A New York Times
article (free registration required) about professional mini-golf players. The journalist wonders about why pro golfers are worshiped like semi-gods, while pro mini golfers are not even mini-worshiped at all. I always loved mini-golf because of its microworld qualities. It is certainly much closer to videogames than traditional golf (think miniature garden meets lovely little traps.)rWhen my sister was born I was 5 years old and I spent the day with my father’s cousin while my mom at the hospital. That particular day I was treated like a king and I was taken to the amusement park. There was a little car circuit (very simple, I think it was shaped like an O) and I remember requesting Emerson Fittipaldi’s car (a very popular Brazilian F1 racer during the 70s). I was given a yellow car and the guy assured me that it was an exact replica of Fittipaldi’s car (I bet that those days he said the exact same thing to every single kid racing on his game.) The fact is that there were these little house (about 1 meter tall) in the center of the track. I was fascinated by its windows and I think I spent most of the time trying to get a peek inside them. I was more interested in the little houses than on my car but, sadly, my ride was on a rail and the center of the track was off-limits to everybody. I am telling this because many years later, when I played mini gold, I remembered that car ride. There was a miniature house in the mini golf and that was probably what triggered my early memories. It was quite ugly and not very detailed –the ones on the racing track were far prettier and much more detailed. I still could not enter the miniature house, not even take a look inside it, but it was far more accessible that the one on the racing track because I was able to send my golf ball inside it and that made all the difference.
rrI guess we always expect videogames to fulfill our fantasies of total freedom, but games always fail at this because total freedom does not make any sense at all. Games are limited, by definition (if you have total freedom you cannot be playing a game). Bad videogames are like the racing track houses: they have highly detailed featured, but they are only skin deep and that only enhances the player’s frustration. Mini golf is well aware of its limitations: it models the experience in a simpler way. It still does not allow players to visit the miniature house, but at least turns the house into something meaningful than can be explored through the golf ball. Certainly, I did not have any vision of little people living inside it as I did when I was 5 years old, but mini golf’s familiar buildings (the house, the windmill) still do a great job at transporting players into an alternate mini world. There is certainly not much need for next-gen graphics processors to enhance gameplay, it suffices not trying to exceed players expectations. No matter how hard we try, we will never able to simulate realistically life inside our miniature make-believe houses. Besides, there is no real need to do it: the only thing that needs to be mimicked is not life itself but the illusion that life may exist inside those tiny houses. The old principle of suggesting rather than showing is still valid in the computer world. Videogames are not about what you can do, but about the players' illusion of what could be done. It's a subtle, but essential difference that both game developers and players have been trying to explore in the last decades. There is still a long road ahead but never think that games will get better when we code better AI into them: they will only improve as we discover better ways to get deeper into the player's imagination.