After watching Mahalo Daily 094 on the topic of pinball, a now mostly dead gaming platform, I've been thinking more about tactility in games and how pinball may not be dead afterall.
I kind of missed pinball. Gaming for me was straight on to Atari and ZX Spectrum but the one thing that has been mostly missing in modern gaming is tactility but it is there.

After getting an Xbox 360, I picked up Lego Star Wars which I had semi-played before on PC. You could say it's a kiddie game, but that's probably only in its face value appeal. Lego Star Wars is a fantastic game because it's so tactile. All the little sounds, blocks, everything, is so touchable, it's almost edible - you can feel the game through the screen.

Watching Mahalo Daily also reminded me that one of the games I found completely addictive on my first 486sx-25 PC (after Doom and Tie Fighter of course) was plain old Pinball. And this was also true of desktop games on Windows.

Pinball, even in its most basic, is so tactile that you just can't help playing it. You can feel the weight of the ball due to the game physics. You feel it when you smack it up the table.

I think tactility in games is the next thing. It's coming in already without really being identified - vibrating controllers, chest pads, the Wii.

I appreciate the effort, but don't really understand the whole vibrating controller thing and why they get so much attention. A pinball game on ZX Spectrum had more tactility than some modern games even with their vibrations.

The point is it's in the programming. Lego is made so well that it doesn't actually need anything else. Other games could do so much more to bring this immersive sense of touch to games. The closest many first-person shooters get is a mild recoil on firing accompanied by a non-descript buzz on the controller.

Pinball comeback

Ok, so pinball may not exactly make a comeback, but I think there is a lot to learn from them in modern games. Lego Star Wars is addictive because it's so tasty. N+ does a similar thing with its sense of physics.

I can't ever remember picking up a 'force feedback' controller and thinking "Wow, it makes it feel like I'm really in the game". Lego does it even without vibrations.

Let's hope the games industry takes tactility more seriously and that such elements get over the gimmick factor (as with the Wii). After all, some great games get missed out, not because there is anything wrong with the story or the graphics, but because they are missing an element of immersion or interactivity - a tactility.

Ok so maybe Lego has an unfair advantage in this considering it is all block and we have all touched the real thing but surely throwing a grenade could have more tactility than some falling Lego bricks in a game?

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Posted By Justin Fleming to Justin Fleming's Fuchsia Shock - Freelance UK webdesign & marketing, ideas man and muse on 4/08/2008 12:47:00 PM