Can we make more intuitive use of monitors?

General
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I was thinking, in regards to the Skill Shot Pincast topic, about what experienced pinball players feel about big, bright monitors in the back. Currently, Jersey Jack and Heighway are swearing by them (with Spooky to a lesser extent), and Stern is said to be going into using monitors instead of DMDs now, so I think this is a good time to discuss monitor usage.

Personally, right now, usage of monitors is far from the best that it can be. In some ways, it is definitely being used for something other than a bigger DMD, with game status always being displayed except when cutscenes and whatnot take over. But I can’t help but feel that, on the other hand, it is being used in some other instances as if it were a bigger DMD. An example is the end-of-ball bonus in The Wizard of Oz, which displays each bonus one at a time until it shows the total at the end. The entire monitor is dedicated to that, and I personally feel it’s a waste of space. The monitor can potentially display all of the bonuses at once and the total at the bottom. This sort of thing comes about from thinking in terms of DMDs.

I’m guessing I’m coming over with a different perspective than most people into pinball, as I play a lot of modern video games and got into pinball later. Over the decades, game designers have become very good at displaying a lot of information simultaneously in a non-intrusive way that’s easy to understand once you’re accustomed to the game.

Here is an example from Splatoon, the most recent competitive video game I’ve played. I have a shrunken screenshot, but clicking on it will lead to a bigger image:

There are at least 11 different things about the game status that can be viewed at a glance: There is the time remaining (2 minutes and 2 seconds), team status (roughly even, with two KOed players on the red team), score (382 points), which special weapon is available to use (the Inkzooka), progress in filling up the special meter so it can be used (about 30%), the effects your character’s clothing currently has (Bomb Range Up, Special Saver, Special Charge Up), controls for status relay (“C’mon!” and “Booyah!”), damage taken (the red border indicates I’ve taken heavy damage), whom I’ve just KOed (someone named “sniping ya”), the location of the KO (that pink explosion thing to the right), and the locations of my teammates (the blue names towards the upper middle).

That being said, the distance to look is a lot less than any pinball machine, and looking away for even a split second can be dangerous. Maybe one can get cues from driving, which similarly requires you keep your focus in one direction and looking away can be lethal. A car’s dashboard tells the driver a lot of information: Speed, the engine’s temperature, your fuel tank’s fullness (or emptiness), any abnormal status, your turn signals’ status, your headlights’ status, distance traveled, RPM, and the time. If you have media playing, it’ll display information about that media. More modern cars tell you your fuel efficiency, oil life, GPS, and a bunch more depending on the car. The difference here is that you look down instead of up. And road signs outside tell you of things to come.

Currently, The Wizard of Oz and Full Throttle are displaying less information than that in a less intuitive way. How one can do it elegantly, however, is something I’m not too sure of, as it’d require a level of knowledge of psychology, game design, and experience I don’t have. I do like what they’ve done with these screens though. (And the burden of needing to convey information at a glance goes double for Multimorphic, as the entire playfield is one big screen.)

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Turning the playfield glass into a HUD would be pretty awesome. Just like the screenshot - put some information along the edges.

That said, they could probably do more to show where you’re at on the playfield itself. The most common things I need to know:

  • How many more locks do I need? Some games display this directly (Whitewater, BDK), but others don’t (TAF, LOTR).

  • How much time is left in my mode? I can’t think of a game that displays this on the playfield…it’s always on the display. LOTR does do audio callouts. All games should do this, or at least use the playfield inserts to show me (if High Speed had timed modes, using the inserts to indicate time remaining would be pretty slick - I wouldn’t need to have my exact bonus displayed at all times).

  • What ball am I on? I almost always know, but sometimes I’ll forget - especially if extra balls are involved. Maybe just give me some LED lights down near the apron so I can see it without having to look up at the screen and/or wait for some other animation to finish. In fact, making four separate sets of indicators, one for each player, would be really helpful for newbies - if for no other reason than to make it clear that they can play a multiplayer game.

  • How many tilt warnings do I have? I usually know, but not always - particularly if I made some save while there was lots of loud things happening. Not sure if I took one danger or two. I’m often asking onlookers, or telling the person playing how many they got. Yeah, you can put it into the info/status, but unlike the things above, I’m not going to have ability to look that up at the moment I’m trying to decide how far I should go in saving a ball that’s headed toward the outlane. Would also be good for communicating to newbies who are always asking things like: “but isn’t that illegal?”

