The year in walking
I'm going to level with you: nobody knows who said 'golf is a good walk spoiled' so I'm going to ask that we all agree that Mark Twain probably said it. When Mark Twain probably said this, he made an astute distinction between experiential, ruminative, self-directed activity and rules-driven, scored, structured activity. Probably.
Or, to put it another way: most video games have a little bit of 'walk' in them and a tremendous amount of 'golf'. We tend to think and talk mostly about the golfness of a game: how much something costs and how much it offers, how fair it is and how it is won. This is important because there are a lot of video games and they would all like you to buy them, and the strengths and weaknesses of the structured experiences they provide are more or less the only thing you've got to go on when making a choice.
It's funny, though - the older I get, the less of a golfer I become. Short on time, I've become someone who tends to walk around for a bit in a game and then put it down. There are benefits to this: value propositions shift and frustration fades. I've become more conscious of the craft, rather than the business, of game creation, and more relaxed in my approach to games. I've enjoyed approaching games as places to wander, rather than as courses to complete.
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