Abstract
Maps and map-like visualizations in digital games have been repeatedly addressed in research of cartography and related disciplines. For example, visualization techniques and tools used in video and computer games, including navigation and locomotion tools in VR gaming, have been analyzed and adopted to VR-based 3D cartographic modeling in recent time. A successful and diversified game which has only hardly been considered in the literature so far is pinball. Modern pinball machines are equipped with sophisticated map-like playfields (and other related components) that allow pinball players to immerse into a rapidly changing spatial story which is directed by the pinball movement. The (endless) game of skill is cognitively challenging and it sometimes even ‘plays with’ overloading the cognitive capacity of players by activating a multitude of multisensory (spatial) events. An overloaded communication of spatial information is apparently part of the success story of the game. The successful story of pinball also includes several characteristic themes that seem to fascinate the worldwide community of players (and retro fans). These themes, including their map-like visualizations, invite players to be involved into the rapid spatial story, and they include many ‘triggers’ for the individual and social construction of landscapes. These landscapes can fulfill desires for escapism. This article presents characteristic examples of successful and established modern pinball themes and discusses their potentials for landscape construction, from a social constructivist perspective.
Highlights
Whoever spent a night out playing a pinball game might have experienced the feeling of being immediately ‘immersed’ into the quickly and spontaneously changing ‘story’ taking place on an animated and interactive map-like pinball playfield
As in many other examples of pinball themes that simulate a situation of existing places, the players are confronted with a set of graphical—sometimes multisensory—stimuli that activate processes of individual interpretation and construction of landscapes
Apart from such examples of pinball themes communicating dangerous landscape impressions adopted from popular culture, other pinball examples support the construction of different landscapes
Summary
Whoever spent a night out playing a pinball game might have experienced the feeling of being immediately ‘immersed’ into the quickly and spontaneously changing ‘story’ taking place on an animated and interactive map-like pinball playfield. Modern pinball games include map-like cartographic media, especially playfields and (animated) images. These components are the basis for evoking ‘spatial stories’ and triggering the individual and social construction of landscapes that are related to pinball themes. Based on a selection of pinball examples and map-like pinball components, this article introduces these spatial pinball themes. It indicates the possibilities of pinball design—an ‘exotic’ neighboring field of (game) cartography—for evoking social and individual meanings. This article binds aspects of cartography to established concepts of constructivist landscape research and “pinball-ology”, a term coined by Marco Rossignoli (2011, p. 20)
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