The Audaciously Simple 'Desert Golfing' Taught Me to Cope With Grief

The first class of my senior year in college was “Intro to Game Design.” It was the first class of my game design minor, and I was emotionally conflicted. On the one hand, I was finally studying something I loved, as opposed to something 17-year-old me decided was practical. But on the other, I was scared to be entering a new field so late in my college career.

Our professor for that first class, designer Charles Pratt, had us break the ice by introducing ourselves and sharing the game we had most recently played. I panicked, wanting desperately to seem cool. Overwatch seemed too cliche, so I said Pet the Pup at the Party, which wasn’t too much of a lie. A few people said Breath of the Wild, someone mentioned The Witcher 3, and another person threw out Mass Effect: Andromeda. When we finally got to Charles, he talked about Desert Golfing, a mobile golfing game he claimed had immensely deep life lessons. I was absolutely baffled, even more so after I looked up the game. How could a two-toned, 2D mobile golfing game have any important answers to life’s big questions?

Sitting in that classroom, I was struggling to answer a lot of those questions. My girlfriend of three and a half years had just cheated on me and we were in the process of breaking up. Graduation was around the corner and I was terrified. Who would I be when I wasn’t a student anymore? Not that being a student brought me much comfort; for the past three years, I had been studying economics rather than what I loved: game design. Now I was finally pursuing my passion and I was frustrated knowing all my classmates were freshmen with their whole college career ahead of them. I felt angry that these kids got to follow their dreams while mine were dying in front of me. And Charles had suggested a mobile fucking golf game?

So, I downloaded it. The levels in Desert Golfing are fairly simple: there’s the ground with all the obstacles, the (usually) empty sky, your number of strokes so far, the hole, and the ball. When you play the game, you aim the ball, decide how much power to give it, and watch it as it soars through the air before repeating the cycle. I felt like there wasn’t a whole lot going on here. I mean, I’d played plenty of mini golf Flash games.

I breezed through the first hundred holes by the second class. (There’s a prompt asking if you want to tweet about reaching hole one hundred, and I did). I ran in and told Charles about my progress, beyond excited to impress him. He said I was missing the point. Stunned for the second time in two days, I plowed on.

I desperately needed to understand what this game might be hiding from me. My classmates began playing too, all of us racing to comprehend the hidden messages buried in the sands of this pixelated desert.

I quickly reached over a thousand levels, which surprised and frightened my classmates, all of whom were significantly further behind. They couldn’t understand how this mobile game had captured me so thoroughly, so I jokingly told them that playing each level felt a little bit like going through the five stages of grief. There’s the denial as you tell yourself the angle of the shot was perfect, anger when you see the ball roll down an incline, bargaining as you try to convince the ball to stay where it is, depression as you see where the ball ends up, and acceptance as you begin the cycle all over again. I found joy in the absurdity of placing such a huge idea on a relatively simple mobile game.

The thing is, I was still missing the point. As obsessed as I was, I had been focusing on the wrong things: average stroke count, what hole I was on relative to my friends, when the next tweet prompt was coming—basically anything I thought would affect other people’s perception of me.

While I was joking about the five stages of grief, I couldn’t see that Desert Golfing was actually showing me how to process my grief. Each level wasn’t some metaphor for an outdated, empirically unsupported model of grief. It was about moving forward, even when progress itself seemed pointless.

When you start the game, the foreground is a deep, tiger orange while the background is more of a marigold, representing the titular desert. After playing hundreds of levels, I noticed a subtle change in the color of the levels. At first it was such a small shift between two shades of orange that I filed it away as a cool little touch.

At some point, the color change floored me. The game wasn’t just transitioning from fire orange to brick red—it was transitioning around the entire color wheel. Levels were essentially the color of plums now. The idea that such a significant change could happen so gradually and imperceptibly hit me like a whirlwind: big, sweeping changes don’t need to happen overnight, you might not even notice them happening. It’s okay for growth to be slow, for progress to be gradual.

The more I looked, the more I realized that the whole game had something to say about how I processed grief and how I could do it in a healthier way. Take the number of strokes at the top of the screen: at first, only average shot count mattered. I needed to be the best (relative to whom, I don’t know). Early in the game, it was easy to focus on the average since the numbers were small enough to handle the math in my head. As I roared into the thousands in both stroke count and level number, it became harder and I began to care less. Subconsciously, my mindset shifted: it didn’t matter how quickly or efficiently I finished the level, what mattered was THAT I finished it. Desert Golfing is entirely about progress, moving left to right. Progress is always the goal.

At the same time, the game doesn’t let you forget how you got there. Only two things are always visible, even during level transitions: your total stroke count and the ball. Where you are and how you got there are both important, but it’s not about judging the journey. It doesn’t matter if a hole took you one stroke or 113 (listen, it was a *really* hard hole), but it’s important to remain aware of how long it took. Achieving a goal doesn’t mean you get to forget the journey there, and while each level is a fresh start in a sense, it also builds off your previous 10,584 strokes. In each level, you learn tricks and strategies that you can apply to future holes, and seeing the shot count is an important reminder of your progress.

Now, the only real mechanical difference between Desert Golfing and traditional 2D golf games is something I like to call the “sticky” mechanic. Essentially the ball “sticks” to surfaces, but it needs a certain amount of continuous contact before it does. It’ll bounce right off inclines if the angle isn’t right, but if the trajectory of the ball matches the angle of the slope, the ball will stop rolling wherever it loses momentum, even if it means it’s suspended halfway up an incline. The game encourages you to think about the best way to tackle the given problem, and emphasizes that it often isn’t the way that seems the fastest. Sometimes when you take huge swings at a problem, you end up back at square one or even lose progress. The more consistently effective approach is to take methodical, purposeful steps forward, all with the intent of helping you reach your goal.

Knowing Charles’ profound experience with the game was what led me to my own, I went online to see if others had similar reactions. The Desert Golfing subreddit is full of posts about people whose journey with the game has come to an end. People staring at the endless ocean at the end of the desert and wondering what to do now. So many of them talk about the sadness or anxiety of looking at the looming unknown, the end of an era of their lives. Plenty of others talk about the excitement of starting over. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll feel when I see it.

I needed Desert Golfing because I needed to learn how to move on: with small, purposeful, incremental steps forward. At ground zero of my struggles, I couldn’t see the horizon, there was no path forward in my eyes, and I constantly beat myself up over how slow I was progressing. I felt stuck, trapped in my own trauma and pain. Desert Golfing showed me the way out of the pit. I don’t know when I’ll go back. But I know if I ever need it again, the desert is waiting for me right there on my phone. Desert Golfing has given me the tools to deal with it when I get there.