My son sent me this paper and asked that I read it as it applies to golf.
"Wow..." is all I can say. Some very interesting insight into the nature of games of all types. A few sections really stood out to me. I'm curious what others think....
https://philarchive.org/archive/NGUGAA
Seems no one else enjoyed the (admittedly quite dry) paper.
I'll go first:
But we can design games for the sake of this harmony of practical fit. In our games, the obstacles are designed to be solved by the human mind and the human body— unlike, say, the tasks of curing cancer or grading. John Dewey suggested that many of the arts are crystallizations of ordinary human experience (Dewey 2005). Fiction is the crystallization of telling people about what happened, visual arts are the crystallization of looking around and seeing, music is the crystallization of listening. Games, I claim, are the crystallization of practicality. Aesthetic experience of action are natural and occur outside of games all the time. [/size]Fixing a broken car engine, figuring out a math proof, managing a corporation, even getting into a bar fight — each can have its own particular interest and beauty. These include the satisfaction of finding the elegant solution to an administrative problem, of dodging perfectly around an unexpected obstacle. These experiences are wonderful — but in the wild, they are far too rare. Games can concentrate those experiences. When we design games, we can sculpt the shape of the activity to make beautiful action more likely.[/color]
[/size] And games can intensify and refine those aesthetic qualities, just as a painting can intensify and refine the aesthetic qualities we find in the natural sights and sounds of the world."[/color][/i]
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[/size]From my son: "I think about that last bit a lot, as to why I like golf. Each shot is a little particular challenge you can solve. There aren't many of those discreet, solvable problems in everyday life..."[/color]
I've often thought about why I love golf so much, and the above is, for me, exactly it.