#3: Machine manipulation
Hello, movers and shakers!
Have you nudged a pinball table today? If you did, it’s nothing to worry about. See, there is this thing that is perceived very differently inside and outside of dedicated pinball communities: Shaking and slightly punching the machine in order to keep your ball in play. In this issue of The Ball is Wild, we will go more into this topic, on why it is an essential part of pinball play and how people are kept in check so that they don’t lose their temper too much and keep their respect towards the machine and the game.
IN THIS THIRD EDITION:
Editorial: Nudging, not tilting!
Heavy Machines: How to start out playing pinball
Institutions & Initiatives: Mastering Pinball
Silverball Academics: RHIZ-cade
Videoballs: Power Solenoid
Mini-Interview: Derek Thomson from YEGPIN
From the archives: Archer Plays Pinball
EDITORIAL:
Nudging, not tilting!
People and players who know more about pinball never ever worry or think about it much—aside from maybe pondering how to do it more efficiently. But outside of the world of pinheads, people do wonder: Is it really okay to shove or jab a pinball machine around? Some of those who aren’t sure often do it anyway and then afterward have both a little bit of a bad conscience as well as some kind of secret excitement that you feel when you do something that is seemingly forbidden, frowned upon or transgressive.
To be clear: There is gentle pinball nudging, and then there is pushing and hitting a machine around like a crazy person. We don’t want to endorse the latter, to be sure. Having said that and out of the way, let’s join in the choir: Pinball nudging is completely fine! More than that: It’s an essential part of the game, especially when you want to grow your skills. If you refuse to interact with the machine in any way other than shooting the plunger and pushing buttons then you are missing out and might be playing a duller game than others who embrace the moving and shaking. Let’s have it from one of pinball’s most important personalities, Roger C. Sharpe. In his seminal book Pinball! from 1977 he states on page 140:
Knowing when, where, and just how hard to strike and nudge the pinball machine is the way that the true pinball wizard demonstrates his (or, of course, her; editor’s note) skill. This action alone is an integral part of “playing” pinball contrary to some who believe that nudging the machine is a form of cheating. It isn’t and you should feel comfortable in hitting the machine, just as long as you don’t stray too far.
But what happens if you do stray too far? In order to prevent players of becoming too overeager, Harry Williams, one of pinballs founding fathers, invented different tilt mechanism. You might be familiar with the corresponding word already, often featured in all-caps: TILT. Williams’ tilt mechanisms let a pinball machine know when it is maltreated so it can then react accordingly.
Pinball pendulum
The most well-known tilt device is a suspended steel pendulum with a ring around it that is installed inside the cabinet. Once a machine is shaken or hit too intensly, the pendulum touches the ring and issues at least a warning. Sometimes the player loses the current ball immediately, without getting bonus points. Worst case: The machine stops your game completely, leaving you only to start anew or to walk away in shame (or anger, because some tilt devices have been known to be faulty). The machine then temporarily shuts down and lets you know of its reaction: TILT, written either on the backbox through a lit lettering or on the digital display.
This basically means that you can’t cheat in pinball as long as you abide by the law of the tilt devices. (And if you don’t, you can’t continue playing anyway.) The tilt pendulum, which is used to this day in every new machine, can also be configured differently. Depending on the setup, it can register early on and trigger an activation after only slight manipulations to the machine, or maybe only when you really put on some steam. A good player also shows talent by identifying early on how a respective tilt pendulum is configured.
You can also fully deactivate the tilt mechanism but then we would have gone full circle within this editorial: Because the game would then become dull again as it’d be void of a behavior pattern, a range within allowed play takes place and which makes for a fair competition between players.
HEAVY MACHINES:
How to start out playing pinball
Moving and shaking a pinball machine during play is easier said than done. Even if you understand that it has its purpose and you know that it will definitely make a difference because you watched better players: At first, you don’t know how to nudge properly and you don’t think about it at the appropriate times. It takes a while to start doing it in the first place and get a feel for it later on.
So let’s circle back for a moment and get some more basic techniques in that will make you a better player without much hassle. Cradling, for instance! Cradle-what? Well, even if you haven’t arrived at nudging yet, you can still try to slow down the silverball a bit. There are some simple ways to do this. One of my favorites is the so-called Dead Bounce, which is exactly what it’s called: You play dead and let the ball bounce, usually from one flipper rubber to the opposite one. If you aren’t familiar with this technique yet, trust me that overcoming the urge of just flipping the ball away every time is tough at first. But once you start dead bouncing, it will feel like the most easygoing magic trick ever.
Cradle up!
Pro pinball player and tutorial creator Travis Murie has another good tipp at hand: keeping a flipper button pressed and thus the respective flipper held up to trap the ball. What is this called? You guessed it: cradling. It’s not always trivial to pull this off as the ball tends to bounce away due to higher speeds. But sometimes it works well, and even more so if you combine it with some dead bounce action. The sequence is as follows: dead bounce, cradle, taking a breath, and take your next shot!
INSTITUTIONS AND INITIATIVES:
Mastering Pinball
Fellow Austrian player Abraham Siedler aka Abe Flips is still somewhat of a newcomer to pinball: He just started out in 2019 but quickly learned the ropes of the game and got himself educated about the international community. In spring of 2021 he started his pinball tutorials on Youtube which are especially helpful to newer and intermediate players and technically very well done. They also don’t overstay their welcome and focus on the topic at hand. Some of his advice sometimes pops into my head during a league or tournament day that is always fun: “Stay away from the danger zone!”, which is another way of saying that some areas of a pinball playfield are best avoided at all.
