Hope Springs
At a pinball museum, there is always a certain optimism: this thing, at least, has not been getting shittier.
Outside it was the last Saturday of May: a soap-sunny sky, the quiet smell of salt, no fight for parking spots on Webster, the healing garden reserved for a birthday party, and a four-dad jazz band playing on the museum's threshold. Inside the games of skill, however, it was the same day as any other, a day of bings and trills and extra balls. A convenient day to forget which May’s last Saturday it was—a major pursuit in 2025 exactly.
Still there is a history here, more than one. The first room’s games are ancient bagatelles through the early seventies, slow in play and sober with their points, ten per rubbered bump. Often their theme is woman, in her bikini, totem of your jouissance. In the later rooms, on faster tables, there are so many sound effects you can’t hear them individually, until the ambient dad-jazz anchors a general dopamine bebop.
A history of dopamine, then: bands, clunks, then bings, then LEDs and AC/DC licenses, eventually entire tablet computers, and the chance to select a Star Wars hero with the bumpers. A history of inflation: by 1991’s Terminator II console you are getting 10,000 points per bumper-hit, and more sounds all the time. A history of scammy coin operation: helpful to gray-market casinos, then money launderers, and then the marketers of films.
A history, too, of enterprises. By the third and most modern room, points and woman give way to world-saving conceits, like the slaying of zombies or terminators. In one favorite, the player puts out the Great Chicago Fire. In another, they are invited to destroy a Death Star jeweled with green LEDs. Teleology will have a telos of its own, and the fate of all enterprises is to invent a way that they themselves are saving the world.
Today’s clientele, before the summer tide of tweens—children and their mostly-dads, a few ringers getting their admissions' worth—clusters toward the present. We like things this way, after all: fast and high-scoring, with voice acting, many ways to activate the Multiball, and hand sanitizer stands in every room. Together we labor at local perfection, learning to hold the ball in the pocket of the flipper, to juggle it between our twitchy hands and zing it up the indicated ramp. Two buttons, a gun, sometimes a tilt. Better controls than life or history in this anxious May. Good enough to blow up the Death Star, if we can only read the signals in the lighted letters. Pow, screeches a child beside us, bleem! It is the sound of agency.
An ominous form, pinball? A stanza from the prehistory of TikTok, gacha, and the NFT, one that reveals our true desires to hear some bing sounds while we scam ourselves, and for a little screen to tell us we are heroes who have learned the secret code? No. For here in the dark carpeted clamor there is a serial drama of hope: little gleaming things, lifted one by one from tombs, sustained briefly by collisions intentional and otherwise, setting their little world ablaze. But the ball always frets its way downstage, always eludes sustaining hands. Pinball does not lie about death.
Nor, we think, does it lie about life. Some years the ball does spring straight back down the middle, seeks as if by magnets the wide defeating lanes, avoids support. Not every fire can be put out, not every ball retrieved. And yet at the Pacific Pinball Museum the fight does go on. The next ball will carry on the work, maybe guided by a little luck and maybe by a defter hand. It is a game of skill. Hitting the lanes is a matter of timing. And then the Death Star, though briefly dark, will hang there in the cage, waiting to be destroyed again tomorrow, and all summer, and the summer after that.
