What does pinball, generally speaking, mean to you?

For me, it's man finding his relationship between him (or her) and his machine. Take that as you will.

When I'm questing about town to find some pinball, I know where I can go to find some moments of clarity or find some friendly competition.

To me, these are my fleeting moments of past greatness and moments of pure abject humility.

It's all Zen to me. (Not Zen Pinball,mind you)

It's a way to relax and unwind, and serves much the same purpose as casual video games. I've noticed, though, that I haven't played much non-pinball Live Arcade games since TPA came out, and I only play a handful of regular 360 games, such as Skyrim, UMVC 3, and whatever local (or system link) two player co-op games I can find (a dying breed). I suspect this trend will continue, as the video game industry has degenerated into clones and sequels, with only occasional bright spots (L. A. Noire, the upcoming Bioshock Infinite, and maybe even the Tomb Raider reboot).
I have noticed a Zen-like nature in that I do best when, as Obi-Wan suggested, you "let go your conscious self, and go on instinct". Trying to hard, or concentrating too much on getting a good score, usually leads to failure. Also, like life, your attitude is important. Not letting it get to you when you lose your balls will inevitably lead to higher scores. When I get two fast drains and don't get upset or wanting to start over, I often do really well on that final ball.

It's a battle. Me vs. The Machine.

Reply to Jeff (I can't quote, sorry): Take the sniper approach to a table. It's about man AND machine working to make well placed shots.

It's about making the toys light up and go wooo wooo wooo!

Pinball for me is about that 1 game in 50 (for me anyway) when you achieve pinball nirvana as it were. Everyone who has played for more than a few games knows this feeling...when all of a sudden you can do no wrong, all your shots magically go exactly where you wanted them to, you made that impossible save not once but twice, you finally finished that damned wizard mode (or merely reached it for some tables), etc., etc. It's worth the 49 games that you just suffered through and the next 49 games you'll have to suffer through before you achieve pinball enlightenment again.

Like today...just smashed my high score on ToM by 3.3 billion (5.2B to 8.5B) and finally hit my personal goal of finishing the Grand Finale in a single 12-way combo. And now I'm going to the arcade to play some real pinball and remind myself I'm not Bowen Kerins.

Squid said:

Reply to Jeff (I can't quote, sorry): Take the sniper approach to a table. It's about man AND machine working to make well placed shots.

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That works too

Reply to Mr. Seven: It definitely sounds like you have spent your money well. I am no stranger at the local dive bars, arcades, theaters (...this reminds me.) and bowling alleys.

The best game ever.
...OK, that's kind of pushing it. But it's up there for me.

It's no longer caring about anything else in your life and only about that little world under the glass.

When I was a kid it used to mean spending time with my older brother and at times through my pinball skills being, maybe even for just a moment, equal to him.

Now that I am older and have a daughter it means something else. When we were playing Williams Pinball HoF on the PS3 one day she asked me if real pinball machines made that much noise. I suddenly realized that she had never played a real pinball machine or even had seen one before. The next day we made a trip to a place that had a few Stern machines and played the afternoon away. Then we made plans to go to the Pinball Hall of Fame in Vegas. That wound up being the best family trip we've ever taken. Now she's 18 and about to go off to college. We still hunt out the odd pinball machine in our area and play "real" pinball. I love the look on her face when she first steps up to a machine that she's only seen digitally. And now almost every night we play a little TPA. Ah, but come September...time goes by so fast sometimes!

Its about wrecking that damn game. The realization of a perfect confluence of motion and attention that results in making sounds come out that nobody else has EVER heard, having the good people of the world flee the venue in terror of the demons you are summoning from your hands. Riding it so well for so long that you play the paint right off the field, light up the toys and wind up the sirens so much that the electrics burn the machine to ash before your eyes.

Well, that plus fun.

Serenseven said:

Pinball for me is about that 1 game in 50 (for me anyway) when you achieve pinball nirvana as it were.

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That's the way it is for me too. I approach pinball as a way to unwind, to lose myself But unless I'm in that zone where everything flows right, I find that I get just the opposite: I tense up, which of course leads to more poor shots. When I can just forget about everything else and get into a sort of symbiosis with the machine, then it's really relaxing and envigorating.

To me video game pinball represents what arcade video games were all about before the home consoles arrived. Home console video games have become so much easier than their forefathers were in the arcade. Today most games hold your hand and walk you through them ... hints pop up on the screen, arrows point in the direction you need to go, save points are around every corner. But not in pinball, pinball follows the RETRO PHILOSOPHY ... games that were designed to kill you within 3 minutes but offer you just enough candy that you would keep coming back for more to get just a little further in the game, they have a beginning but no ending, and death lurks around every corner.

