The Pinball Guide To Creativity
// February 18th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // creativity, creativity theory, metaphor
As a teenager, the KISS pinball machine was my absolute favorite. I was crazy about KISS, and playing that machine catapulted me into the world of a KISS concert: I could feel the make-up, the noise, the pyrotechnics and the excitement with all my senses.
While playing, I didn’t just feel I was watching a concert. For that brief time I felt like I was in the band, performing.
This is how I feel when I get lost in the creative process, too. When I’m really firing creatively I feel like I’ve entered another world. My state of mind changes, the imagination takes over and shifts that world around until something new and exciting is born.
Pinball machines and creativity…here goes:
The Back-glass:
The back-glass sits on top of the pinball machine with an exciting visual display that attracts players.
The main job of the back-glass is to carry the metaphor of the game. Every pinball machine is based on a metaphor. This allows the player to build an imaginary world which serves as a container for what are, really, a generic mix of plastic, rubber and metal bits bouncing a ball around a tilted surface.
Metaphors are essential to the creative process. Creativity is born from our ability to take seemingly unrelated ideas (bits of plastic rubber and metal and a rock concert, for example) and bring them together to create something new.
The Plunger:
The plunger is a small spring-loaded handle you pull back on and release to launch the ball. Here is the momentum needed to launch into your creative project.
This part of the machine is where the physical momentum begins. But there’s also the aspect of mental momentum.
If you’ve ever played pinball for a while, you more than likely developed a ritual around launching the ball into action. Mine usually kicked in while waiting for the ball to get into position for the next shot. It went something like this: grip plunger, plant feet, check out the score, check targets, flip flippers (to check they’re working), SHOOT!
There’s even an inbuilt mechanism for creating this ritual as the player is forced to refocus for the time it takes for the ball to roll all the way down and back into position for the plunger. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, or part of the planning that goes into building a pinball machine, but this is a brilliant idea.
It’s also makes sense for you to build in small rituals at the start your creating time, or small downtimes in the middle where you regather yourself. I always sit and sharpen a handful of pencils before I start an illustration. It is a small physical act that grounds me, quiets the mind and anchors me in a creative space.
When writing I sometimes go to this website where I can set a small mindfulness bell to go off every twenty minutes or so. It often helps to catch me if I’m drifting, but if I’m immersed in my writing and doing well, it’s not distracting enough to break the flow.
The Ball:
In the metaphor of the pinball as a field of creative activity the ball can be: your idea, your project, your problem, whatever you are working on.
Flippers:
The flippers are the tool you use to direct the ball around, just the way your creative choices direct your project. The ability to keep the ball in play by using the flippers well is what separates a good pinball playing experience from a frustrating one. This is where the many hours of ducking math class to play pinball over and over finally start to pay off.
Creative technique and skill keep your ideas and inspirations focused and moving along.
Like flippers moving the ball around different features on a pinball machine, we have the option of moving our original idea or vision through as many mental and physical frameworks as we can.
We can do this by asking questions like:
“What is a good metaphor for this idea?
”What would happen if I place my idea beside another concept?”
“How would these two concepts interact?”
“What if I restrict my palette to one colour?”
“How would this character react to losing everything?”
“What material can best give this sculpture a sense of movement?”
We can have the most luminous starting idea ever, but we also need to push it around and stretch it to reveal its full potential. Once we develop our ability to apply a range of creative options, we become like a skilled pinball player intuitively knocking the ball around the playing field, making all the right moves to keep the ball going and the score ticking over.
Note how physical the act of using the flippers is, too. Pinball machines get you so busy with hand-eye coordination and twisting the body around that they don’t allow much room for the rational mind to step in. They almost trap the player into entering a state of flow. (I wonder if that’s a key to their popularity.)
Lanes:
Once the ball has been launched up into the playing area there are usually three or four lanes divided by rubber stoppers through which the ball can drop. To some degree you can finesse the ball where you want it to go. However, once the ball has dropped down into a lane, you are locked into that trajectory.
