We all know that, for any group of fans to stay stable, there has to be fresh blood coming in to displace the people who leave, but I’m seeing something of a grinding frustration whenever I see curious non-players step up to pinball machines. Now, people-watching is something I like to do. That is, I like spectating in general. Watching people play pinball is no exception, and heading out to locations with a lot of people unfamiliar with pinball try them out like 82, Casa de Carlos, Family Amusement Corporation, Neon Retro Arcade, or the Orange County Ice Palaces, these are the things I have noticed people frequently do:
(For this, I’m not referring infrequent players, casual players, or unskilled players. I’m talking about people for whom this may be their first time playing pinball ever.)
- Never once do they look up at the DMD or alphanumeric display (or a monitor display if they’re playing The Wizard of Oz or something like that) until the game ends. This is an understandable trait, as they’re focused on not letting the ball drain. They will not look up even when the ball is in a scoop or they have drained. A corollary to this is that any instructions on the display will be ignored. A decision that has to be made will be timed out, including those made at the beginning of a game, such as with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Metallica. An exception seems to be video modes; usually, a bystander tells the player to look up, or the machine will not begin the video mode until it receives a signal from the player.
- If there is a button besides the start button or the plunger button, it will not be used. I’m talking about not just third or fourth buttons (a la Johnny Mnemonic or Starship Troopers), but buttons in plain sight too. The most notable case is the “FIRE!” button for AC/DC: Incredibly frequently, I have seen people get the ball into the cannon on AC/DC, then stand there staring at the cannon until it fires out automatically. I sometimes have to stop being a passive spectator and tell them to push that button.
- They thrust their bodies forward with every flipper flip. That is, it seems to be a nudge upwards every time they push a flipper button.
- They walk away after one ball. This is not out of disinterest in the game, but because they think the game ends once the ball drains. I sometimes tell them that their game is still going on.
- Not being familiar with the knocker, they walk away from the game with a credit via a match game. I usually tell them they have another game (I say, “Hey, you won a free game”) and are, without exception, delighted to find out.
- The “Eddie Murphy,” which is repeated pressing of the start button to begin a game. This is particularly frequent in games that don’t feed you a ball the moment you push the button and at locations where machines are set to free play. To my knowledge, pinball is the only kind of arcade game where multiplayer is indicated by repeated pushing of the start button. In all other kinds of arcade games, the start button is disabled once a game begins. (Instead, they either have multiple start buttons, one for each player, or the game asks directly how many people will play.) Not familiar with this concept, people will push the start button repeatedly to rush the game to begin, or thinking the game isn’t registering the button. A frequent side-effect of this is that they will leave the game once Player 3’s first ball has drained, not realizing they are playing a 4- to 6-player game by themselves.
- They do not know there are rules. As far as they’re concerned, modes are not happening, and they’re just bashing the ball around. An exception is multiball, which is impossible to miss. Interestingly, even a beginner, after having activated multiball 3 to 5 times, will catch on in how to activate it and will beeline towards it.
Oddly, I almost never see someone push both flipper buttons at once unless they’re small children. I guess the idea that it could be harmful has become common knowledge. This practice is played for laughs in the Gravity Falls episode “Bottomless Pit!,” where Soos repeatedly mashes both buttons simultaneously and immediately gets a center drain.
In any case, I feel like knowing habits of complete beginners should be valuable in figuring out how to get these beginners into pinball. As it stands, because they are too focused on not losing and lack of familiarity with pinball’s idiosyncracies, pinball can be quite impenetrable to them. And I would know–I did not really get into pinball until late 2013, when I did many of those things myself. Then, I educated myself on how pinball is currently like, and I learned about match replays and cradling and such. But I know most people will not go that far and will have a hard time shedding assumptions and misconceptions about pinball bred into popular culture.
I also feel that observing beginners is something designers should do too, both playfield and rules. After all, in every field, the product should adapt to its consumers, not the other way around. Maybe there can be a breakout hit if someone designs a machine that can conform to beginners’ expectations while teaching them about how modern pinball is like while still keeping it appealing to experienced players. The Addams Family pulled that off (and it didn’t need a “casual mode”). I think it can happen again.