Frustration
Guest Contribution
I have no hobby that causes me greater frustration than pinball.
I’ve spent hours working on making the perfect cake for a dinner party, only to see it crack and turn out miserably dry on the sides and perilously undercooked in the center. Even if I took my spatula and attempted to remove the cake in one piece, I’d instead end up with a plate of chocolate crumbs.
I’ve spent an enormous amount of time writing a show with a writing partner, toiling over the thankless logistics of booking a space, auditioning a cast, and directing pages of material, only to end up opening to a house with three people.
But nothing in my life has ever compared to the Sisyphean torment that is pinball.
Pinball is?—?from every angle?—?immensely frustrating. If you’re a new player, it’s a confusing overload of flashing lights, loud sounds, and impossible controls. You just pushed start, and your game is over in less than 30 seconds. If you’re a skilled player, the game could exhibit a mild lean in one direction?—?or it might not recognize when the ball rolls over a switch, preventing a key objective from being triggered, or the flippers could be weak. The lights could be burnt out. The rubber could be just not bouncy enough. You could be doing everything right, and aiming the ball at everything perfectly, and then see the ball leap over your flipper and down the center. Most of us believe that pinball is a two dimensional game and when the ball decides to disagree, it feels as if the machine is voiding the implied contract we have with it but they’re entirely indifferent to our woe.
Owning your own machine might make you more familiar with a table’s quirks, but then you could have just potentially spent in the neighborhood of seven thousand dollars on a luxury entertainment item that constantly breaks. The very objective of pinball is to beat the machine down into its component parts. Any pinball game involves you firing a large steel ball bearing at remarkably high speeds at softer, weaker, objects. The ball could snap through the plastic, run dents into the soft wood that makes the field, or pick up dirt and turn your formerly shiny pristine piece of pop art into a sludgy, murky mess.
If you’re one of the few manufacturers that survived past the Pinball Boom, you’re dealing with obsessive nerds who are extremely peculiar and justly want their several-thousand-dollar expenditure to feel like it was worth it. The machine breaks too much, it’s too hard, it’s not hard enough, the construction is cheap, the toys are weird, you didn’t work hard enough on it, it’s overworked. Every time someone stops by the factory, they marvel that you still exist, reminding you that you’re constantly on the knife’s edge of obsolescence. Why wouldn’t you be? Isn’t pinball just too frustrating?
So, why waste your time with the above? Why throw your precious quarters (or, increasingly, dollar bills) towards that feeling of acid rising up your gut? Why spend your time and money to just feel bad and powerless? Isn’t the world enough of a bummer?
I have long held a theory that pinball succeeds not in spite of this litany of problems, but entirely because of it. There’s certainly joy to be had in the old-timeyness of it, the baked-in nostalgia if you happened to grow up playing it, as I did?—?the tactile nature of balls and bumpers and bells in an increasingly sterile and digital world.
But, for me, and I suspect many others, the real joy of pinball is the joy of those few moments where you’re able to impose a sense of order on a world of deep chaos. When you’re able to take those two clumsy flippers and somehow make them sing, despite their deep suspicion towards your intercession of their rest. To triumph over electronic entropy.
It’s an old saw to say that you climb a mountain “because it was there,” but the true joy of pinball is that the machine exists only to frustrate you. While pinball has some vestiges of victory?—?high scores and wizard modes?—?ultimately it will beat you. Chaos defeats order. The ball has to go down the center, or the left side, or the right. The frail plastic pieces will yield to the impossibly fast metal ball. Yet, for a moment?—?and perhaps a moment is all it will give you?—?you’ll have understood that progress can win over the cruelty of the elements, the esoteric rules can be understood despite the din, and frustration can yield to ecstasy, however fleeting it may be.
This is the first of potentially many stories where I write on thoughts I’ve held on the deeply weird hobby of pinball.
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