I am not a very good golfer. Wait, let me start over.

I am the worst golfer in the world. That sounds like hyperbole, the kind of thing one might say to make with the funny, but it’s not. It’s an accurate description of factual data as derived from anecdotal evidence, empirical analysis and the signed affidavits of friends and family confirming the theory’s validity. I have scanned YouTube numerous times to find golfers worse than me, and I can assure you that I’m in an entirely different league than these posers to the throne. Golf shots claiming to be impossibly bad elsewhere are routinely superior to even my more athletic attempts on the links. I am the kind of golfer whose very presence drags the sport down as a whole, my awkward flailings at the golf ball probably suggesting to spectators that I had been recently injected with elephant tranquilizers and floor cleaner.

And yet, I can’t wait until this furiously persistent winter, which even today threatens to spit frozen water at us from its interminable clouds, finally capitulates and returns to Canada where it belongs so that I may go out again and get my first five putt of the season. My persistence, a truly inexplicable thing like a leprechaun with a head made of cabbage wearing an I’m With Stupid shirt, is strangely durable in the face of little to no hope. It is such a palpable thing, that I am left wondering how I never could summon its reckless determination in order to finish Ninja Gaiden.

I am a fickle gamer.

I was reminded of this earlier in the week when I rented Rainbow Six Vegas, and had turned the game back off and sent it back from whence it came within fifteen minutes. This was supposed to be a title that everyone and their maladjusted second cousins agreed was an outstanding example of console gaming and by the end of the first alley-filled, terrorist packed level I was far more interested in seeing what the secret ingredient was on Iron Chef America, than loosing more politically extreme nere-do-wells this mortal coil.

And yet, any given evening may find me mindlessly dispatching the redundant and apparently virile livestock of WoW’s Outland for reasons neither clear nor, I suggest, environmentally responsible. What is that mechanism in me that grows bored at the thought of engaging in furious firefights with Central American extremists, but is perfectly happy to hunt Bantha-looking animals to the precipice of extinction until my eyes grow dim and hollow?

In many ways, video gaming is all about persistence. These are investments in our time, and rare is the game that doesn’t demand you invest significant chunks where the action is neither packed nor non-stop, where we fetch a particular brand of flower in exchange for the nebulous resource that RPGs call experience, or where we stalk through empty hallways finding the key to unlock the door to the next level, or even where combat has become repetitive, predictable and easy, and we are just holding on to find out if it’s really the Undersecretary to the Foreign Minister who has been feeding the nuclear codes to the nationalist revolutionaries.

But, the question on the table is not whether gaming demands persistence, but what is the secret sauce, the eleven herbs and spices if you will, that makes it work in some games and not in others? Sure, personal preference plays its part, but I think to drop the matter there is to fall short of appreciating the psychology of video games. There is manipulation at work here, and those that develop games with the understanding of how to motivate players are, I think, the ones who surpass that artificial ceiling of preference, who even surpass the inevitable imperfections of the medium. It is, I suppose the answer to the question I asked a few weeks ago when pondering what the big damn deal was about Bioware, a topic that still dances through my head, they simply understand how to motivate players. It’s not so simple to say that story, or world building, or gameplay or polish can induce gamers to sacrifice time otherwise spent in futile pursuits like social networking or bettering oneself, but that developers must have a keen understanding of principals of manipulation. They must make us believe we are having fun in the moments when we are not, believe at all times that even if we have not been rewarded we will be eventually.

I think that this is the defining failing of bland or bad video games, a lack of understanding what moves players forward. I’m not sure there is any force more powerful in engaging gamers and having them look past the flaws than a clear design philosophy built to manipulate. They must be like overbearing mothers or that girlfriend who got you to spend $450 on a date with nothing but letters from the bank and some lipstick on your cheek to show for it. They must be politicians, convincing you even when you know that they are dealers of deception that behind the next door is an area of such mirth and fun that no game henceforth will be able to satisfy you in the same way. I say this because as a frequent victim to their guiding hands, too often pushing me off the cliff into the rocky shoals, I recognize the difference between those falls into the black where I scream rage into the darkness and those falls in which I think what a nice trip I’m having, oblivious to my certain demise.

I do not slaughter the hefty bovine of Outland because I have some particular beef [sic] with the herd, but because I have been motivated to believe it worth my time. I traverse the long halls of too many enemies in first person shooters not because I have a particular investment in the story or the visuals – those are the transitory things on which we wax ad nauseum later, but rarely notice or appreciate in the moment – but because the developers have sold me on the reward of fighting the next boss, getting the next cool gun or seeing the next world.

Even when I send my tee shot not onto the taunting fairway laid before me but into the lake behind me (actually happened), I secretly believe that my next hole will be the one where I finally turn the corner at least into vaguely respectable competence. Those games that can send me to similar realms of self-delusion are the ones I always enjoy most, and those developers who can consistently deliver that kind of cognitive dissonance are the ones who will continue to succeed.