

How Pinball Ate itself: The Economics of Pinball - wakeless
http://cheeptalk.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/the-economics-of-pinball/

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dasil003
_There currently exists one botique manufacturer of pinball machines but its
fair to say that innovation stopped in 1992._

I don't think that's fair to say at all. Williams tried to save the Pinball
industry by inventing the Pinball 2000 platform which had reflected video over
the playfield. It was definitely as big an innovative step as anything that
cam before since the invention of the flipper.

Also, I might be biased having been 14 at the time, but I wouldn't call The
Addams Family the end of innovation. I would call it the beginning of
maturity. The machines Williams released in the 90s and the Stern machines of
today reflect the perfection in pinball playability. The precise shooting
lanes and the deep rulesets gave rise to 15 years of amazing machines that are
just as much fun for beginners as they are for experts.

It's a real shame the pinball machines are so expensive to maintain and thus
so rare to find in good operating condition. When I see my first real
liquidity event I plan on purchasing some of my favorites (The Twilight Zone,
The Addams Family, Attack From Mars, Indiana Jones, Simpsons Pinball Party,
Lord of the Rings, Star Trek: TNG, Arabian Nights, Medieval Madness, etc)

~~~
willwagner
I have an old pinball machine that I purchased a few years ago (Maverick,
1994) and it's definitely a labor of love to keep the thing working properly.

That being said, there is something really hacker-like about pinball. I am
truly amazed at times the ingenuity that goes into designing and building a
pinball machine and all its mechanical parts.

I have this in my netflix queue, which supposedly describes the history of the
Pinball 2000:

<http://www.tilt-movie.com/index.php>

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ryanelkins
I wonder why they weren't able to implement increasing levels of difficulty.
They could have mechanically changed the playing field at certain thresholds,
or even looked into using different sorts of balls (heavier, smaller, BOTH AT
THE SAME TIME!!!). How about balls with uneven weight distribution? Most of
this stuff I envision being unleashed as you advance, so it's similar to other
video games where it gets progressively more difficult.

It just seems like they could have done something other than just make a
static game that was harder than the last version.

~~~
roundsquare
_mechanically changed the playing field at certain thresholds_

More moving parts means harder to maintain means costs more money to maintain.
However, I guess this can be done by... for example, having parts of the board
that open up as you get to higher scores. Still, there's only so much you can
pack into the space a pinball machine has.

 _using different sorts of balls_

Spectacular!

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snorkel
It's not free play algorithms that doomed pinball so much as the fact that
video game arcades were doomed by improved home gaming systems, and pinball
machines are expensive to design, manufacture, and maintain, and pinball
operators charge up to $1 per play.

~~~
roundsquare
Actually, as I read the article, I didn't get the impression that he meant:

free play algorithms --> demise

In fact, he seemed to mean:

transferable skills --> disparity in skills --> demise

And free play algorithms were actually what kept the industry going for
slightly longer.

~~~
iron_ball
The same thing happened with fighting games (such as Street Fighter). This
type of game is extremely deep and technical, with highly refined skills which
can be transferred over successive generations of a series. There are people
who have been honing their Street Fighter skills for 15 years now; that makes
it difficult for new players to participate on a casual basis.

As a result, the genre is pretty much a niche these days, despite the
unexpected popularity of Street Fighter 4.

~~~
roundsquare
Interesting, makes sense.

However, I would think this applies mainly to arcades, which I believe are
dying in the US anyway (though I've heard they still flourish elsewhere).
Console games allow one to play against the computer or against friends. At
least against the computer a beginner can play and have fun.

I wonder how this will evolve change as console's take advantage of the
internet. A test case could be Starcraft. Anyone have any idea of how hard it
is to break into Starcraft now for someone just starting?

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lmkg
The balancing act between new and hardcore players is something that video
game publishers have to deal with as well. They have an easier time of it, but
it's by no means trivial. While video games are flexible with respect to skill
required, as the article mentions, pinball is a more transferable skill than
video games, which means that the balance has to be found on a game-by-game
basis rather than across the industry. I've seen quite a few gamer communities
that demand their games be more challenging and intricate. This article
demonstrates the danger that pandering to that audience exclusively brings a
danger of stagnation. It's difficult to provide a good challenge that doesn't
have a noob-unfriendly learning curve.

There's lessons in here for any other sort of community. Barriers to entry and
a community that only cares for its own needs lead to stagnation. This is
especially relevant to communities based around technology, such as software
applications or programming languages.

