my phone I wouldn’t put it in my collection spreadsheet… It’s my own decision and I still can’t make any sense of it.
It’s the case with Golf on Mars, too (got there eventually), I played it on my phone so it’s not technically in my collection, or, for these purposes, my backlog. And yet I, if I chose to spend my £2.09 on Steam, rather than the Google Play Store, it would have been on both.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’m thinking about this again after playing Golf on Mars for over an hour.
The term ‘Zen’ has been twisted, misrepresented, and variously appropriated by various elements of Western culture for decades. In gaming it is usually thrown into the description of puzzle games that have little or know urgency, those that can be played at one's own pace. ‘Golf of Mars’, though, for me at least, was Zen in the true sense of the word.
As I slid my finger across the screen, knocking the tiny ball from one end of each two-colour screen to the next, watching the hole from pin 9 rise up and become the tee for pin 10, and that, in its turn, for 11, and so on, ad-almost-infinitum I became very self aware, and began to question my reaction to the various events, and non-events of the game.
The reward for scoring a hole in one while playing Golf on Mars is the same as if you score a hole-in-twenty-one: You get to play the next hole. Score five holes-in-one back to back? Play the next hole. The game steadfastly refuses to care about your expectations. You want to finish a round at hole 18? Nope. Hole 18 is the same, essentially, as hole 118, or 118000, probably.
Somewhere in the early forties a grey monolith appeared in front of my next hole. Why that hole? What was the point of it? Why did I not see one again for another 20 or so holes?
Then, at hole 105, I fell off the bottom of the screen. A dozen or so holes later water appeared for the first time. But by this point I’d stopped asking why the game was doing certain things at certain times and was instead asking myself why I expected the things I expected.
Why did I expect something special for hole 100? Why did I think falling off the bottom of the screen would do something other than give me a swanny whistle sound effect and put me back where I started? So, at hole 118, when water appeared for the first time, I deliberately, gleefully, played straight into it.
This kind of breaking down of conventions and expectations has been tried before in far more complex games than this, but here I was, playing a game with one finger, the file size of which could be saved to the memory of a digital thermostat, that was having me think about compulsion, expectation, and reward in video games more than any I’ve played in recent memory.
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