I’ve used videogames to be antisocial at family gatherings many a time—but I’ll always have a soft spot in my cold, black heart for the 1992 Addams Family pinball machine at one family friend’s abode. As much as I enjoy Space Cadet 3D Pinball, Pinball FX, and more recently Ball x Pit, I do miss the tactility of an actual machine—thankfully, I’ve just got a lead on some silver balls near me.
That’s because today I stumbled across Pinball Map, an open-source, crowd-sourced map that documents publicly accessible pinball machines across the globe (via MetaFilter). Beginning in 2008, the map now covers over 51,000 machines situated at more than 12,000 different locations. They’re not all in pubs or bars, with some even being legitimate museum pieces.
As much as I enjoy carefully picking my way through Stella Montis in Arc Raiders, only to be immediately taken out by a trio wearing matching skins and caring not a jot for my frantic cries of ‘Don’t shoot!’, I miss gaming’s physical space heyday. With even tabletop gaming going increasingly virtual and remote, tactility is a declining trend in game design of all stripes.
When things get too heated, the common refrain is often to ‘go touch grass,’ but perhaps it would do us all a world of good to ‘go touch ball.’ Wait, that came out wrong. Failing gassing each other up over high scores in person, I’d also be amenable to an amateur theatre revival of The Who’s 1969 rock opera, Tommy.
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