[game_edu] Pinball machines useful in teaching game theory?

[Ian Schreiber]

>Quick learners: What I enjoy discussing with students is how pinball

>machines and most 80’s arcade games differ from many console games my

>students like to play. Pinball and 80’s arcade games required a short

>learning curve ie: if it cost more than a few quarters to obtain some

>sense of success you lost your customer. 


And also how games were designed to make you lose in 3 minutes or less, because the business model required a steady stream of quarter inputs. A lot of students who grew on in the NES/SNES era don't realize just how *difficult* early games were. I take great pleasure in bringing in an Atari Flashback and watching my students (who usually consider themselves pretty good gamers) die in a few seconds on Yars' Revenge or Pitfall :)


>Multi-player: Some of the later Pinball machines provided multiplayer

>gaming although it required taking turns.  I am also trying to remember

>if the concept of TOP Score first started on some of the later pinball

>machines. Anyone recall? 


I believe the first pinball game that allowed the player to enter their initials for high score was High Speed (Williams, 1986), so this is a case where pinball lagged behind arcade games by quite a few years.
 
This could also lead to a discussion of UI, because a lot of early pinball games that allowed entry of initials had an absolutely horrendous interface for doing so (admittedly, having only a left and right button are going to make just about anything seem counterintuitive). See what kind of initial-entry methods your students could come up with, and compare to what the machines actually did.


      
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