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It would be nice if you could customize what info is displayed and where. Maybe also incorporate a player login similar to BOP2.0 so your layout would be shown while you played vs someone else.

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Have you played the P3 yet? Lexi Lightspeed does most if not all of these things and I think is a great example of what can be done with playfield screens.

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I have, but I don’t remember any of it. Perhaps because I didn’t really know what I was doing, and one of the creators was explaining as I went.

My general comment about P3 was that it was too much like regular pinball. I had to be told how to get to something cool that showed off the capabilities (the swamp level with the ball trails of gas killing the bugs). It was like a minute of standard pinball gameplay just go get into that (albeit with giant callout arrows on the screen). I think it should be built for a more casual audience…something to draw people into pinball, rather than a technology enhancement for those who are already intermediate and above players.

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Have you scrolled through all the screens on a WOZ? It gives you tons of information and is very simple to understand. I own one and use the screen frequently and it makes it easy for those waiting to tell what is going on.

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Out of curiosity, when was the last time you played the P3?

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@SunsetShimmer: you definitely need to check out Multimorphic’s P3 platform. Their first game is Lexy Lightspeed.

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July 2015, at Pinburgh. First and only time I played it. Don’t think I even watched a video before that.

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Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could reflect the video off the glass in such a way that the ball appears to interact with it? Man, I bet that would be stunning.

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If we only had the technology! :wink:

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The back screen on WOz does double duty showing game status and acting as an advertisement - think of how much less attractive it would be if the back screen went into status mode during game play just in case the player looks up. I think it does well at giving game state information in a beautiful way, - it does take a little bit of experience to understand how to read each of the four quadrants at a glance, but there’s text there to help.

I think the main source of game status information has to be the playfield - and most games do have plenty of lights and arrows to accomplish that. It’s not fair to compare with video games since they have only one main screen as your interface and you can put whatever you want on it. Our main interface is the playfield, a lot of people don’t even look up at the back display until it’s safe to cradle up and get to the status screen.

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Wow, there’s a lot of really interesting input here! I personally feel that monitors on pinball, being as newas they are, have an iceberg of untapped potential, possibly more than that. People just need to come up with ways to use them, and it’llcome with time. I also personally feel that monitors can do everything a DMD can do but better. That is, with monitors now costing less than DMDs, I see no reason why they won’t become the new standard, so I think it’s important that designers come up with ways to use this extra space and color.

An example I thought of is multiplayer. Why is pinball multiplayer restricted to 4 players tops? Because that’s as much as a DMD can show at a time. I think this is the case because SEGA machines can support up to 6 players, and their DMDs were larger. Monitors are even larger still (except in cases like The Big Lebowski) and can display smaller text than a DMD can. A monitor can potentially support an unlimited number of players at once. Are there that many situations where a pinball machine needs to have more than 4 players? Probably not, but it shouldn’t be that hard to implement, and there’s no harm in putting it in.

The reason I brought up that Splatoon example is because it conveys a lot of information in a small space in a non-intrusive way. This is something that can be done with monitors on pinball machines too. If someone’s REALLY good at space management, you might not even need status reports at all–all of the information would be right there.

Regarding having to glance up, I think this is something Heighway solved by having both a monitor right above the flippers and on the backbox. Currently though, I think Full Throttle does not convey important information clearly enough, or at least I think its use of space is disproportionate to how necessary the information is. On any given machine, the most important information, I’d say, are the score, progress towards the wizard mode, progress towards multiballs, and, as mentioned, time remaining on timed missions. Having a monitor right above the flippers would make that last trait a lot handier.

[quote=“ryanwanger, post:2, topic:1311, full:true”]* What ball am I on? I almost always know, but sometimes I’ll forget - especially if extra balls are involved. Maybe just give me some LED lights down near the apron so I can see it without having to look up at the screen and/or wait for some other animation to finish. In fact, making four separate sets of indicators, one for each player, would be really helpful for newbies - if for no other reason than to make it clear that they can play a multiplayer game.

  • How many tilt warnings do I have? I usually know, but not always - particularly if I made some save while there was lots of loud things happening. Not sure if I took one danger or two. I’m often asking onlookers, or telling the person playing how many they got. Yeah, you can put it into the info/status, but unlike the things above, I’m not going to have ability to look that up at the moment I’m trying to decide how far I should go in saving a ball that’s headed toward the outlane. Would also be good for communicating to newbies who are always asking things like: “but isn’t that illegal?”
    [/quote]

Hmm, that’s interesting. I thought most machines will show you what ball you’re on. That’s something even EMs will display. But I guess that’s the thing with DMDs–animations and cutscenes take up the whole display.

