Arcade-Style Game Design – Pinball’s Connections to Coin-Op Videogames

Résumé

One of the three main traditions applied to the study videogames within the humanities is the history and analysis of board games, card games, or games like Dungeons & Dragons. While by no means representing the totality of the authors’ research and methods, books including this angle include Rules of Play (Salen/Zimmerman 2003), Game Design Workshop (Fullerton et al. 2004), and Challenges for Game Designers (Brathwaite/Schreiber 2009). Tabletop game traditions are unlike the other categories that I’ll address in that they are oftentimes games primarily of strategic decision making rather than skillful real-time execution. That is, when I as a player choose to move a knight to a certain position, or play a particular poker hand, that decision is easily performed with complete accuracy, without risk of error from overshooting or undershooting the knight’s move, or accidentally playing a different hand in cards. Where chance is involved it generally can be calculated beforehand as a fixed probability as when rolling dice, spinning a spinner, or considering what the other and next cards may be in poker.