Abe now wants to bring his pinball tutorials to the next level by creating a full-length film of over 90 minutes of playtime. This will without a doubt exceed the beginner and intermediate skill classes and go all the way to the best players in the world and their very special knowledge of the game. It will be achieved by showing tricks of hotshots like two-times world champion Johannes Ostermeier. In order to make this project a reality, Abe assembled a glamorous international team and created a crowdfunding campaign. Mastering Pinball: In-Depth Skills and Strategies has at the time of writing already raised over 20.000 USD—a lot more than double the amount that the project initially asked for. The campaign is active until August 5th.
SILVERBALL ACADEMICS:
RHIZ-cade
I am always on the lookout for projects out of arts and academia that incorporate elements of pinball or sometimes even fully dedicate themselves into pinball culture. It must have been short of a year ago that I stumbled into a collection of multimedia works about pinball that felt like a jackpot to me. It’s an arts and academica hybrid from 2013/2014 (rerelased in 2020) called The RHIZ-cade: Ten Multimedia Projects on the Rhetoric of Pinball and features nine wild texts about different aspects of pinball. Some of those texts are also accompanied by videos, and there are also cases where the video is the central part of the contribution.
RHIZ-cade is a bold ride between media theory, philosophy, game history, feminism, art, and, of course, a genuine interest and fascination for pinball as an artefact and a hybrid object between analogue and digital, retro and contemporary. No doubt: Some of these texts are all over the place and a bit convoluted but often consciously so. In any case, everyone who has an interest in pinball will find something in this wonderfully unconventional collection. My personal favorite is What Pinball Tells Us About Gadgets, Groins, and the Galaxy by Anthony Collamati which references and also shows the 1986 Italian movie Troppo Forte, featuring a hilarious pinball scene where a big macho street gang guy humps a machine to show that pinball is not just about brains.
VIDEOBALLS:
Pinball and pinball-like computergames
Power Solenoid (Windows)
There are many smaller experimental pinball videogames that pop up ever so often, sometimes from fledgling designers who learn the ropes of developing games through easy and established genres like pinball. I always like to take a look and have at least a quick play at them. There are cases though were it doesn’t end there. Because I then get drawn into these videopin games that seemingly come out of nowhere and where one is in for a surprise. Especially the unconventional and strange titles are those that I can’t resist and where I have to learn more about them.
One of these cases is the recently released Power Solenoid (available on Itch.io and Steam) by an Argentinian game developer who goes by the name of Jupitron. Power Solenoid’s protagonist is some kind of living pinball named Rockhound who, as the game information lets us know, is “an interdimensional punk who loves cool sunglasses”. We control Rockhound directly, can perform a little dash move, and also learn more tricks later on. The stages are designed vertically and sometimes go from top to bottom, then the other way around. There are minigames, secret stages, weird bosses, special equipment and many other whimsical things. The controls are a bit wobbly at first but make sense once you get the hang of them.
Power Solenoid also has a fantastic look: It evokes old school CRT television vibes, hip hop culture and home-made videogames from a time around the year 2000. The soundtrack is perfectly matched to the visuals and rounds up the great presentation of this game. You really should join Rockhound on his curious pinball-like adventure.
MINI INTERVIEW:
Derek Thomson from YEGPIN
Following up on issue #2 of The Ball is Wild where I wrote about my experience at the big pinball event/tournament YEGPIN in Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) I had the pleasure of conducting a short but informative interview with its main organiser Derek Thomson. It’s about how such a big event is planned, how the team manages to convince pinball owners to borrow out their machines, and why YEGPIN is a competitive yet also very friendly place where players of all skill groups will have a good time. You can read the interview in a blog post at TheBallisWild.net.
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Archer Plays Pinball
Eight years ago I took part in a Storytelling Summer School in Portland (Oregon, US) where we learned how to write non-fiction (journalistic) texts in a style that is otherwise commonly used in novels. After two weeks of school, every student had to come up with an idea of a story where we would then try to integrate the things we learned. As you could have guessed, I took the liberty of writing about pinball. Specifically, I wrote about a pinball summer camp for children at the public charity Pinball Outreach Project (POP) in Portland.
My subject was the then 9-year-old Archer and how he was fascinated by pinball and gradually learned how to play it during the summer camp. The coach, by the way, was his older brother Colin. You might have heard of him, he is currently the 20th best player in the world. Even in 2016 as a young teenager he was already a very good player who would put most of the older players in their place. Why not have a look at the text? Archer Plays Pinball is part of the archived stories at TheBallisWild.net.
That’s it for issue #3 of The Ball is Wild
Did you have a favorite story?
If you have a minute, why not let me know about what you think of this third edition of The Ball is Wild newsletter. You can send an email by just hitting reply or reach out on Bluesky, Mastodon, X or Instagram.
Back issues!
Issue #1: Let’s get this ball rolling (10 June 2024)
Issue #2: Examining the pinball (1 July 2024)
General information about this newsletter and the person behind it is available at the front page.
If you like this project, please recommend it to family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances or whoever might be interested.
Issue #4 will be out in late August. Catch you then! 🪩