Thinking about pinball

Ever since Sarah bought me a Wii for my birthday, I've been playing a lot of pinball. Williams Hall of Fame pinball simulator, to be precise - but it's a pretty spectacularly good simulator. Everything feels right - the weight of the ball, the flipper response, that bleeding edge between chaos and control that real pinball gives you. You can even push the table around with the magical Wii-mote.

It's kind of interesting, actually. What I've been discovering is that both pinball and painting are sort of... zen no-mind biofeedback devices. For both, you do absolutely the best with a clear, unselfconscious mind, totally devoted to the object act hand. The moment some shred of self-criticism or worry or self-judgment creeps in, skill suffers. Balls drop. Paint strokes go stiff. Life goes away. You lose your multiballs. But it's a marker, a way of making subtle inner states outwardly explicit. It helps you track your no-mind zen state - it helps you notice when it goes off. And I find, as I paint more, and play pinball more, that I'm getting better at slipping into no-mind.

Why is it so compelling, though? I think it's partly because pinball is part of this class of games - very low amounts of input, or very constrained types of input, into vastly complex systems. Golf, poker, Knizia's Ra - all are like this. And there's this weird narrative energy to pinball, too. Unlike most of the arcade games, you're not in constant contact with your little jumpy dude. You hit the ball, you send it out, it bounces, further away, coming towards you, bouncing away, you're trying to predict when it comes, and how, disinterested at first, gradually more focused and intense as the ball starts to drop, trying to anticipate when it'll come and what angle and how fast and where it wants to go and how you should get it there, all at once. A game of pinball is, instead of a steady state of reflex-testing, a series of little narrative arcs - further away, and coming back - over and over again.

The ball hanging
at the top of its arc
between the bumpers.