From Games To Art: Chapter 2 - Pinball December 27, 2010 by


Chapter 1 - Land

“III. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” – Sir Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

“Ju ju: 1.  An object used as a fetish, charm or amulet. 2. The supernatural power ascribed to such an object.” –

The game of pinball has been with humanity for more than three hundreds years. Under the reign of King Louis the 15th, an unknown inventor took a billiard table and reduced it, placing the experience on a fixed, narrow angle. The game was no longer from all angles, but from the point of view of one person, standing in front of the billiard table, getting the balls into the holes on the other end. The invention was demonstrated for the king and his wife at the Château of Bagatelle. The game was a huge success and swept through France. They called it Bagatelle.

1869, a British born inventor, Montague Redgrave, decided to move and settle to America. In his factory in Cincinnati, he created a new version of Bagatelle. He was granted with the patent in 1871 for “improvements in Bagatelle”. The board has a wooden frame, and instead of launching the balls billiard style, there was a wooden plunger that launched the ball into the machine. Redgrave’s design is the modern day template for pinball, as we know it.

Alameda, California is an island located in the San Francisco Bay. The first post office was established in 1854. The majority of its notable historical events have been water based. In 1917, a swimming attraction was created, creatively called Neptune Beach. The park was a major attraction, and was notable for being the first place where the snow cone and the Popsicle were first sold. If the park visitors did well at a game, they had the chance of winning a Kewpie doll. The park hosted many swimming events and was home to some notable races. It closed in 1939 because of the great depression. The residents of Alameda went to see films for entertainment, or traveling shows, or visiting pinball arcades.

Today, in 2010, Alameda no longer has anything like Neptune Beach. However, in a church parking lot, a strange oasis of forgotten American folklore still remains. Sometime in the late 90’s, Michael Schiess, an aspiring artist was working for the Exploratorium, saved up some money, bought a house and rented out the adjacent property. Schiess realized that he didn’t need in his life to be incredibly successful, that he didn’t want a fast car, really, all he wanted was the ability to live and by art supplies.

With his spare time Schiess began thinking about what sort of art he wanted to make. He began being interested in ‘interactive art’. “What is that, what is interactive art? When you go up to it and it does something. And I just thought, you know, painting is, all the art forms, they’re not - they’re lame. They don’t do anything! Well, kinetic art, that’s pretty cool. When I though it through, I realized, it’s pinball. Pinball is interactive kinetic art.” The game of pinball originated for billiards, a game meant to abstract the game golf into a smaller, more manageable setting. The modern day pinball is different from the old Bagatelle. During the golden age of growth for Pinball, in the thirties and late forties, Humpty Dumpty introduced flippers to keep the ball at the top in 1947. What it had essentially done was combine the sports of golf and tennis in a unique, compact, and abstract form.

Schiess purchased forty vintage pinball machines from an old woman started remodeling them with his own art. It was at this time he rediscovered his love of pinball and wanted to show the world something he felt needed to be remembered. It was at this time, when Schiess had just opened up a sort of pinball museum where people could actually play the antiques, that Jim Gruber became interested in Schiess vision, and the two set out to make what they called an ‘arcadium’ (a museum, and an arcade).

Gruber developed an appreciation for pinball as a child. He suffered an accident on an exercycle and the only thing to console him during his convalescence was a pinball machine. “If you look at a pinball machine from any era, it completely exemplifies that time, in the theme, in the art work, the style, the technology that was used, the craftsman’s ship, everything.” Schiess and Gruber created this ‘arcadium’ and they called it Lucky Ju Ju Pinball.

In the Second World War Pinball companies adorned their pinball machines with more patriotic artwork. The artwork was done in many styles of new kind of American exceptionalism that was being born into the propaganda artwork of that era - even foreshadowing the nuclear art style that would pervade in the 1950’s.

Gruber remarked in the same interview for A Life Well Wasted, “Recreation is a completely undervalued commodity in our society. We’re such a consumer culture. We’re all about buying shit to define who we are, and to make us feel whole or satisfied in the day. Pitching horseshoes or playing a game of pool or going fishing, was how people recreated themselves. They found an activity that provided enjoyment and rejuvenation and a release from their everyday worries and stresses.”

