In an age when the XBox One and PlayStation 4 seem to rule the landscape, places like Seattle's pinball museum is a must-see for many tourists (I kid you not). Lest you think it's just "old folks" who go, a University of Washington law student from Chicago picked it as one of the places to take out-of-town visitors to show them a place he considers, "very Seattle." And, before you think, "well, it is Seattle, you know?" these kinds of places have been popping up all over. Las Vegas had the most well-known pinball museum, but there's another one right up in Baltimore (just a few hours north of this blogger's seat). To get a more complete look at the article about the Seattle museum, visit hhttp://news.yahoo.com/seattle-pinball-museum-part-silver-ball-revival-074101866.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory. To check out the Baltimore pinball museum, well, you can only go online because the museum (the National Pinball Museum, mind you) is seeking a new building, but the site is: http://www.nationalpinballmuseum.org/homepage.html ..
So, why the sudden nostalgia for pinball? I mean, I have an app on my iPad that'll let me play pinball on about a half-dozen "machines" and, if I make some in app purchases, I'll literally double that number. One of the first things I did on my first windows PC was find and play the pinball game. If I can do all that, why do I care if there are real places with real machines? Why? Because of the feeling.
Playing pinball on a computer is kind of like watching Wheel of Fortune. You get the experience, but not the feel. You get to see the puzzle solved, but you never spin the wheel.
Think about it, when you're at the controls of a pinball game, so much is translated to your hands. Each thump of the bumpers being hit courses through the pressed metal of the machine to your fingers. The metallic launch of a ball after it's been "captured" briefly by whatever mechanism the makers of the game built into it to allow the game to have some sort of plotline, truncated or derivative though it may be. The chunk of a new ball being dropped into the straightaway in front of the plunger; that chunk being one of the most universally hopeful sounds to every man, woman, and child who has ever stood at the buttons controlling the paddles of a pinball machine. That "chunk" is the onomatopoeia of hope, in many ways. It says that no matter how badly that last ball was played, this could be the one that earns a free ball, breaks the high score, and earns you a place among the constellations as an immortal among pin-ballets. And if it gutters out before you even flipper it once, the gods of pinball may see fit to offer you a do-over. That never happened to me playing Tetris.
The Who never wrote a song about a kid being a wizard at Atari or ColecoVision or at the controls of a Texas Instruments computer (yeah, they made home computers before focusing mostly on calculators and we had one at the Moss house - yep, we avoided buying a Betamax player, but had a TI-99/4A). Before I travel too far down the road and we cover the Commodore 64 and the advent of the analog-pretending-to-be-digital "blip," allow me to get back to the human appreciation for the analog.
We, as human beings like the convenience of the digital world, but need the contact of the analog (I am somehow made to think of Woody Allen's Sleeper here and the machine the similates...Uhm...you know). Just as we need to hold hands, touch an arm, rub a shoulder; so also does the touch of the flipper control buttons and the impact of the bumpers and all the things described in the paragraphs above combine to provide that contact we so intrinsically need as human beings.
Really, we need both physical and emotional contact. If only our physical needs are met, that can prove as stunting or fatal as only meeting emotional needs. I don't cite moribund studies about the same to back me up (though I found some online). If your think about it, pinball does both. The sounds and pixilated images that are part of the game appeal to our need for affirmation or feedback that transcends the physical, while the physical interaction we have with the game meets our need for contact.
"Chuck, you are really over analyzing this pinball thing. It's just a game. You play it, you're done. That's it. There's no interacting." Oh yeah? Why do Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all have feedback devices for their controllers? Why has the video game platform revolutionized itself by becoming a way to do our outside activities inside? Maybe I do over-analyze, but so do the people who put new games in your hand every day. You want to talk about over-analysis? How about the Call of Duty games where the CGI characters' bootlaces bounce when they run? How many man hours did THAT take?
Look, I'm not suggesting that a return to pinball is needed to allow mankind to recover part of its soul. It is just a game, after all. But, what a metaphor for life, right?
I just realized this whole blog flies in the face of the movie Her. Oh, well. Sometimes Joaquin Phoenix and Spike Lee are just on a different side than I am. How many times has THAT happened, right?
Like a ball that has just caromed off a pinball flipper, the wagon rolls on. Thanks for riding shotgun. Next game's yours, if you want it.
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