It is the fear of death which keeps me coming back for more ... it is refreshing to know that pinball is unforgiving and one screw up, and you are a dead man! This creates an atmosphere of panic during gameplay and forces you to have quick reactions in desperate attempts to save your life ... it is that twitch gameplay, as was in games like Defender, that keeps me coming back for more. Sure there are those that become masters at the game and make it look easy but that requires a lot of practice and even those which are masters must also face death with a single screw up on their behalf.

In addition, your reward is a high score, just as in the early video games, there is no ending to a pinball game and therefore you can never beat it and that provides re playability, which most games today lack ...

Cant claim to have any huge connection to the real thing was too young or just couldnt find what was needed on my own, as retroblast has said

Games got uhhbh balls

Latest tech with a silly amount of pixels what do i do? Play retro games....

Method to the madness? Nahhhhhhhh

Pinball means fighting the odds that are fully turned against you: you will fail, all you can do is improve and make sure you fail a bit less next time.

Not just by improving your skill and reflexes, but also by getting to know the system and ruleset that you are fighting against. Its a battle of wits and skill vs emotion. The machine is evoking an emotional response that you need to suppress. PErhaps that is the "Zen" quality people tout. In the end it's a game about development: you get better at the game/table in very measurable quantities.

I guess why games like Demon Souls/Dark Souls resonate in a similar way to me: beating insurmountable odds.

I find myself going back to simpeler, smaller games these days. Yes I enjoyed Skyrim, yes I'm playing Diablo3 (on inferno-difficulty, hello insurmountable odds again), and I play almost every major release. But almost nothing gets as much time these days as games that provide bitesize chunks like Pinball Arcade or Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalker 2013. The value for money on those kind of titles is almost incomprehensible. Maybe because those smaller games alllow you more room to grow and improve?

As somebody who has been doing zen style sitting meditation for about a year now, I must say: The zen comparison is very fitting. While going for my personal best is a very nice indicator of actual progress (I don't care for comparing my scores with others at all), pinball is most fun to me when I just go from moment to moment, following the ball around, slamming it into the jackpot loop on Whirlwind while juggling the other balls, or listening to the sweet "ratatat" sounds of the spinners on oldschool tables like Black Kight or Gorgar, staring into the blinking light symphony of these tables, soaking in the personality of each machine - the wild taunts of the kings in MM, the very specific, retro-futuristic atmosphere on PinBot, slamming Rudy in the mouth, the noisy mayhem on RBION and Gofers or the bombastic style of ToM and TotAN...

Another thing that is very zen about pinball: In zazen, you don't really try to "think of nothing", you just keep refocussing your attention to your breath, your body, your senses, whatever you chose to meditate on. Your mind drifts off, you daydream about stuff, about what happened to you, what you desire... then you notice you are drifting off, and you readjust your attention back to your breath. It's just pure concentration, pure attention without any intention or goal - the "non-doing", that is incredibly liberating and relaxing while still challenging and stimulating.

Likewise, pinball is the most fun to me when I can really keep my focus on that silver ball. It helps me relax when my only job is to pay attention what's happening on the playfield. Once I start daydreaming I usually drain or brick the ball. I sometimes even start an inner narration, like in the PAPA tutorials. "Now, let's go for the million plus and start multiball!" Then, whoops, I start doing sloppy shots - let's get back to making every shot count!

I usually have my problems with attention spans, and pinball really is like zen to me. It's not about "getting stuff done" in a game, like in those rpg-centric games with loot, leveling and all that - in pinball every second is very enjoyable. I love the immediate feedback of it all, and I've never been so in love with a genre so much before. Even looking at closeup pics of ramps, bumpers or playfield art on ipdb or watching videos on the pinball archive is like chicken soup for my soul

(And really, I don't think this is off-topic at all. I've been actually thinking about making a thread on this exact topic, and this is the first time I even visited off-topic, a part I usually just ignore on forums )

To me, pinball is taking the fundamental physics of the Universe (gravity, speed, trajectory, etc...) and saying "Let's play a game."

ehansen24 said:

To me, pinball is taking the fundamental physics of the Universe (gravity, speed, trajectory, etc...) and saying "Let's play a game."

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Absolutely!

If you go back to the early video games and put them up against pinball machines, there is no comparison.

The classic video arcade games had so much that was simply "memorize this sequence, and repeat it".
Lots of "when this happens, hit this button".
They certainly did require a lot of hand-eye coordination, but it wasn't the same.

Pinball certainly also requires great hand-eye coordination, but it also requires a lot of physics and mathematics.
Physics like ...how long will it take the ball to get from this point on the ramp down to this point on the flipper...
Geometry like ...if the ball hits the slingshot at this angle, which direction will it go...

Like shooting pool... lots of calculations have to be done to get the shots you want.
Unlike pool though, you usually have to be doing it VERY quickly, instead of thinking about it and planning each shot.

This makes me wonder, how many people that are pinball nuts like to shoot pool?

Reply to Mr.mmMagnetic: Too many words about nothing.

You seem to have a grasp on things.

Hmm.