 Marquette, is that considered a public space? Just give me a kind of all of her seat. No problem. So I'm going to be talking about the world of virtual pinball as kind of a cultural artifact. And as an advocate, I'm also going to talk to you about being an advocate for alternative design experiences to create narratives, which the design artifact, which you see in front of you, was the big influence, not only in this talk, but in the work that I do. So I'm going to do a quick introduction. And then we're going to talk about community. Community is what drives this subculture. And without the community, I don't think we would have any access to visual pinball unless it was a paid experience from a large provider. So who am I? Well, I'm a creative technologist. That's kind of what I've settled on, I guess. I'm also a PhD candidate at Georgia Tech. I have an MFA in Integrated Media Arts, an MS in digital media. And I hope to submit my thesis around this time next year. Not my thesis, my dissertation. So the artifact you see in front of you is actually a really great way to procrastinate writing anything, and it's been that for about four months. Little subtext, this was just finished Monday, Mike? No, you're still working. I'm still working on it. Yes, yes, yes. That's a really good answer. That's a terribly too good answer. But I'll just show you some background in my work. I have two pieces of work up right now in Atlanta. One's called Prana. It's on the side of the Hard Rock Reverb Hotel. The other one's at Georgia Tech on something that we call the Media Bridge. It's an inverted LED screen. I work with screens. I have worked with screens my whole life. I started off as a documentary filmmaker, an editor, a shooter, a producer. And I moved on to doing more art. There's Prana actually moving. It's an animated piece. And it's a single point perspective piece. This goes way back to the second renaissance. It's used in digital billboards or 3D billboards as the community likes to call them. I've also done work in robotics in 360 video. But all of the work that I've done over the past 15 years has influenced this. And it influences every piece of work after that. And I don't think I've done the same thing twice, which is kind of the thing. So it's hard to figure out where I fit. But within the past five years, I think I've figured that out a little bit. I've also done documentary work and I was a stereoscopic cinematographer for a while during the 3D craze. Now, this is just a piece. But more importantly, all of this work, including visual pinball, it's a narration. It's a narration of a story. And using practice as a research opportunity, I believe is one of the most important, one of the most important tenets in interdisciplinary teaching and interdisciplinary practice. So this whole conversation that I wanna have with you folks today is about, ah, there you are, Lee. I got her permission, by the way. This is about, and this is in the context of working with a community. Whether that community is at your local college, is at your local maker space, is online. The possibilities to create new things, using new emergent nostalgic mediums, I think that's a new term, is there everywhere. So the big thing is all my work has kind of revolved around electronic mediation and illusionism. And that's exactly what visual pinball is. Visual pinball, if you're not familiar, is using the same tenets and metrics of traditional pinball, physical pinball, in a virtual form, okay? But before we talk about that, we have to, is everybody familiar with pinball? Everybody was at Reclaim Arcade, okay. I'm not a historian, nor do I know everything about pinball, okay. I've been in this community for about two years and have been a lurker, and only in the past four months have I actually applied what I've learned in these communities to this work. But with that said, this all started with me buying a mechanical 1969 airport Gottlieb machine last year. So let's talk about it, in the context of the Reclaim Conference. What was? This was actually printed on a Gottlieb machine in 1962, something like that. Amusement pinball, as American as baseball and hot dogs. One thing to really understand is that pinball is uniquely American. It was kind of invented and popularized in Ohio. It's not something that is or was worldwide until the 70s and 80s. And when we think about pinball, what do we think about when we think about pinball? Now you guys all, did everybody play pinball yesterday at Reclaim Arcade? Okay, great. Just yell it out. What comes to mind? What do you think about? Colors. Colors. Noise. Noise. Lights. Lights. Noise. The chaos. It's a chaotic game. It's a chaotic physical game that you can feel. It also has a lot of interventions on your own agency too, right? So we have the machines. We have the games that are played on the machines. We have the sounds. We have the locational context, right? If you look at Reclaim Arcade, their context is as important as who fills it. From the moment you walk in the door, it is changing your contextual awareness into another time, into another space, and you can enjoy it differently. And that's what physical storytelling does. So the game was kind of, it came from Bagatell. This is actually