I didn’t think about how no machines actually show you how many tilt warnings you’ve had though. Would be handy to show how many the machine will give you until a Tilt too.

That would be really neat! But it’d be kind of messy to implement and would be different from game to game. A login system could only really work for that one machine too, unless the machine can connect online and you play on another machine that’s online.

I’d have to wonder where and when you’d get to customize it, and how you’d do so with the flipper buttons and potentially a start button. Bride of Pinbot 2.0 uses a DMD; a full-size monitor would be exponentially more complicated. I’d reckon most people walking up to a machine won’t bother to take the time to customize them; they’d want to start playing immediately.

I definitely know about Multimorphic and Lexy Lightspeed. I have not had the chance to play one, as I can’t travel freely and there hasn’t yet been a demo of it close enough to where I live that I can go there. I have seen videos online.

Currently, they’re using the playfield-wide monitor more for artwork, as is a traditional playfield would be, with animations and scores and such reacting to the ball. I think it’s functioning like virtual pinball, such as Zen Pinball 2, for instance. I definitely feel this system could be used to make pinball more accessible and alluring to non-fans, but I agree with @ryanwanger that Lexy Lightspeed’s approach is more towards people already into pinball.

I’d say that the attract mode is all it really needs. When someone’s actually playing, everyone knows the real action is on the playfield, and everything else is secondary. Non-players know that too. When I’m playing, whether it’s Wizard of Oz or not, and people come look, they’ll look at the playfield. A game is compelling only if the playfield is compelling.

During gameplay, however, I think what will catch eyes is movement. The human eye is more tuned to movement than anything else, and people will naturally turn to examine movement at the corners of their eyes (no doubt as a survival instinct in case there’s danger nearby). If someone’s attention goes to the monitor on the backbox, it will turn to the playfield before long. That, I feel, is the real shortcoming of the display for The Wizard of Oz: There is too little movement.

Regarding information on the playfield, what are your thoughts on the Heighway-style playfield monitor? If you ask me, it’s something to get used to, but if it becomes common, I think it’ll become such a core part of pinball that people who start with those games will have a hard time adjusting to having to look up at the backbox.

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Actually, there probably is some harm… much more than 4 players, and people start getting seriously bored waiting their turn. Maybe they wander off. Maybe people forget what player number they were. The net result of those things is that the players don’t have a great experience with the game.

Is 4 players really a magical breakpoint for that, where 4 is just right and 5 is too many? No, not really… but if you allow 5, then the question becomes why not 6? At 6, why not 7? And so on, indefinitely. So it makes sense to have a limit. The competitive scene (a very common case for multi-player games) is unlikely to adopt >4 player groups, both for the “interminable wait” reasons mentioned above (made even worse with skilled players), and because it’d be silly to have >4 player groups when most games don’t support it. So you’re down to supporting >4 players just for the occasional large family or group of friends who all want to play the same game together… probably not worth it for manufacturers to go to the trouble for such a small audience.

Full Throttle was only Heighway’s first game. I’m fairly confident that future Heighway games (Alien is next) will continue to evolve and offer more useful and entertaining presentations on the playfield screen.

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Sorry for the late response–I kept this tab open, and ironically, that made me forget about it. I also got distracted with other topics.

I definitely understand regarding the four people having to wait their turn. Still, even if it’s unpopular, I’dlike to see it added in versus it not being added in. It’s a minor thing, honestly. Which reminds me of another minor thing: I’d like to see some movement away from “Player 1” and “Player 2” and such. Funhouse has Rudy assigning nicknames to each player, and Star Wars: Episode 1 gives players randomly assigned named of iconic characters in the Star Wars films. I don’t know how popular it’d be because it needs extra time, but I’d like to see something where players can choose characters or somesuch, akin to picking out pieces on a board game. To save time, the game can start on a randomly chosen character and just have the player push start. I think it’d give a bit of flavor to multiplayer.

As for Heighway, yeah, it and Jersey Jack have only begun. As time goes on, new things will be thought of and tried out. Hopefully, they won’t be the only two doing this–I’m guessing Stern’s going to come up with something that could soon be a standard too.