Pinball is a unique stepping-stone in the journey towards video games. It is the closest thing to a video game ever conceived before they existed. Pinball is inherently an abstraction, a simplification of something corporeal condescend into something more coherent. Pinball wasn’t a social game necessarily - it defies the concept of a game as stated by McLuhen or others. The experience is singular. Perhaps people had friends standing around them, or others accompanied them to the arcade or bar. The experience of focusing on something directly in front that is not human, in such a distant way, is only found in one other medium – video games.

The sheet of glass distancing the player from the game is evidence enough to how similar pinball is to video games. Pinball isn’t a precursor to video games; it is the first video game – or at least as anything could come close to video games without computer software. But what does pinball have to tell us about video games? Does it show us a vital truth about pinball?

Gruber said, “… Historically pinball’s very commercially successful during times of great economic upheaval. It was hugely popular in the thirties, gigantically popular in the thirties. That’s kinda when it broke loose in America because there was a depression going on, and people needed a cheap thrill in the same way they would go to see a movie cause they could go hang out in an air conditioned building for two or four hours and be transported to some different place, with this whole experience.”

Does pinball take us to the tennis court? Can we really feel like we’ve got a birdie when we get the ball into the hole and the lights flash?

Pinball is dealing with the problem at hand. The problem that the player faces is that the player needs to keep the ball beyond a certain barrier where the game ends. What is clear is that pinball is a game. There are rewards and risks involved. The player has objectives to maximize their time as the ball. The difference between pinball and video games is that you don’t assume the role of anything in the context of the pinball’s universe. You exist solely in the corporeal world as a guiding hand.

Gruber told the interviewer on A Life Well Wasted what made him dedicate his life to pinball, he thought for a moment, smiled and told him, “My mom lived in this town house in Lancaster Pennsylvania that had a remodeled 50’s wet bar in the basement. We parked the pinball machine down there and in the summer time, it’d be like a hundred degrees and totally humid outside and down in the basement it would be totally dry, sixty five, seventy degrees, and my friends would come over and we’d get a six pack of seven up and man, it was on. We’d have these pinball tournaments and I think that was kinda what ruined me in terms of pinball. Because I always associated pinball with good times – with shared good times.”

The social model continues to exist in pinball. More and more the idea that a game is a social experience and is the extension of our social selves continues to be more and more prevalent. What does it mean for art?

Pinball was destroyed by the phenomenon of video games. They came in and took over its popularity and replaced it. However, the theme of pinball wouldn’t be lost, it would continue on, digitized.

Chapter 3 - The Oscillioscope. [Coming soon]

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Some Questions(?)December 1, 2010 by

Is anyone out there?

Where is From Games To Art Chapter 2?


Why haven't I posted some new songs for the day?


Does anyone give a shit?






Zealots by The Fugees, a song about poets.

















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The Law of Diminishing Returns in Relation To The Industrial Military Complex

I am death, I ride

on the dark horse. Scalped hides

adorn my mare. I trade

them for gold. But the future bodes

dark times for me. I will run out

of heads to sell.

And I will find myself in hell.

Songs For The Day






(No we can't)











Find the Introduction here:

Find the first chapter here:


Doc Rieux

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From Games To Art - Games - Chapter 1 November 18, 2010 by


From Games To Art - Games - Chapter 1 - Mr. Moneybags


are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all.” The Judge, Blood Meridian