a real comic with Abraham Lincoln of him playing Bagatell with his generals. So we know that it goes back to the mid to late 1800s, which is always pretty cool. But as we know, this is a uniquely American art form, and it's commercially produced, right? It's considered low art. It's gaming. It was in gambling halls, okay? There's a great documentary, not a documentary, there's a great film out that's based on a true story called Pinball. It's about the legalization of pinball in New York City because the big question that it tries to answer very uniquely, it's a great movie. Is it skill, or is it luck? Is it chance, right? Or is it natural ability? But what makes this a very unique platform in which to develop for is that it was created by electrical and mechanical engineers and designers and artists, right? That's what we all are. That's what this conference ultimately is about. What can we create from these three spectrums of makers, right? So it is an analog blend of skill. These are some really great machines. The electromechanical systems, if you've ever seen inside of one of these, and I actually forgot to put a photo there, sorry about that. It is a mechanical computer. It is mechanical logic, right? And it always was. It was built by the engineers that built the first card counting computers, okay? Combined with artists and storytellers. And it's analog, uniquely analog. So 17s and 80s, we had some pop, reached kind of peak popularity. It was supplanted by video games in the 80s and many cabinet makers, Balli and Stern, they transitioned into video game making and video game cabinet making. Stern pinball, they're still around, oh no, sorry, Gottlieb pinball, still around. No, is Gottlieb still around? Gottlieb, no, Stern is. Stern is, Stern's still around, they make physical pinball machines. But Gottlieb made a lot of pinball machines. They also made Cubert, okay? So cabinet and game design and pinball and video games, they all go hand in hand. It's a remediation, I work with a gentleman at Tech called, his name is Jay Bolter and he kind of came up with this term called remediation and it's about understanding that one medium absorbs another, the previous medium as it replaces it. So this is kind of, this is the scene where it all started. I just bought my pinball machine and showed my son back to the future for the first time and I realized that, you know, what's so funny about a pinball machine and the parts is that it looks complex, okay? It feels complex. And until you see the inside of it, the magic's all hidden, right? There's a suspension of disbelief. So this remediation in the early 80s started with video games being added to pinball cabinets. The most famous one is Baby Pac-Man right here. It's a very, very rare cabinet and I didn't see it at Reclaim Arcade this year, but maybe next year. There's also Caveman and then there's a Centipede. I don't know if this is Nat Home version, but the play field looks a little too nice to be a Nat Home version. So this combination was essentially the pinball manufacturers losing their grip and coming to terms with the new wave of video games, okay? And then another video game that I think most of us may be, I don't know, depending on your age around here, most of us may be familiar with, Space Cadet was a default program on Windows XP. Only overshadowed by Solitaire. The great standard of casual gaming experiences. But this was a pseudo 3D pinball experience and I kind of see visual pinball as, this is the inflection point, right? This is the point where we started to think about pinball. We started to think about some of these physical games that we used to play, that we used to have an attachment to differently. So let's talk about what is, where are we right now at this moment? Physical pinball is making a huge comeback. Boomers, Gen X, and nostalgia for that matter is driving this force. We also have virtual pinball, okay? That's what you see right here. It can be called virtual pinball, visual pinball, video pinball. Ultimately we call it V pin, okay? Kind of puts all those things. It's kind of like the XR versus AR, VR, Mixed Reality. But the main generation, casual gamers, online subcultures, and the DIY community are driving these experiences, and they're driving them in several different ways. One of the big ways that they're driving them is through hardware, software, and design communities, okay? Some of the design communities that are out there provide the hardware experience. This is emulation at a physical level, okay? This is a digital intermediate between the physical and the electronic, all right? So we use things like 7.1 surround sound USB hubs, and we take each channel and we send it to transducers, which is essentially a speaker without a cone. That gives us our haptics of a real pinball machine. We use video playfields that provide 3D effects. This machine has an Xbox Connect that does head tracking for even more immersive 3D effects. We can add a video panel in here that uses active shutter glasses to get more 3D effects. Increasing the immersion without having to wear a headset, although that is a very popular way to consume. VPin Games is using a headset with a really advanced controller, and it's one of the most