research-article

Implementing games on pinball machines

Authors:

Nathan SturtevantAuthors Info & Claims

FDG '10: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

Pages 240 - 247

https://doi.org/10.1145/1822348.1822380

Published: 19 June 2010 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

Almost no research has been done on designing pinball games although much research has been done on designing video games. We are interested in designing pinball games on pinball machines to teach computer science students about how to interface to mechanical systems in a fun and motivating way. Thus, we have developed a pinball machine interface between a PC and a recent Lord of the Rings pinball machine. We demonstrate that it is easy to innovate pinball games by designing and implementing Pinhorse, a pinball game that avoids some of the design problems of existing pinball games. For example, it features a true multiplayer mode where each player directly influences the game of the other player within a limited amount of play time. This paper describes both our innovative pinball game and the hardware and software of our pinball machine interface that enables game designers to develop such pinball games on real pinball machines.

References

[1]

J. Bork. Controlling a pinball machine using Linux. Linux Journal, 139, 2005.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

J. Bork. Reverse engineering a microcomputer-based control unit. Master's thesis, Industrial Technology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green (Ohio), 2005.

Google Scholar

[3]

Business Roundtable. Tapping America's potential: The education for innovation initiative, 7 2005.

Google Scholar

[4]

D. Clark. An inexpensive real-time testbed - the pinball player project. In Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Real-Time Applications, pages 86--88, 1994.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[5]

D. Clark. Progress toward an inexpensive real-time testbed: The pinball player project. In Proceedings of the Real-Time Educational: Second Workshop, pages 72--79, 1997.

Google Scholar

[6]

R. Cohen. Designing an experimental pinball wizard. The Electronic System Design Magazine, 19, 1989.

Google Scholar

[7]

M. Cutumisu, C. Onuczko, M. McNaughton, T. Roy, J. Schaeffer, A. Schumacher, J. Siegel, D. Szafron, K. Waugh, M. Carbonaro, H. Duff, and S. Gillis. ScriptEase: A generative/adaptive programming paradigm for game scripting. Science of Computer Programming, 67(1):32--55, 2007.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

S. Gustafsson, J. Munoz, S. Norell, D. Real, and Y. Xiao. Smart pinball project - final report. Technical report, Skolan för Elektro-och Systemteknik, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (Sweden), 2004.

Google Scholar

[9]

G. Lichtenberg and J. Neidig. An example of hybrid systems control: The pinball machine. Technical Report 2003.13, Lehrstuhl für Automatisierungstechnik and Prozessinformatik, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum (Germany), 2003.

Google Scholar

[10]

M. Rossignoli. The Complete Pinball Book. Schiffer, 1999.

Google Scholar

[11]

N. Sturtevant, H. Hoover, J. Schaeffer, S. Gouglas, M. Bowling, F. Southey, M. Bouchard, and G. Zabaneh. Multidisciplinary students and instructors: A second-year games course. In ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, pages 383--387, 2008.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[12]

M. Zyda. Creating a science of games. Communications of the ACM, 50(7):26--29, 2007.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[13]

M. Zyda and S. Koenig. Teaching artificial intelligence playfully. In Proceedings of the AAAI-08 Education Colloquium, pages 90--95, 2008.

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Beszédes B(2023)Artificial Education Process Environment for Electro- Pneumatic System2023 IEEE 6th International Conference and Workshop Óbuda on Electrical and Power Engineering (CANDO-EPE)10.1109/CANDO-EPE60507.2023.10418034(000175-000180)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CANDO-EPE60507.2023.10418034

Index Terms

Implementing games on pinball machines

Recommendations

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games: the past, present, and future
Theoretical and Practical Computer Applications in Entertainment

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are emerging in the computer game industry as a very popular genre. These games have existed since the late 1990s, but in the last few years the market has become increasingly strong. This ...
Towards a Constructionist Serious Game Engine
CompSysTech '16: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies 2016

Game developers have been using commercial game engines to create serious games. The development of serious game is a process that requires game and instructional design. Constructionist environments and games are becoming more popular in the last years ...
Writing real-time .net games in casanova
ICEC'12: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Entertainment Computing

In this paper we show the Casanova language (and its accompanying design pattern, Rule-Script-Draw) in action by building a series of games with it. In particular we discuss how Casanova is suitable for making games regardless of their genre: the Game ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

FDG '10: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

June 2010

306 pages

ISBN:9781605589374

DOI:10.1145/1822348

Conference Chair:
Ian Horswill
Northwestern University
,
Program Chair:
Yusuf Pisan
University of Technology, Sydney

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 June 2010

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

Conference

FDG '10

Sponsor:

Microsoft
SASDG

FDG '10: International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

June 19 - 21, 2010

California, Monterey

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

1
Total Citations
View Citations
262
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)21
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7

Reflects downloads up to 23 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Beszédes B(2023)Artificial Education Process Environment for Electro- Pneumatic System2023 IEEE 6th International Conference and Workshop Óbuda on Electrical and Power Engineering (CANDO-EPE)10.1109/CANDO-EPE60507.2023.10418034(000175-000180)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CANDO-EPE60507.2023.10418034

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games: the past, present, and future

Towards a Constructionist Serious Game Engine

Writing real-time .net games in casanova