Unless, presumably, you are extremely good at it, real golf is boring, unpredictable and dispiriting. I know because my dad loves it, and for my entire life he has come home on a Saturday afternoon after five pitiless hours on Scottish golf courses in a raging mood that morphed slowly into despair by Sunday morning. Oh, and the courses have interesting novelties like floating islands or moving platforms or piranha plants that gobble up your ball. If you get into trouble in a bunker, you can usually get out of it without entirely ruining your round. You can make your calculations, know your drive distance, check the wind direction, add spin with a deft touch of an analogue stick, and send the ball rolling beautifully on to the green or into the hole. What I love about golf games is their calming predictability. I even became briefly obsessed with a Korean online golf game called PangYa in the early days of broadband internet, largely because my caddie was a paper bag with a cat face drawn on it. It began with Mario Golf on the Nintendo 64 and continued through to Everybody’s Golf on various PlayStation consoles, via the fab little role-playing Mario golf games on the Game Boy (low-key some of the best sports games in history, if you ask me, because they let you write your own wee rags-to-riches story).
I have an abiding love of golf that is confined exclusively to video games, for instance. (Check out Dorfromantik if you liked those old city-planning games, by the way – it’s a similar principle but much more chill, getting you to create and expand idyllic rural landscapes.) This feels weird to admit in regular society, but I’ve built up a significant knowledge base of some sports and interests without ever having done them in the real world. I would rather defenestrate myself than be an urban planner, and yet SimCity is ridiculously compelling. Actual farming is arduous and complex and involves horribly early mornings Stardew Valley or Minecraft farming is soothing and simple and can be done in bed at 1am when you can’t sleep. Most of the time the things we happily do in video games would be unbelievably boring in real life. It’s rare that video game and real-world interests conflict.
What might have happened if I’d spent all those hours learning my real instrument? Obviously Guitar Hero is the sole reason I’m not currently embarking on my seventh stadium tour. I became superhumanly good at it, and meanwhile I remain an average player of the real guitar to this day. In my late teens I was a decent player of the actual guitar, but Guitar Hero was so much more fun that I ended up ditching my actual instrument and playing that instead. Despite the hundreds of happy hours I spent playing Guitar Hero in the late 00s, I feel slightly resentful towards it.
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