~~~
wakeless
Video game publishers also chicken out and add a difficulty level selector at
the beginning of the game, rather than dynamically adjusting the level.

~~~
jerf
Dynamic difficulty is a terrible idea. It reduces the potential difficulty-
space of the game to two basic cases: Always too easy and always too hard. It
means that if you lost, it's because the game chose to make you lose, not
because of an effect on your choices, and if you win, it's because the game
chose to let you win, not because of your skill.

Every couple of years I'll play a game with this new, innovative idea, and
it's still the same story. It's sort of fun for a bit, until your brain
catches up and realizes that as meaningless as most games are, this one is
even more so. It's not a new idea and if it were going to work, it would have
been made to work by now:
[http://www.intellivisiongames.com/bluesky/games/credits/spac...](http://www.intellivisiongames.com/bluesky/games/credits/space.html#astrosmash)

(No, there is no in-between "just right". Simple control theory shows how you
can't hover at the "just right" point; as you are at "just right", the system
must dynamically adjust the difficulty above your level (or you even just hit
a bad patch) and cause you to fail, at which point you're back at too easy.
There's nowhere near enough data to get to "just right" even in theory.)

~~~
ubernostrum
I haven't personally played it, but people I respect have been saying that the
Left 4 Dead series is actually doing a good job of this.

(also, as a general rule I have an extreme distrust of "nobody I know of has
managed this yet, therefore no-one anywhere ever will")

~~~
jerf
And I have a pretty extreme distrust of "Yeah, I know thousands of smart
people have tried and failed, but I'm still sure it's a great idea!" See also:
General purpose visual programming, 3D desktop or chat interfaces (and I mean
_true_ 3D, not "using 3D hardware for nice effects), "I'll just wrap a natural
language interface around this and it'll be easy to use!".

Certainly both of our rules fire off, but for every time your rule hits, mine
hits several thousand times.

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chris100
The one thing that fascinates me about pinball is that unlike an arcade game,
a PC can't properly simulate it. It has a physics/reality component to it that
a computer can't touch.

Just like playing tennis or golf on your wii isn't quite the real thing. Why
is it that for arcade games (think Doom for instance), the disconnect with
reality is not as noticeable?

~~~
JacobAldridge
Maybe because I don't have specific experience of running through dungeons
destroying invisible monsters with my bfg? (Yet.)

You raise an interesting point. At a guess, I imagine if you asked a big game
hunter or combat soldier with experience tracking a target and firing weapons
with the intent to kill, they would probably notice the disconnect. I wonder
if Guitar Hero has limited fans among those who can actually play the guitar,
for this reason as well?

~~~
hnal943
I play guitar and Guitar Hero; I enjoy them both. It isn't the same thing of
course, but on the harder difficulties it does involve some of the same
fretting motions. I guess I don't understand why real guitarists are such
snobs about games like this. No one would argue that they are equivalent....

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rnicholson
This article reminded me of this documentary - <http://www.tilt-movie.com/>

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lurkinggrue
Cool, he knows Eugene Jarvis!

I wondered what happened to him.

~~~
joezydeco
Eugene Jarvis left Midway about eight years ago and started Raw Thrills
(<http://www.rawthrills.com>).

Eugene wasn't the host mentioned in the story, since he didn't work on design
for Black Knight or High Speed (he does have a sound credit on HS, though).
You're thinking of the other Vid Kid, Larry DeMar.

~~~
agent86
And I think the article takes a bit of a wide berth with the term "designer".
Steve Ritchie actually designed those machines, Larry DeMar did the software
for them.

As other posters have pointed out, innovation really did not stop in 1992.
Pinball 2000 was actually a success, but Williams decided to pull the plug
despite that. The Pinball 2000 platform was quite revolutionary - from how the
player played the game, to how the game was designed, maintained, and even
upgraded.

I don't think free play really had anything but an ancillary role in the
decline of the hobby. It was likely the rise of video games, and specifically
home consoles, that really hurt pinball. People played video games at home,
and then played newer/better games in the arcade. Due to the cost a pinball
machine in the home is a rarity to this day, and so the exposure it received
was never the same. Kids learned Mario and Nintendo, they didn't learn the
silver ball and flippers.

Along the lines of the article, the most "interesting" idea I heard in pinball
circles was that clear coating playfields was a harbinger of doom. Williams
started doing this and called it "Diamond Plate". It was designed to reduce
the need for mylar to protect the playfield.

The premise is that the idea worked TOO well. Playfields on the machines could
look like new forever. A machine's lifetime was extended, the impetus to
replace the machine was lowered, and sales suffered.

~~~
koz1000
As someone that worked with Mr. DeMar at Williams, I can honestly say that he
was a "designer" in every sense of the word. He was an essential part of every
design team, and a lot of times took a boring playfield and turned it into a
highly entertaining game. It's really not fair to diminish the role of a
programmer in these games.

You see, High Speed represented an inflection point in pinball history where
the software became the star of the game, not the playfield geometry. The game
told a _story_ instead of just being a noisy point accumulator like previous
solid-state games. All that choreography with lights, music, display
animation, etc was a huge part of High Speed's success.

The rest of the points you make are very accurate. The article gives a very
interesting history of auto-replay percentaging and match tricks, but that had
very little to do with the demise of pinball in the last decade.

