You may be aware of Penn & Teller’s unreleased Desert Bus game, wherein you have to drive a bus the complete 8-hour realtime trip between Tucson and Las Vegas.
Since the bus veers to the right, and since there is no pause or save function, this may be the most boring game in the world.
And yet … isn’t there something fascinating about it? Some kind of pure gameness?
Desert Bus for Hope is a charity event in which participants play Desert Bus non-stop, while onlookers can give donations to keep the bus going. At the time of writing, the game has been played for 4 days and 15 hours, with $56.000 collected – the money goes to the Child’s Play charity.
Had I been American, I would have described this as “awesome”.
Wait – pure gameness? Can you elaborate on that? In which sense do you mean this?
Ah, you called me on it. OK: what I mean is that this is a minimal game that involves no learning, only patience. In that sense it is a bit like John Cage’s 4:33 – pure duration.
What if I write a backstory for Jocko and give him/her a personality? Let’s say they had a minor stroke and their left arm is weaker than the right, which explains why the bus veers. Would that alter the fundamental nature of the game by turning it into the sad story of a man with nobody to care for him, or would it just make me a huge nerd?
Was just wondering. So it’s “pure” in the sense that it’s a “pure” “poetics of action” then. It’s just doing something, all the time, without any artifices. I agree that it’s got a “pure” quality, though I’m not sure I’d settle on “game”, but it’s certainly fascinating, at any rate. Would this be better envisioned as a game of no-progression (the point total notwithstanding), or a game of non-emergence (the fly that crashes against the windshield notwithstanding)?
Jason, I would actually expect people to start thinking about things like this if they did play Bus Driver long enough to score a point or two. But then you’d already be a huge nerd by that fact alone, so we’ll never know whether filling in a backstory would have the same effect.
This kind of game is only interesting if part of some other goal (such as raising money for charity). Rather like Andy Kaufman reading the entire text of “The Great Gatsby” at live shows. It’s funny, as long as you weren’t there.
…or perhaps it could be a single level in a game based on advancing through the ranks of Tibetan buddhism – in which case it should come with a ‘wake up stick’ which your partner can hit you with when you start dozing.
(BTW, I tried to buy a ‘wake up stick’ online. Nobody is sellin’ ’em. Why? Why?)
Brennan, I must admit that I am attracted to the idea of actually playing the game. Wouldn’t it be great? Seriously.
Thinking about it, perhaps my attraction to the game comes from the idea of being able to tell people that I completed a level in Desert Bus, so that would support your argument. On the other hand, games always oscillate between the goal and the path.