It’s hot out. It always seems so, so close as they get to the south. Beyond the heat there are trees. Nice green reasonably tall trees. Open fields are plentiful. They say they will start building on them. Right now it’s a small town but eventually it will grow. The B & O railroad passes by every now and again, filled with people or cargo. In 1903 a woman named Elizabeth Magie applied to the US patent office for a board game called The Landlord’s Game. Magie was the follower of Henry George, a the economist that stated that everyone owns what he or she creates, but that everything found in nature, especially in land, belongs to all mankind. Magie used the board game to illustrate Georgist beliefs that monopolies bankrupt others and serve no purpose for the general will of society. It would be 55 years before the oscilloscope. It would be 29 years before Parker Brothers acquired Charles Darrow’s version of the game, aptly called Monopoly. Monopoly would become the most popular board game of all time, almost one billion people of Monopoly since it’s inception in 1934. It would see nearly ten video games on six different platforms. While the inherent message of monopoly is rather manifest, it is doubtful that most of the millions of monopoly player have ever stepped back to understand what they were doing. People play monopoly for fun. They show their love for each other by trying to bankrupt each other. Inherently the board game might not be the best medium for expressing specific allegory in-group mentality. As stated before McLuhan thought the nature of games was the extension of our social selves. Anthropologists have observed in the animal kingdom the way the animals learn essential survival skills, such as social communication, mating, natural dangers, etc. Games for animals are learning tools. To understand the evolution of games in video games, we understand where they come from. Why are video games called games? Why are they labeled in the same vein as Monopoly, dice, gambling, tile games, guessing games, pen and paper games, etc? In Chris Crawford book, Chris Crawford On Game Design defined what a game is.



This is our starting point. The social dynamic of what a game is. No game before the oscilloscope had you playing alone. The game is something that is together. To understand the video game in relation to the “game” aspect of it, we must delve into the corporeal in this incorporeal medium.

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From Games To Art - Introduction November 15, 2010 by

I've teased it quite briefly. I am going to continue on with this. Tell me what you think so far.

From Games To Art

Dr. Rieux (Marcello Ferrara)


Odilon Redon

Let me ask you something, what is not art?

Author Unknown

Too low they build, who build beneath the stars

Edward Young

Night VIII, l. 215

“The historian’s


What determines art?

I became a gamer when I was in the hospital. I must have been eight or nine. I was there for two weeks and it was the worst experience of my life. I was transported from the playgrounds and classrooms and gymnasiums to empty white hallways, with a needle perpetually hooked into my arm. I didn’t feel human. I forgot what it was to be that way, if I had ever been that way anyway. A nurse would come by every once and a while but then they would be gone and I would be alone again – with this thing, sticking out of my arm. My parents and family would come as often as they could, but they had work so I was alone for sometime. I would sometimes walk around, with dragging my IV meter with me. I didn’t like my room, it was small and just white, no colors anywhere. One day I walked past a white door with a little window and I heard some noises. I walked inside and saw three television screens and on one a boy playing something. He was playing Super Mario Bros. 3. He turned back to face me. He didn’t have any hair. He smiled and told me that this game was awesome. He handed me the controller. I started playing. The character on screen jumped and ran. He was supposed to find a princess. He was alive and moving, something that I didn’t feel like I was doing in that place. I reminded myself who I once was. I was reminded in that hospital, that I was still alive. That is what art is to me, human expression, the mirror of ourselves – and without it we wouldn’t be able to see ourselves as clearly. The distinction from “games” to “art” is that it is more transparent who we are in art, and in games it is barely noticeable beyond the pixels or actions. This idea is similar to Wilde, to Rodin, to Camus, to Freud, to Frye and to many others. It states that art is fundamentally part of us.

Marshall McLuhan once wrote that medium is the message and the message changes based on what characteristics are present. Though this is not the primary focus of this work, video games are about interaction and some of the more “artistic” efforts play to this respect. Undoubtedly the significant medium qualities that make video games will be apparent in the description of the “game” and the “art”.

Marshall McLuhan, in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, labeled his section on “games” as “The Extensions of Man”. He wrote, Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are the extensions of social man and of the body politic, as the technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image… That games are the extensions, not of our private but of our social selves, and that they are media of communication, should be now plain… Games are situations contrived to permit simultaneous participation of many people in some significant pattern of their own corporate lives.

McLuhan wrote this book in the late 60’s. When he says “games” he means gambling, board games and so forth. God knows what he would say about video games if he were alive today. But that is where we begin. And his words will echo through the game portion of this document. Games are not the extension of our private selves but of our social selves. Video games have an important distinction, they are ourselves, when someone watches a film, he says “I am watching life, when someone is playing a game, they say “this is my life”. Video games are the extension of ourselves and the game part is taking yourself somewhere else, and forgetting about where you came from. It is essentially fun.

The point of this is document the two parallel paths in video games since the beginning, the game and the art. The first part will focus on the game. The second will focus on the art. Whatever it all means, it should be clear by the end. It will begin not with video games, where it will begin is with games.

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