Less Screen, More Green

There's a growing trend in the mini golf industry toward technology. Digital scorecards. Ball tracking. Interactive lighting. Automated scoring. Systems that can tell an operator how long someone spent playing and which holes they struggled with. Puttshack's latest Trackaball technology puts a tiny computer inside every golf ball. Its processor runs at roughly 125 times the clock speed of the guidance computer that helped land Apollo 11 on the moon.

All so nobody has to keep score with a pencil.

Duh, this is an AI generated image

I understand the attraction. Technology can make a game more exciting, more competitive, and certainly more measurable. Some of the new high-tech mini golf venues are impressive places.

But I keep coming back to a question.

What if people don't want mini golf to be more impressive?

What if they just want to goof off with their friends and play mini golf?

I spend a lot of time watching people play. It's one of the unexpected pleasures of owning a mobile mini golf business. I get to see how people behave when you put a golf club in their hands and give them something wonderfully pointless to accomplish. And usually, the golf is the least interesting part.

At a recent event, a group of five guests took more than thirty minutes to complete our nine-hole course. They played a few holes, chatted, sat down for a break or two, chatted some more, and eventually wandered back to finish their round.

The Five, taking a break

Nobody seemed particularly concerned about their score. Or their pace of play. Or even whether they were playing particularly well.  If I snuck up on them and took away their putters, I’m not sure how long it would have taken before they noticed.

When they finally finished, they told me how much fun they'd had. One of the five was the event planner who had hired us, so that was especially nice to hear.

Now, imagine what a sophisticated tracking system might have made of that group.

Thirty minutes to play nine holes? That's a pretty slow pace. Maybe the system would flag a bottleneck. Maybe it would suggest ways to improve throughput.

From an operational standpoint, those five people might look like a problem.

From where I was standing, they looked like a success.

When More Becomes Less

I don't have anything against technology. We've experimented with digital scorecards ourselves, and I can see situations where leaderboards and other enhancements make the experience more fun.

For a competition, absolutely.

For a trade show challenge, maybe.

For a group of friends who really want to know who's winning, sure.

Those are features the players can actually enjoy.

But there's another kind of technology being introduced into mini golf, and it's not really intended for the players at all. Ball tracking, dwell-time measurement, and other analytics can tell an operator how guests move through a course, where they spend the most time, and which holes slow things down.

The players may never see that information, but I understand why an operator would want it. Knowing where bottlenecks occur could help manage crowds, reduce waiting times, and move more people through the course.

Those are legitimate business concerns.

But they aren't necessarily the same as making mini golf more enjoyable.

If we're measuring how quickly people move through the course, we might start treating the folks who linger as a problem to solve.  But what if lingering is exactly what we wanted them to do?

Technology is very good at helping us measure things. How many people participated. How long they stayed. How many shots they took. How many holes they completed.

Those numbers can be useful, especially to someone running a business. But they don't necessarily tell us whether anyone had a good time.

A person who plays nine holes in twelve minutes might be having the time of their life.

A person who takes thirty minutes might be having an even better time.

And a person who picks up a putter, plays two holes, and spends the next twenty minutes talking to someone before wandering off might have gotten exactly what they came for.

I wonder whether our enthusiasm for measuring experiences sometimes tempts us to start optimizing the wrong things.

The Case for Charm

I suspect there's a reason traditional mini golf has survived for so long.

It's a simple game with personality.

The obstacles are silly. The rules are forgiving. The equipment is familiar. And a golf ball that takes an unexpected bounce can make everyone watching smile.

That's a pretty solid entertainment system. And it's a system that, thankfully, hasn't required a software update in a very long time.

We're developing a couple of new games that lean even harder into that idea. They're still in development, so I don't want to reveal too much, but it's safe to say they're going to be silly and fun. And wonderfully low-tech.

There's something appealing about an experience that doesn't need to explain itself. You look at it, you understand what you're supposed to do, and you want to try.

No tutorial. No loading screen. No terms and conditions. Just something amusing sitting there, waiting for you to pick up a club and see what happens.

I'm not suggesting that simple is always better. Some experiences genuinely benefit from sophisticated technology. And I'm certainly not opposed to using technology when it makes things more enjoyable.

But I wonder if we've become so accustomed to adding features that we sometimes forget to ask whether anything was missing in the first place.

The Case for Unoptimized Play

There's a place for high-tech mini golf. I expect those venues will continue to find enthusiastic customers, and some of their innovations will eventually become commonplace.  Some of that technology will probably find its way into mobile mini golf eventually, once it becomes affordable and rugged enough to survive being loaded into and unloaded from a trailer a few times every week.

That's fine.

But I don't think the future of mini golf has to be a race to see who can put the most technology into a golf ball.

There is room for a different approach.  If the high-tech mini golf world is moving toward optimization, I suppose that means we're offering non-optimized mini golf.  I like the sound of that, although I’m not ready to change the name of the company to Hill Country Non-Optimized Mini Golf. 

Nonetheless, non-optimized mini golf means real putters, real golf balls, a few amusing obstacles, and taking as much time as you want to play. And when you've had enough, you can put down the putter and walk away. No need to log out.

I keep thinking about those five players who took their sweet time on our course.

Would they have enjoyed their evening more with digital scorecards, ball tracking, and a live leaderboard?

Maybe.

But instead they played a few holes, sat down, talked, laughed, and eventually wandered back to finish their round.

I've said it before: sometimes mini golf is something you do to have fun, and sometimes it's something you do while you're having fun.

A computer could have told me how long they played.

But what mattered was how much fun they had.

I'd like to see a smart golf ball measure that.