Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 272)

Trigger Happy
274
With Western slot machines, the bottom line is how
much money the thing spews out at the end. With
pinball, with which Pachinko obviously has a lot in
common mechanically, the object of the game is to
amass a different kind of currency—the social capital
(in French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology)
of the arcade or bar: a high score. (Remember, the first
successful arcade game was sited next to a pinball
machine in a bar.) But Pachinko is purer than either of
these alternatives. Players do not eye each other’s piles
of balls. They are fixated on their own machines,
seemingly hypnotized.
This hypnotic effect of Pachinko is in part caused
by the startling beauty of the showers of silver balls
bouncing around the board. If you remember studying
Brownian motion under a microscope at school—the
jiggling, dodgem-like movement of tiny particles
bouncing off others—the Pachinko balls offer the same
kind of random-seeming fascination. In fact, neither
Brownian motion nor that of Pachinko balls is random;
they are both governed by physical laws that are, at
least in principle, deterministic. But they are
unpredictable, given the impossibility of measuring
accurately each system’s initial conditions (they exhibit
chaotic behavior).