Trigger Happy
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).
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