Desert Bus (1995) is absurdly boring.
No review of Desert Bus is complete without that sentiment, so I thought I’d just knock it out right away. Indeed, Desert Bus’s superlative boringness was very deliberately constructed.
Desert Bus is a glorified minigame, part of the ill-fated 1995 game Penn and Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors which would have been released for the Sega CD had it not been a god-awful mess whose developer ran out of money halfway through. Desert Bus asks you to drive its titular bus from Tucson to Las Vegas, for eight hours, on an empty featureless straight road across its titular desert. Your steering wheel is broken, so your bus is constantly veering to the right. If you make it all the way, you earn one point. If you don’t, the bus gets towed back to Tucson in real time.
I played Desert Bus through the only surviving copy I could find on the Internet — an Android app. You’d tilt to steer the bus, while holding a finger on the screen to keep the gas on. That meant I was constantly tilting my phone for eight hours. I definitely have carpal tunnel right now. That also meant that playing Desert Bus — constantly rocking your phone back and forth to keep it within the bounds of progress — felt like one of those here’s-what-it’s-like-to-raise-a-baby exercises they make kids do to teach them a sense of responsibility. Desert Bus demands your constant attention, and that’s the real point of the game.
What does it feel like to have your attention constantly demanded? Sometimes, it feels like playing a particularly enthralling game. Most of the time, it just feels like having a Facebook account or an email address. In either case, though, your brain is being actively told it’s doing something meaningful or productive. Even if that sentiment is illusory, it still holds your attention. DesertBus’s boringness, then, comes from demanding your attention and doing nothing with it. It leaves you alone with yourself. And since you’re running it on your phone, you don’t even get to check your email as a diversion.
Desert Bus was a game we thought would really appeal to people who didn’t like unrealistic games, and didn’t like violence in their games. It was just like real, loving life.
— Penn Jilette, 2006
Desert Bus was a satirical creation, because of course it was. It was the crown jewel of Smoke and Mirrors, which itself was a smorgasbord of one-joke games that bordered on pranks. Its creators, magicians and wannabe public intellectuals Penn and Teller, were pissed at then-Attorney General Janet Reno for suggesting that video games cause violent and aggressive behavior by presenting fantastical and unrealistic scenarios. A self-described ‘realistic verisimilitude reality game,’ Desert Bus was an experiment in video game realism meant to rebut that sentiment: the very unrealism, fantasy and escapist elements of video games is what makes them entertaining.
I feel like given this post’s title, I have to specify that I was not on LSD while playing Desert Bus. But I was definitely detached from my normal reality. I couldn’t figure out how to stream it, so I was alone, disconnected from my usual means of constantly interacting with the world. nn the end, I didn’t earn my one point, but I played for several hours. I put on music, I thought about life and the future, I counted bottles of beer on the wall. I alternately enjoyed and bemoaned my own company. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing or why, but I was pretty sure it felt different than everything else I’ve done recently.
Throughout its history, Desert Bus has always been a tool for something or other. In ‘95, it was an instrument of protest against the moral panic surrounding video games. In the mid-2000s, it was co-opted by Desert Bus for Hope into a charity yearly Desert Bus stream focused around the communal mitigation of the game’s enforced boredom. Now that gamification has squirmed its way into goddamn everything, it feels like a tool for deliberate, temporary withdrawal from everything. Namely, escapism! Desert Bus was meant to show that real life is boring, and that video games are constructive escapism from said boredom. But as life has become increasingly gamified, Desert Bus has become increasingly escapist, and the satire has become the satirized.
I find it interesting to consider that some of the main minds behind this game were Penn and Teller, who are stage magicians and celebrities. Desert Bus feels very far removed from anything related to the stage or to magic tricks — its mechanics are undeniably straightforward and staid. The absence of the fantastical in Desert Bus is part of what makes it remarkable, and can inspire some meditation in the player if they take it as an introspective experience. In contrast, stage magic often uses objects from ordinary life (such as cards or ropes), and presents them in a way that inspires immediate awe in the viewer. The enforced boredom of Desert Bus seems antithetical to this thrill of magic, as does not attempt to subvert the experience of the ordinary. How might this enforcement of the ordinary in games cause players to want to keep playing if dramatic thrills are absent?