immersive fun experiences I've had, and this machine is set up to eventually take a VR headset, which is another affordance of a narrative device like this. So we have DMDs, which is a digital matrix display. These LED screens, they used to be plasma, but now we use LCD screens that emulate that technology. We have three different pieces here. We have what's called a back glass, okay? The DMD is right here, and then we have a play field. Now, but we also have mods. The community has modded this to make alternative cabinets, smaller cabinets, vertical cabinets, okay? That create the physicality of a pinball game to a degree and allow you to play it in all new different ways, which means that if you choose to create your own VPin game, it doesn't have to be with this. It can be with what, Tim? You did it once, right? You take your monitor, you turn it sideways. Oh yeah. Okay? You put it on your desk and you play pinball, okay? It's just that simple. You can mod with toppers. There's all sorts of people. There's also sorts of communities and companies out there. Arcade One Up is one of them. Legends Pinball is another. Arcade One Up and Legends Pinball, by the way, are great modding communities to get into as an entry point because you can buy these machines that are already built. And that's usually like the point that people don't wanna build stuff like this, but you can buy all a pinball machine, buy a Legends Pinball machine, mod the heck out of it to do whatever you want, okay? We also have folks in the community like Cleveland Software Design. They make small board computers. That's what's right here. There's a very small board that interacts with a solenoid from a vehicle, a 12-volt solenoid, that gives you the feel of a real flipper solenoid moving. We also have the software side. Now this is, I'm not gonna talk about copyright intentionally. I don't wanna go over my time. I'm gonna dance around it but tell you how it's dealt with in the community. This software is not emulation. It's a hybrid version. It's a remixed version. The software that's most commonly used is, let's see, is a future pinball and visual pinball. They're both kind of based on the same code base. It's, and it uses a very simple, accessible code base to program from, but they're all GUIs. It looks like a text editor. This is essentially what you see. What the community has done is taken tables and taken photos of it, recorded all the sounds, and created homages to Deadpool, homages to real tables, but they've also made tables that never existed. So not only are we emulating and recreating real physical interactive experiences, but we're creating new ones. And I think that's where the power of this lies. So the software that you use, it's a simulator and an editor. So you build and you play in it. It has a single point perspective that you can modify. And there's some really cool things that I mean, you get to in a minute. This is all very, very approachable, okay? We, as designers, as artists, are often flummoxed by new technology and new ways to apply it. Actually, this room is probably that wire in that context, but if we can think of ways to create new experiences, we can think about how we tell a story differently and kind of use the affordances of a platform like this to tell very unique stories. So the online communities tend to, are unbelievably thriving, but from being a lurker in these communities for years and interacting with these communities, I found that these online communities tend to really rely on the traditional standards. Forums, blog posts, trading PDFs, okay? They do have a Discord channel, but it's crickets. So that tells me what the demographics are, right? Folks that are comfortable with this type of online interaction. These online communities are also code bases, okay? These are all open source communities. This is actually the visual pinball, or VPIN, VPINball, that is, and it's connected and sustained by VPIN forums. The largest online repository of not only tables and code, but of knowledge, experience. This is the VPIN program. Technically, this is actually Star Wars. Okay, this is a Star Wars game. I'll probably fire that up on this one, but this is not an exact recreation, but they do have a lot of heavy lifting from all the films, all that IP that's from it. And more importantly, you may have seen this. This is a ROM download. And one of the reasons why there's a photo of this ROM is because you're downloading, you're not downloading the artwork. You can't do that. You can do that with MAME, right? Get the sprites, get the artwork, get the rules of the game. These ROMs are the rules only. They're what light turns on when, they're what sound clicks when, and they're usually the basis for homebrew VPIN games. You start with a good ROM, you build a table on top of it. You don't reinvent the wheel. The community has really played at their strengths and their strengths is in design. So as we kind of move forward and think about things a little bit differently and make a turn, Future Pinball is another one. This one actually is the kind of highest grade. It uses real 3D tools, ray tracing, ambient occlusion, all of these things that we use in programs like Gimp and Blender and these types of things. And