Taunting Landscapes in Pinball Games

Abstract

AbstractPinball is a popular (retro) game which has fascinated generations of players. Although the endless game always leads to a player’s moment of loss, the successful story of pinball continues. Accompanied by a game of speed and spontaneity, pinball machines present different themes which ‘tell’ a spatial story and immerse the players into landscapes which are not only composed of physical objects and object arrangements but (in line with Karl Popper’s three interacting worlds) also transport and communicate cultural aspects affecting an individual cognitive processing. These landscapes can be considered as individual social constructions, and the aspect of provoking, sometimes even celebrating the loss of the player within these landscapes by a programmed and animated electromechanical (retro game) machine seems to be an established game feature, at least from the 1990s onwards. The concept of taunting the player and, thus, making landscape elements taunt the player through (multisensory) animations are addressed in this paper. Examples of taunting animations in 1990s pinball machines are presented and discussed in this short article. It appears that, for example, the idea of a ‘taunting head’, an object representing a ventriloquist dummy ‘brought to life’ through electromechanical and audiovisual animations, was a pioneering development in pinball history, leading to a strengthening of the (from the player’s perspective: hopeless) player-pinball-relationship (the player is losing anyway), but without counteracting the pleasure of playing the game.KeywordsLandscape ResearchLandscapeSocial ConstructivismPinballPinballologyAnimationTaunting