Working in Movement

Spring has sprung (or at least it's springing some days). That means golf season; time to dust off the Pings, put on your Footjoys and head for the course. After all, you play golf on a golf course. But you can also play a simulated version of golf on a computer. You don't need warm weather for that.

The golf video games are fun, but can they help with your real game? Mouse or game controller are not the same as actually swinging the club. And pretty green pictures on a high res monitor don't offer fresh air and the feel of clipped grass underfoot. Undoubtedly your hand eye coordination gets a good workout, but is there more to it?

You bet, according to The Swingers Club in the April 2004 edition of Wired. Getting good at the simulated version can help with the real thing. And if discretionary income is burning a hole in your pocket, a pricey full sized simulator lets you use real clubs and golf balls to almost duplicate an actual round.

Computer golf games haven't always been so helpful. They were fun but the behavior of the simulated golf ball bore little resemblance to what real golf balls do when struck. Designers caught on to this shortcoming and learned how to simulate actual ball flight, including how the ball spins as the clubhead strikes it. As any hapless slicer will tell you, that makes all the difference in the world.

So the value of console-based games lies dispensing knowledge of how the ball behaves on the actual course. This can be quite valuable. For example, author Stephen Johnson tells the story of making an eagle (two under par on a hole) on a particularly difficult hole at Pebble Beach. Though he was playing the actual course for only the second time, he had played it hundreds of times on the Links computer game. The knowledge he gained from Links let him select the right club and ball flight to make the green from a blind lie.

This sort of knowledge might also be useful in learning golf. Johnson tells the story of a guy with Multiple Sclerosis who took up the game late in life. This guy was world class when it came to playing Links on a console, but didn't have experience with the real thing. In his first year on a real course, he used his knowledge to improve his score from 123 to 85.

While you can learn about ball behavior and the like, console based games won't help you with your swing. Mouse or controller don't feel anything like a four iron. But if you yearn for a simulated game that lets you use real clubs and balls (and you have an extra $50,000), Full Swing Golf of San Diego, California might be the thing you're looking for. In this game, you hit real balls with real clubs into a video screen displaying images from Links. Loads of sensors read how you've struck the ball and how the ball has struck the screen. The game uses the data to simulate the flight the ball would have taken on the course.

I've written about video games previously. They can provide pretty useful learning environments, and they are certainly useful in developing meta skills like hand eye coordination. What surprises me about the Wired article is even if they don't include the realistic motion, these sorts of games can take some of the mystery out of the environment in which the real thing is done.