a lot of these open source programs, design programs integrate directly into a visual pinball and Future Pinball. The hottest communities out there, like I said, are just the traditional forums, but they're also Facebook. I mean, we're talking 24,000 members in the Pinball Repair Help Group, which is more than happy to help you build your own cabinet that uses all real pinball parts to display video pinball. We also have, this is just a good example. I actually took this about four hours ago, took this screenshot. This is the type of collaboration that I'm talking about. These are the type of communities that I'm talking about. This game was just released, but it's based off of a ROM from Stern in 2012. And the ROM that you download isn't, you know, a torrent, isn't on Usenet, although those exist. It's downloaded directly from the Stern Pinball site. It's the logic. And Tim, is this true? When you get updates, are they over-the-air updates for modern pinball machines? Yeah, they're all... Modern ones have started adding Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi, right? But some of the non-so-modern ones, you update the logic. And that logic is freely available. Whether or not it's encrypted, I'm not too sure. I'm sure the older stuff is not. So when we think about all these things, the communities that support this new medium, what are some of the things that we can do with it? Traditionally, pinball is associated with popular IP, right? We're talking about, you know, Foo Fighters, Ghostbusters, ooh, Stranger Things, Rush, Aerosmith, okay? These all play to what you guys saw yesterday. It's fun, it's exciting, it's loud, it feels good. But what if we had one that wasn't based on Ghostbusters and it was based on an 80s film starring LeBar Burton, called Roots. Anybody seen Roots before? Okay. So what would it look like? How could we intervene? Can we create a table that explains climate crisis? Can we create a table that tells individual stories of the BIPOC community? Can we talk about economic justice through VPAN narratives? Can we talk about a specific subset of what racial justice would look like? Can we talk about women's rights? These are tables I've not found online, but I intend to work with others who can help me tell these stories. So what do we have with this table? What are the affordances? How can we design? Well, I would say the most important design aspect is this position of power, okay? It gives you a god-like agency over the game. You are not sitting and looking up at the television, okay? You are standing over it. You are looking down. It's very similar to The Sims or Sim City, any of those games, right? This three-quarter perspective. You affect what happens on the table. You push it, you pull it, you tilt it. We have haptics, right? These are meant to emulate a real pinball machine, to increase immersion. But with haptics, we can create different haptics, okay? We can use heat. We can use dielectric cooling. We can use all sorts of things that can be triggered with an on-off DC switch. So we have knocks, clips, bumps, low-frequency vibration, and more importantly, we can use alternative controller methods, right? It has USB, you know? We have small board computing that gives us all of our IOs. We have accessible tools. They're free. They use Visual Basic, .NET, Blender, GIMP. They have a physical design language where you can say, this is a bumper, okay? This is a ball. This is a ramp. These are all things that are out there. They've been out there for 50, 60 years. And you have these interaction layers with small board computers, okay? And what that necessarily means is that you can use multiple screens, addressable LEDs, anything that needs to be turned on or off. So looking at VPNs as a platform, you pretty much have your run. You can kind of imagine anything. But the foundation is there. But you also have things that you look at what Microsoft is doing with the Xbox and the adaptive controllers over the past two years. PlayStation just came out with an adaptive controller. But we can cater to those who traditionally cannot play these types of games, right? We can design with physical interactions that are custom to folks with physical disabilities. We can custom design cabinets and tables to do research for folks with neurodivergent difficulties in their life, okay? Physical therapy, ADHD, dyslexia. My daughter was just diagnosed with dyslexia last year. And one of the things she loves doing is playing physical games. I actually installed a smart board in our basement specifically for this. Because the research says you get your body involved, whatever you're learning is being reinforced, right? So these alternative control methods I think are a really powerful tool. So when we really think about this, when we really think about this talk and what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to be an advocate for using alternative mediums in which to tell narratives, in which to do research. It doesn't have to be this. This is just a manifestation of an interest of mine, okay? But we can look at other communities. We can build those communities. We can help foster those communities. We can look at this as a very novel way to get things like grant funding. We