The first time you play God Hand, you will either hate it or think it's 'okay'. The second time you play it, you will probably have a similar opinion. Somewhere between the second or third time you experience the game, however, a switch will flip in your brain and you'll need to cope with a disturbing reality: As an opportunity to press buttons and see things occur on a screen, this game is perfect. On every other level, it's an indecent example of everything shameful about video games.

Oh well, you can't win 'em all.

If Tacoma, the new game from Fullbright, had come out ten years ago, it would have engendered three hot takes on the Internet. As someone who lived through the past decade, I can enumerate these possible opinions with perfect accuracy.

1. Tacoma does not feature running, jumping, or shooting people/monsters in the face, and is about two hours long. Therefore, Tacoma is not a video game.
2. Tacoma does not feature running, jumping, or shooting people/monsters in the face, and is about two hours long. Therefore, Tacoma proves conclusively that games can be art.
3. Tacoma does not feature running, jumping, or shooting people/monsters in the face, and is about two hours long. Therefore, Tacoma is not worth its $20 price.

It's 2017, and I have played Tacoma. Here’s what we know:

1. Tacoma is a video game.
2. Tacoma is art.
3. Tacoma is too expensive.

Let's talk about it.

You know what’s fun? Walking. People don’t talk about how joyous simply moving around is, but you’d be a fool to deny it’s one of life’s greatest pleasures. You don’t think about inherent happiness in walking because it’s something that you do every day. As I write this, I am 29 years old. That means I’ve been walking for something like 28 years. That’s 10220 days. It’s practically impossible for something repetitive like walking to remain fresh for that long. Over time, the novelty of movement wears off and walking becomes something that just ‘happens’.

In the early ‘90s, id Software made a game called Wolfenstein 3D. That game cast players as BJ Blaskowitz, a Jewish killing machine stalking through Nazi territory toward a final showdown with Hitler. Because this is a video game, Hitler wears a robot suit and puts up a fight rather than offing himself in a bunker. 

Desert Golfing, a game you can purchase for your iOS or Android device, is perfectly designed for its environment. Right now, no other video game better harnesses the always-on-and-always-aimless nature of pocket computers. It’s a game full of goals, but those objectives originate from the player as much as the game’s creator. If there’s one phrase I associate with smartphones, it’s “killing time”. I don’t know if there were fewer moments of boredom in the past, or if we only started to notice the five minute gaps in our day after everybody stopped smoking cigarettes, but since smartphones came around we’ve all gotten very good at filling in the temporal cracks. I don’t remember killing time as a child. I remember doing a whole lot of nothing, but I never felt like I was actively trying to fritter any moment away. That’s probably because I rarely had anywhere to be, so there was never space between appointments. It’s a lie to say that I did nothing as a kid, what I actually did was construct meaningless games in my head. My door became a dartboard, my dresser became a warzone, my backyard became a golf course. These games lacked time limits, and because they existed in my mind, I could visit them whenever I wanted, for as long as was available. Desert Golfing is like one of the imaginary games I played as a kid, except it puts my backyard inside my pocket.