Editorial: Pinball Wizard
Copyright (c) 1994, L. Shawn Aiken
All rights reserved



        Five years ago I wandered into a video arcade near where I 
worked.  It had been quite some time since I had gone into one, and I
was wondering what had changed.
        There were some very realistic games where people hit one another,
but I had seen their kind before - in lower graphics.  There was a very
fun game involving building a blowing up castles, but that wasn't where
the crowd was.
        I don't remember the name of it.  Some screwy foreign sounding
word.  Guys from all ages, from ten to twenty, were hovering around it,
while a ten-year old played.
        It was some sort of strategic game.  You could move a line around,
filling sections while little flying things tried to kill you.  Not very
original.  In fact, I was sure that I had seen the like before.  And what
was more - it was boring.
        So why were all of these guys hovering around it?  I decided to stay
and watch the adolescent play.  We whipped his little line drawer across the
screen and narrowly won the match.  The screen wavered a bit, and up popped
a scantily clad Asian girl on the screen.  I blinked a few times my brow
knotted.
        Blam.  He went to level two.  Finished it.  Up popped the girl
again.  Then part of her clothing disappeared.  Another level.  More clothes
off.  Until finally the girl was nude.  Then it all started over with
another Asian girl.
        It didn't seep in for a while.  How could it be happening?  A ten
year old was publicly nudifying electronic images for all the world to see.  
Had something changed?  Had congress all taken happy pills and voted in
strange ways?
        I diligently returned day after day to see what would happen.  My
civic duty, of course.  The kids, most far too young, would cluster around
while the owner would spend all his time in his little glass booth counting
money.
        It still seems like a dream.  I remember when Pong came out.  I
actually slapped down money to play the stupid game.  A while back a friend
and I were talking about Generation X.  They are lumped into one big group,
but we saw a line that divided the group like the grand canyon.  It took
us a while to figure it out - but we finally hit the nail on the head.  The
Pong gap.  Okay, everybody who played Pong when it first came out, stand
over there.  Those who missed it - well, you guys are different.
        My father zeroed in on the highest technology - bypassing the Atari
for the Bally Home Entertainment System.  Most of you have never heard of
this marvel of technology.  I think maybe three units were sold before
Bally ran away screaming from the market.  But to put it into perspective,
that Bally machine was to Atari as Sega Genesis was to those old Nintendo
things.
        It had mega hits such as Tennis, which was, well, Pong.  But up to
four people could play at the same time.  Yes, four.  It had four joysticks.
Well, they weren't joysticks.  They looked like pistol handles, with 
triggers.  And a little knob up on top that you could turn left and right.
It was very nice.  Fingers didn't get tired and your thumbs never hurt so
bad you wanted to cut them off to stop the pain.
        The Tennis was really the bottom.  It had a baseball game that had
little men with hands and feet who would run around on the screen.  It
always felt odd pulling the trigger of the gun to swing a bat, but it was
better than pushing a button.  Those old Atari buttons broke too easily.  I
don't know how many friends joysticks I destroyed.
        Further jumping the gun, my father bought me an Odessey.  Few of you
will remember that either.  The key selling point was that it had a
keyboard.  Not that any of the games or cartridges required a keyboard,
but it had a keyboard, none the less.  The company made a program that
so closely resembled Pac-man that Atari sued it and the company floundered
and disappeared from the video game scene.
        But not even my friends Sega Genesis prepared me for that game of
taking off Asiatic women's clothing.  It wasn't a moral issue.  It was the
fact that photo quality graphics were being used in a video game.  An
amazing amount of technology at that time.
        One of the kids' mothers caught wind of the nifty import game
from Singapore, or where ever, and the police hauled the game off.
Distributing pornography to a minor, I think the charge was.
        The kids scattered and went back to playing games full of death and
violence, body parts flying and blood gushing.  But that little pornographic
pinball wizard still haunts my mind.  Around his age, I was playing highly
advanced games like Zevious, with the little red flashing lights, and
was diligently trying to avoid playing Mrs. Pac-man.  But even at that time,
you could still see those old standbys, Pac-man and Space Invaders, lurking
in the corner, suffering from screen burn, but still playable.
        Between that little kid and I lay a ten year gap.  Ten years, and
such tremendous advances in technology.  Now, five years later, they just
strap a CD to the system and get stuff that almost looks like real people
beating the stuffing out of each other.
        What happens in another ten years?  I'm sure playing a game then
will be far more like directing a movie than actual game playing.  Or, 
slap on the virtual reality goggles and motion detectors wand you will be
in the movie.  A decade won't be quite enough time to bring about neural
interfaces, though.  Us old fogies could recognize a video game in ten
years.  Beyond that - well, it will get weird.
        And how about those pinball wizards a decade from now?  I was good
at a couple of games, bringing me brief fame for a second or two.  No where
near as much as the pornographic pinball wizard, though.  It's hard for me
to think how anyone could top that guy.  Perhaps there will a game where
you have to kill everybody on the planet with a banana.  Anyone who could
take out five billion people with a banana would defiantly deserve some
respect - for a minute or two.
        What about the 'real' pinball wizards.  Sorry.  Never did like
that game.  It never had enough balls.