can look at this as a novel way to pursue interdisciplinary research with applied sciences, physics, biology, philosophy, computer science, traditional digital narrative, art and design. There are untapped opportunities in this. You don't have to build this if you want to, you can. You can buy one. But all the tools are there and they're just ripe for the picking. So a lot of these tables that the community does, they're all remix tables. They're all reconfigured. And it's also a way to introduce practice into students' lives, departments, researchers, using practice to pursue research and to pursue those contributions to the academy that I think that we have in our silos that we'd never usually get to apply and work with other folks. I'm a big proponent of interdisciplinary work, especially in the applied sciences, which is kind of like an overall goal. So that's it. I had my 30 minutes. I feel good about myself. Any questions? I'm also gonna be talking at the end keynote, I think, so. Yes. You know it's just your day and some seem to have a strong narrative and some were really just kind of banging the ball around. Well, when your design intent is entertainment, right? Narrative kind of falls to the side in a little bit, right? I think there's even more of a suspension of disbelief in video games and for all intents and purposes, this is a video game. You know, narratives help influence new learning and understanding where the game influences that engagement, right? It increases the engagement time. It creates, I think something like this goes beyond novelty in that the way that you interact with it is a subversive way to tell original changing narratives. Narrators that matter, not narratives like the Foo Fighters as a Saturday morning cartoon. Like I don't give a shit about that. What I do care about is telling stories and helping people understand through empathy, right? There was once, I think what, five years ago, six years ago, we started calling virtual reality the empathy machine and that didn't really pan out. But we're still searching for ways to transport people into another time and another place to understand the experience of others. And like it might become, you know, you light this one up and you hear the 10 second description of how the Hijira album got written and that's, and that feels tacked on even as I say it, I don't love the concept, but just in playing with what's an alternative historical narrative, that actually does kind of match my experience of just going into a record store and this is interesting, oh, I wonder about it. And that's kind of all. It's interesting and it's interesting to think of how different that is from a brand of biography of Donnie Mitchell. Yeah, yeah, and you get a different subset of people to engage in that, right? Once that normally wouldn't read the books. Because Amanda was playing one last night that had a strong audio narrative. So I was actually getting more story standing next to her playing her game than I was getting out of the game I was playing because of the audio. Yeah, well, the social component's a big part of it too. You look at all the photos I use, there's people standing around these games, right? Watching other people play. It's a very traditional thing. There's a very thick online community of pinballers streaming on Twitch, right? They have a camera on the back box, a camera on the play field and the camera on them. People like to see that. And through that kind of ancillary observation, I think there's still kind of, there's still places where we can inject narrative and learning and understanding. Cool, I did my job if there's no questions. Cool? Could you alter the physics based on gameplay? 100%. You can alter the physics at any time. Just thinking, again, it would be kind of interesting to be playing something with a spiky narrative or maybe something like climate change. 100%. It might be interesting to either model the, it's a compounding problem, so the game's gonna keep getting faster or even. Now we're under water and everything goes slower. Who says you have to win, right? You make, if you make a. I've never beaten a pinball game. I mean, well that's the thing, right? Like you can make it, you can make it a, if it's free play, you make it a 23, 25 minute experience where you don't win. Or you win if you just do something very specific, right? And you can curate these narratives in very interesting ways because you can change the play field at any time, right? You can inject full motion video. You have three video screens, a camera, a depth camera, 15 inputs, seven rumble motors, and in this one, 2,000 watts of audio power to, sorry, that came out very like Tim Allen, I guess, but you have all of this at your disposal at any moment. And the soft, and the important thing is the software's there. You know, it's not. It's not difficult, well it's straightforward. That's my new term. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying it's not difficult. It's straightforward because you have the community support really, okay? Cool. Thank you. I'm gonna have this downstairs playing for the rest of the time I'm here today, I guess. What are you gonna do with it once you bring it home? So I have, there are two.