How Pinball Ate itself: The Economics of Pinball
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I don't think that's fair to say at all. Williams tried to save the Pinball industry by inventing the Pinball 2000 platform which had reflected video over the playfield. It was definitely as big an innovative step as anything that cam before since the invention of the flipper.
Also, I might be biased having been 14 at the time, but I wouldn't call The Addams Family the end of innovation. I would call it the beginning of maturity. The machines Williams released in the 90s and the Stern machines of today reflect the perfection in pinball playability. The precise shooting lanes and the deep rulesets gave rise to 15 years of amazing machines that are just as much fun for beginners as they are for experts.
It's a real shame the pinball machines are so expensive to maintain and thus so rare to find in good operating condition. When I see my first real liquidity event I plan on purchasing some of my favorites (The Twilight Zone, The Addams Family, Attack From Mars, Indiana Jones, Simpsons Pinball Party, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek: TNG, Arabian Nights, Medieval Madness, etc)
That being said, there is something really hacker-like about pinball. I am truly amazed at times the ingenuity that goes into designing and building a pinball machine and all its mechanical parts.
I have this in my netflix queue, which supposedly describes the history of the Pinball 2000:
It just seems like they could have done something other than just make a static game that was harder than the last version.
More moving parts means harder to maintain means costs more money to maintain. However, I guess this can be done by... for example, having parts of the board that open up as you get to higher scores. Still, there's only so much you can pack into the space a pinball machine has.
using different sorts of balls
Spectacular!
free play algorithms --> demise
In fact, he seemed to mean:
transferable skills --> disparity in skills --> demise
And free play algorithms were actually what kept the industry going for slightly longer.
As a result, the genre is pretty much a niche these days, despite the unexpected popularity of Street Fighter 4.
However, I would think this applies mainly to arcades, which I believe are dying in the US anyway (though I've heard they still flourish elsewhere). Console games allow one to play against the computer or against friends. At least against the computer a beginner can play and have fun.
I wonder how this will evolve change as console's take advantage of the internet. A test case could be Starcraft. Anyone have any idea of how hard it is to break into Starcraft now for someone just starting?
There's lessons in here for any other sort of community. Barriers to entry and a community that only cares for its own needs lead to stagnation. This is especially relevant to communities based around technology, such as software applications or programming languages.
Every couple of years I'll play a game with this new, innovative idea, and it's still the same story. It's sort of fun for a bit, until your brain catches up and realizes that as meaningless as most games are, this one is even more so. It's not a new idea and if it were going to work, it would have been made to work by now: http://www.intellivisiongames.com/bluesky/games/credits/spac...
(No, there is no in-between "just right". Simple control theory shows how you can't hover at the "just right" point; as you are at "just right", the system must dynamically adjust the difficulty above your level (or you even just hit a bad patch) and cause you to fail, at which point you're back at too easy. There's nowhere near enough data to get to "just right" even in theory.)
(also, as a general rule I have an extreme distrust of "nobody I know of has managed this yet, therefore no-one anywhere ever will")
Certainly both of our rules fire off, but for every time your rule hits, mine hits several thousand times.
Case with coin op games: Games around the year 2000 was frustrating to play. A skilled player would run into impossible to resolve situation and lose a "life". There was no way to play for more then about 1 minute without losing and no way to complete a game on a single credit. From the players perspective, the game was cheating and playing too skillfully was a demerit.
Recent coin op games seem to have moved away from this. It's possible to complete a level with one credit. The game board remains the same and the difficulty is selected by the board type or player specs.
I think in general that games shouldn't change difficulty mid board. To the player, it becomes a disincentive to play too well. Let the player decide what challenges they want to face. It should at least be an option to toggle.
I have seen dynamic difficulty done well exactly once: in an obscure freeware game called Quadnet by Brainchild Design. It is a simple arcade game that focuses on honing a single skill. There are three lives. Mastery at the game means speed in accomplishing the game's objective; it ramps up the difficulty during the first life in response to the player such that after about 5 minutes you've reached your max and you die. It then spends the next two lives very slowly rocking the player back and forth over that difficulty threshold they can't pass.
It works because there is no penalty for skill -- better players are guaranteed to get more points and faster -- and because it is true to the game: the advance in difficulty works to train you at the game's main skill, find your comfort level, and they try to push you past it.
In general, dynamic difficulty is done wrong in two ways: it changes the fundamental game or cheats, distorting the landscape players are trying to conquer, and it does not reward them with points or bragging rights for having triggered the harder mode.
Just like playing tennis or golf on your wii isn't quite the real thing. Why is it that for arcade games (think Doom for instance), the disconnect with reality is not as noticeable?
You raise an interesting point. At a guess, I imagine if you asked a big game hunter or combat soldier with experience tracking a target and firing weapons with the intent to kill, they would probably notice the disconnect. I wonder if Guitar Hero has limited fans among those who can actually play the guitar, for this reason as well?
1) Your character gets tired.
2) You can't jump too high.
3) You can't carry 25 guns including a bazooka, sniper rifle and grenade launcher.
4) Reloading would take a long time.
5) If you jump off a ledge you get hurt.
Etc...
I think people notice its off, but ignore it in favor of having a good time. Eventually, if you play a game long enough, you might forget what you noticed, but thats more a result of playing a lot.
I wondered what happened to him.
Eugene wasn't the host mentioned in the story, since he didn't work on design for Black Knight or High Speed (he does have a sound credit on HS, though). You're thinking of the other Vid Kid, Larry DeMar.
As other posters have pointed out, innovation really did not stop in 1992. Pinball 2000 was actually a success, but Williams decided to pull the plug despite that. The Pinball 2000 platform was quite revolutionary - from how the player played the game, to how the game was designed, maintained, and even upgraded.
I don't think free play really had anything but an ancillary role in the decline of the hobby. It was likely the rise of video games, and specifically home consoles, that really hurt pinball. People played video games at home, and then played newer/better games in the arcade. Due to the cost a pinball machine in the home is a rarity to this day, and so the exposure it received was never the same. Kids learned Mario and Nintendo, they didn't learn the silver ball and flippers.
Along the lines of the article, the most "interesting" idea I heard in pinball circles was that clear coating playfields was a harbinger of doom. Williams started doing this and called it "Diamond Plate". It was designed to reduce the need for mylar to protect the playfield.
The premise is that the idea worked TOO well. Playfields on the machines could look like new forever. A machine's lifetime was extended, the impetus to replace the machine was lowered, and sales suffered.
You see, High Speed represented an inflection point in pinball history where the software became the star of the game, not the playfield geometry. The game told a story instead of just being a noisy point accumulator like previous solid-state games. All that choreography with lights, music, display animation, etc was a huge part of High Speed's success.
The rest of the points you make are very accurate. The article gives a very interesting history of auto-replay percentaging and match tricks, but that had very little to do with the demise of pinball in the last decade.