On Pinball, Board Games and Feedback – Part One

I love pinball.  But when I attended college in the mid-nineties, I could barely sacrifice a quarter to play.  Every summer, I’d up-sell popcorn at a local movie theater, slow filling my saving account.  And every semester, I’d whittle away that savings account until I, quite literally, didn’t have two nickels to rub together.

Still, the flashing lights emanating from the mail room/pool hall/video arcade at my alma mater held me entranced.  I knew it was impossible to avoid playing Virtua Fighter, Samurai Showdown or Shadows Over Mystara.  I just needed to be careful, and regulate the quarters that dripped out of my pocket and into the Student Life coffers.  My goal was to spend no more than one dollar twice per week in the arcade, and I was generally good about it (not that I had much choice.)  I may have hovered over one too many people while I watched them play their games, but my savings account never imploded before the end of the school year.

And then the amazing happened.  One of the pinball machines in the arcade broke in the most awesome way possible.  Every time you played Star Trek: The Next Generation, it rewarded you with a free play.  Every time.  Heck, sometimes, it rewarded you a couple free plays on top of that.

What I didn’t know then, was that pinball machines were going through what many people referred to as their ‘golden age’.  Dot matrix displays and advanced audio playback reeled in a new generation of players.  While cabinet video games continued to lose ground to home consoles, pinball experimented and expanded into the vacant spots Street Fighter and Golden Axe left behind.  The Addams Family, broke out in 1992 as the most successful pinball machine since the 1930s, selling over 20,000 units.  Looking to replicate their success, Midway invested in a number of wonderful machines with a combination of excellent and intricate gameplay.  Among these was the 1993, SuperPin, widebody, Star Trek: the Next Generation featuring eight separate missions, dual cannons and what must have been at least a hundred audio clips.

I was given unlimited access to a piece of game design history, and I burned that sucker into my brain.  Though I didn’t realize it at the time, Midway and Steve Richie were teaching me some good game design.  And the most obvious lesson that ST:tNG would continue to push on me time and again, was the value of feedback.

What is Good Feedback?

To be clear, I’m not talking about the sort of feedback game designers get when other people play their game, then talk to them about it; although, that’s very important in its own right.  What I’m talking about is a sort of Russian Reversal.  This is the sort of feedback you get when you play the game, while the game plays you.  The wooden blocks with heft from Jenga.  The colorful circles on stark white in Twister.  The bang and rattle when you plunge the Pop-O-Matic in Trouble.   What is a game saying to the players when they play?

Quite often, feedback between the player and the game is determined by everything you don’t need to play the game.  Let’s take my beloved ST:tNG pinball game, for example, and remove some pieces.  We don’t need the flashing lights, the sound bites, or the soundtrack, so we’ll remove the bulbs and the speakers.  The dot matrix is also unneeded (with the exception of one mini-game, but bear with me), so we can get rid of that.  In fact, we can pull the entire head right off the cabinet, and replace it with a small tabulator to keep track of our score.

The art on the playfield mat, on the side of the cabinet, and on the individual game pieces is also not the game, so it goes, along with the model Romulan, Klingon and Borg ships that hover over ramps and gates.  Also, most pinball bumpers, kickers and slingshots smack the ball away when they come in contact with them, but we don’t need that to play the game.    Oh, and attached to this game is a grip and trigger, instead of a plunger to the launch the ball.  We can cut downtime by firing the ball as soon as we put a quarter in the game, or when the previous ball was lost (which also means the ‘Start’ button is superfluous.)  In theory, the player chose which mission to start when they pull the trigger, but since we tossed a pile of other parts, the player won’t notice the difference between most missions.

Nope.  Not done yet.  There are extra balls inside the case, and a delivery system, so when you shoot a ball down a cellar hole, a different ball pops out another cellar door for seamless play, but we can wait for the ball to roll into position instead.  There’s also a number of times the game takes a full stop so we can absorb what happened (for example, when locking a ball for multiball).  We can skip that, too.

I could remove more, but what’s left is the game, in all its complexity.  It’s the game without a soul.  I took away everything that gives our pinball machine a sense of style or purpose.  Players won’t know what they’re doing.  The ball will act and react in odd and unpredictable ways until the player understands what is happening by rote memory.  All sense of purpose is lost, since the player doesn’t know why they must continue to knock this metal ball into play, except for the sake of doing so.

