This summer I got the chance to make a couple visits to the newly opened Silverball Museum in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Imagine a hundred pinball machines from 1933 to 1979 lined up for review, comparison, and hands-on play. Cards over each machine pointing out its historical context and any unique or innovative features.
It’s interesting to see what changed over the years and what didn’t. With rare exception the game makers grabbed and held to some basic defining conventions–playfield, flipper controls, and backbox scoring display. Why? Because players immediately recognized a thing with these pieces not as furniture or machine but
as a game.
Foursquare 2009 meet 4Square 1971
Last month I saw that the new versions of GetGlue and BrightKite are sporting number boxes in a visual layout similar to FourSquare. It’s not exactly duplicate functionality–the numbers mean different things. But for those who’ve gotten used to FourSquare, the visceral reaction is:
“Hey, that’s my score! Cool–another game!”
Sure, it remains to be seen whether this site or that one succeeds as well as or better than FourSquare. But as we start arriving at conventions, we define a different kind of space. Instead of one game, we now have an arcade…
—
- If you’re within 100 miles of Asbury Park, go to the Silverball Museum.
- On the original games, the box was called the scoring reel, because the numbers flipped. To go “over the top” was to flip past all 9’s on the scoring reel. For more pinball terminology, check out the Internet Pinball Machine Database Glossary.
- If the three number layout is lifted from somewhere else, let me know the ultimate origin (Doom?)
