Studio Experimental Game
Cultures Prof. Margarete Jahrmann In the context of Ludic lecture series
- discourses on narrative structures in pinball artifacts, videogame culture, art, game, play, politics and the world in relational
times of non-human and human challenges.
Pinball Wizard:
a game hybrid, a physical performance play machinessery?
Born and
raised in the US amusement arcades of the 1930ies and 1940ies, pinball worked its way up from gambling entertainment to a
skill based multiplayer game. Or, as many pinball machines from the 60ies and 70ies later famously stated: "A game of skill
for 1 to 4 players!". Those players didn’t go head to head with their opponents though but instead always had the game itself
as their main adversary. In order to win, you don’t just press buttons, but get in physical contact with the machine: you
shove it, you push it and you nudge it in order to prevent the silverball from draining. Although bereft of its former glory
due to the lost fight against videogames in terms of mainstream appeal and attractiveness in the 80ies and 90ies, pinball
surprisingly found its way back as a strong game culture niche by the early 2010s. By doing so, the basics haven’t changed
much. Although electronically augmented for over four decades now, the main elements of pinball still remain the same: flipper
fingers, pop bumpers, slingshots, ramps and targets that can and do break - if you only play long enough.
Robert Glashüttner is a game culture journalist with a focus on independent and retro videogames and pinball. He
is a senior editor as well as a presenter and coordinator at ORF Radio FM4 where he founded the videogame culture department
in 2016. His communication studies thesis analysed the character of games journalism already in 2006 and has been updated
in different texts and papers since then.