And you know what?  It’s still fun.  But, for many of us, we’d no longer be playing a game, so much as we’d be playing with a toy.  Certainly, there’s a game buried underneath all that toy, but it would take players a long time to piece it together.  And even then, interpretations on what the game represented would differ between different play groups.

The art, the lights, the sounds and the pacing aren’t needed to make the game operate.  But each one of these pieces of feedback contributes to the shared experience between the player and the game.  It shapes the game, offering an identity beyond the rules.  And it creates a sense of urgency, drawing the player’s mind away from their endless list of other priorities, keeping the player focused on the game.

The Back Box – Android

Our dissembled machine is very sad, indeed.  So, let’s put it back together.  Out of all the pieces we tossed aside, the theme may be the most important to reattach.  All the other parts deal with a single aspect of the game, but the theme flavors everything.  We need to re-install the head of the game, in the same way that a person might reboot a damaged ship’s computers to run diagnostics.  We want to capture player’s eyes with evocative artwork, and give them world they can relate to.  If this pinball machine was a board game, we’d want it to contain a theme as strong as Fantasy Flight’s game, Android.

Android mines hard boiled detective stories, combined with a gritty future struggling with the concept of humanness.  The themes in Android are familiar to anyone with a cursory knowledge of science fiction.  There’s pieces of The Caves of Steel, Blade Runner and Neuromancer in here.  But the world and stories in Android never overtly connect to any one book.  Instead, Android offers its own messy, breathing world that feels so foreign, yet seems so familiar.

In fact, if Android’s theme is flawed, it’s because the designers fused too much theme into the game.  Each player is given a character dossier, a personal story, and an adventure tree that forces them to make decisions as they play, which changes the course of their story.  Players must learn to prioritize, as leads blossom throughout the city of New Angeles, and on the Moon colony of Heinlein.  Meanwhile, evidence continues to pile against a list of suspects, while gaps in the conspiracy puzzle fill in, piece by interlocking piece.

In fact, between the various chits and pieces, the conspiracy puzzle, and each player’s different sized hovercar arc which they use to measure how far their investigator can travel in a turn, Android also fulfills our need for props, allowing us to re-install our model ships.

The Playfield and Lights – Shadows Over Camelot

Now that the back box is in place, and our pinball machine reclaimed its purpose, let’s re-install a playfield and give our players a chance to understand the action.  The playfield in pinball is packed with information.  There are instructions at the bottom left side on how to operate the machine (like “1 Quarter = 1 Play”), as well as a synopsis of the special features running up the right hand border of the game (for example, “Complete Missions to Gain Artifacts.  Four Artifacts activates the Super Multi-Ball.”)  The playfield also provides a sense of direction and flow.  We now have names for features (Such as “The Alpha Quadrant” and “Kickback”), and lighted arrows that show when those features are activated.

All this information streamlines game play, and draws our eyes to game features the designer wants us to focus on.  The playfield guides players who comprehended the basic mechanics, moves them beyond the obvious (‘Keep the ball in play’ and ‘Hit stuff’) and focuses on the game within the game (‘Start and complete mission mini-games’ and ‘See how many times you can increase Warp Factor, before the timer runs out’.)

In a similar fashion, the board in Shadows Over Camelot isn’t needed to play the game, but it’s an integral piece of feedback from the game to the player.  By the way… does it remind you of anything?

Because, if I tilt the board at an angle, with the round table directly in front of me, the game resembles a pinball playfield, in my mind.  Saxon targets to my left, Pict targets to my right.  At the far end of the board is a joust against the Black Knight, featuring a bumper trap.  The quest for the Holy Grail lights on my right as I hit various ramps, and the Excaliber Mission/Lancelot versus the Dragon is a separate level to play on.  On the round table, white swords light up whenever I’m successful in a mission, and black swords appear when I fail.  I don’t know about you, but if Days of Wonder ever decided to make a Shadows Over Camelot pinball machine, I would drive half a state to play it.  Yes, I would.

None of this, by the way, is important to play Shadows Over Camelot.  We could toss the board, and make small piles of cards in front of us.  How close are we to completing the Quest for the Holy Grail?  We got two cups, and one despair.  Got it.

But marginalizing what the board does for Shadows misses the point.  Knowing that four catapults are parked in front of Camelot doesn’t replace the anxiety players feel when they see the catapults pile up before them.  And as the threats pile up in each corner of the board, players panic, and accuse each other of being the traitor.  I’ve seen games where the players freak out and throw the game, even though they were in no real danger, with no traitor among them.  I doubt a couple card piles would yield the same result.

~

Continue on to part two.