Gamifying the game

When you want to win a game, you have to teach. When you lose a game, you have to learn.

– Tom Landry

My club face swung back to it’s apogee, and just as I brought it down with terrifying force, someone behind me shrieked like an 11-year old girl.

Turns out, it WAS an 11-year old girl.

I’d like to report that the reason my ball trickled off the concrete edge of my driving range spot was due to that shriek, but sadly, it was one of several that had done so, as I hadn’t tried to hit a golf ball in over three decades. There was no terrifying force. I sucked. Not abjectly. Statistically significantly. And yet, I was having a blast. So was the group of eight 11-year olds who were consistently knocking the crap out of the ball behind me. There was literally a video game epically laid out before us, and I took another swig out of my beer, stepped up, and really got ahold of one, and for once in the right trajectory. I looked up expectantly at the video monitor to see just how high my flighted and GPS-savvy shot had scored.

I was fully enjoying my first TopGolf experience.

I was even more amazed by the cash cow they’d built behind it all. If you are one of the few left unaware of how Topgolf works, I’d broadly describe it as if putt-putt, bowling, and Wii Golf had a love child after a tipsy night out. People are eating the concept up at the moment, and the franchise seems to resemble a machine made to print money. Every one of the 50-plus driving stalls was full, and nearly every group was indulging in high-margin drinks, food, and entertainment while they all knocked golf balls at distant targets, having the time of their life. Even though my day job was footing the bill, I got the privilege of paying a few bucks to sign up as a member. I literally gave them five bucks so they could add my email to their marketing database. I paid them. To email me.

It. Was. Evil. Genius.

The passel of 11-year olds next to me were celebrating a birthday, and every last one of the kids was having a blast. There were  six pitchers with soda and beer for the parents, appetizers and even a facility-provided cake. Talking to one of the moms of one of the girls, she said after a few trips to Topgolf, her daughter had now started following her husband to the course most weekends, and was thinking about playing for a team once she got to high school. Looking around at the other stalls, there was a broad demographic, lots of people of every age. Who’s to say that gamifying golf won’t play a huge part in the future of the sport? There was decidedly a fan base you don’t really see frequenting the local batting cages these days.

Baseball could take a lesson or two. Numerous studies have shown the declining attendance in Major League Baseball parks, with levels clear to tee-ball following along. Even scarier for the game, the numbers in the demographics are even worse. While numbers fall across the board, the youth demos are far and away the lowest. While teams like the Savannah Bananas do their best to reignite passion for the sport by shortening games, shifting rules, and adding a ton of fan entertainment to their contests, the sport as a whole seems mired in a paradigm that is bleeding its fan base away. From ever-longer games, broad allegations of cheating, and a postseason format that pits the best two records in the league against each other in the Divisional round instead of the League Championship – the sport has a laundry list of items to fix, and in most cases, no clear-cut plan to address them.

The other major sports also have a spotty record in continuing to make their sports appealing. While the NBA has consistently tweaked their All-Star Game format with some hits and misses, the NFL has mired the Pro Bowl in inattention and disinterest. Conversely, football was way ahead of the curve on crowd-pleasers like cheerleaders and break-time entertainment, while basketball took it’s sweet time discovering how much more attention and revenue they could squeeze out of a fanbase.

That makes sense in cents, as a typical commercial break entertainer makes less than a hundreth of a percent of what their main stage athlete makes. Those are good margins for owners who are out there competing for the dollars of an audience that have shorter attention spans and more modes of entertainment than at any point prior. You can make that slam dunk? You’re on national television. You need an angled trampoline to do it? I don’t care how many flips you can do, show that stuff to the fan I want to keep in their space-optimized seat, and here’s your meal voucher.

Purists in every sport lament the demise of the game they romanticize to yet another change, whether that shift is in rule set, design change, or flash-bang. It’s understandable to be held by that type of emotion. As a kid who was taught by his grandfather to score a baseball game, some of what the Bananas do seems thrilling, and some seems blasphemous. But if you cannot gamify your game enough to keep the attention of a fan base, future generations will only see your favorite game in an Iowa cornfield or a historical database. At least Major League Baseball took a cue from the NHL’s popular outdoor series this season, and got the cornfield part right.