Our trip to Montreal Pinball for the haptic and physical segment of our Playable Media class took us to a beautiful industrial loft space that was completely filled with fully functional or in-repair vintage pinball machines and their predecessors. We were met by Robert Barake, who seemed to know everything possible about the history, design and function of pinball machines, as well as the physical repair and restoration of them. We looked at different macahines chronologically, from the earliest to the newest. The very first machines we looked at was entirely mechanical and has almost no game aspect to it, rather it was sort of a basic gambling system that required very little skill — it was almost entirely a game of chance involving a pull launch ball and holes for the ball to fall into to score points, which you would eventually cash out. This machine had no ‘tilt’ mechanism, which we learnt about right after. The tilt aspect of pinball machines brought in an aspect of skill as well as a preventative measure against cheating — you were able to, and should, shake and jostle the machine a little bit to gain more control of your ball, but only a very slight degree. If you moved the machine too much, the tilt would kick in and you wouldn’t be able to play any more. I found the tilt mechanism to be very interesting because it was one of the aspects of physical pin ball machines that really stood out from my experiences with digital and computerized pin ball games. I personally never played a physical, old-school pin ball machine because the visit to Montreal Pinball and my brain’s idea of pinball was the old Windows 98 mini game, a space themed pinball game. I had always though that it was a pretty boring game, but playing physical pinball was an entirely different experience. The fact that you can, and should, physically jostle to machine adds right off the bat a huge interactive aspect that was entirely missing from the digital versions that I’ve played. It’s much more rewarding and frustrating to have that second level of control over the game: just enough to be more fun than only playing flippers, but not enough that it becomes easy – extra challenging, in fact. The level of haptic feedback that you get from a physical, old school pinball machine in general is really intense as well: from the feel of the machine in front of you to the weight of the ball when you launch it or use the flippers to propel it back into the playing field, or the way that the pings and sounds have an extremely satisfying physical quality to them, as well as the real kickback that you can feel from the obstacles on the course. The whole machine itself vibrates with energy and physical attitude, and that isn’t even considering the amazing art and light displays that are mesmerizing in a way that a computer screen never could be. They are all stylized in an extremely distinct and dated way as well, which really makes the experience of playing one of these machines, at least for me, totally immersive between the physical feedback, the bright lights, sounds, dated art, and the fact that we were playing them surrounded by other people playing other machines. One of the other very distinctly interesting machines that we got to play during this outing was the two player head-to-head pinball machine. According to Robert it was a total flop, at least as far as money-making goes, however I was really excited by the idea of the game mechanisms of pinball, made competitive and social rather than simply versus a machine and play-field.

The game was much less enjoyable than the other games we played, but I feel that that was due much more to poor design than to an actual flaw in the concept, and I still feel like a head-to head pinball game would be a really great game, if executed in a better way. After the field trip I ran into an old pinball machine on the second floor of Katacombs, a bar on St. Laurent street, and got super excited to analyse what kind of and era of machine it was, and now I’m always on the look out for more now!