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As Steven Nachmanovitch says in Free Play, his great book on improvisation: “Limits yield intensity.”
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Creativity is about breaking out of conditioned patterns of action. Paradoxically, restriction can be a powerful force in the creative process. Making a deliberate choice to restrict your creative options can open you up to moving in unexpected directions, and making creative discoveries you might otherwise miss out on.
Bumpers:
These round obstacles are built to actively propel the ball away on impact. This happens in a vibrant tangle of sound, movement and colour. When developing ideas, it’s useful to have in mind a few different areas of expertise or interest to bounce off. Think of these as your creativity bumpers and emulate that sense of vibrant excitement as you brainstorm.
Good at web design? Bounce your ideas against your knowledge of gardening, cooking or snowboarding.
How about a theory relating the process of web design to building a vegetable plot? Or you can relate creating a social media campaign to hosting a dinner party for 12 guests. You get the idea.
Targets:
There are a number of different kinds of targets used in pinball machines. My favorite are the drop-down targets. Drop-down targets reset when they’ve all been knocked down, or whenever a new ball (or game) starts.
Targets are fun. They add to the complexity of a pinball game, and focusing on them can push you to raise your skill level.
It’s possible to have a fine game, and even get a decent score, without thinking about the targets. You can also get by in a creative project without having any target you want to hit. But this approach can lead to a wishy-washy result.
Having some form of target to aim for–whether that’s a specific word count for writers, or a tonal scheme for painters–keeps you focused, and adds creative tension that helps push you through to a better result.
Just like the drop-down targets on a pinball machine, it can be good to reset your targets if you achieve them midway through the creative process. And keep them small. Often on a pinball machine there will be three or four targets together; sometimes they can be knocked over with just one or two well-placed hits with the ball.
If you keep creative targets within your project simple and achievable, then you get a sense of accomplishment over and over as you keep resetting them and re-knocking them down.
The Drain:
If you see a pinball player looking down at that narrow area between the flippers while howling with despair, their ball has just gone down the drain. Eventually, no matter how good you are, you are going to lose the ball.
Oh, this is all-too-easy to relate to creativity.
Ideas can suddenly slip right through your fingers. Sometimes they just implode. When you go over the blog post you spent all of last night working on and it reads like an alien’s manifesto, or when that picture you just drew of your neighbor’s dog looks way too much like an arthritic banana, your creative idea has just gone down the drain.
It’s okay when this happens. Just like in a pinball game, you can’t keep that silver ball rolling around infinitely. At some point you’re going to lose focus for a moment–or hit a skill-wall, or sneeze–and you’ll see that flash of silver slip between the flippers before your fingers can react.
The fact that you’re going to lose the ball at some point is part of the tension that keeps you locked in and enjoying the game. As with pinball, when a creative idea or project goes down the drain, you check the scoreboard, take a breath, plant your feet and launch a new ball.
Tilt:
When you shove a pinball machine around too much it just shuts down on you.
Manufacturers know that people will get overexcited and lose it while playing their game. They want people to get overexcited. But they don’t want their machines getting busted up, so the tilt function is built in as a protective device.
It can be easy to get a creative vision and pursue it relentlessly, to the point where we forget to look after ourselves. Exhaustion, hunger, burnout–they are all easy to fall into when we lose ourselves in a creative process.
Like it does for the pinball manufacturers, it pays to build in a ‘tilt’ device: a prearranged signal to yourself that you’ve pushed too hard and it’s time to shut down.
You could set an alarm for hourly breaks, set meal times, or set finishing-up times. You might even check in with someone regularly, someone who knows you and can give you a heads-up when it looks like you’re pushing a bit too hard.
I remember when you tilted the KISS pinball machine there was an evil cackling ‘bwahhaahhahha’ sound as the lights went off. Don’t let this happen to you. That’s not a sound you want to hear in real life.
*****
Pinball machines are fun. Creativity is fun. Being creative is difficult at times, but it’s also a process filled with electricity, exuberance, and flashing epiphanies.
How about you? Have you experienced the creative process as a pinball-like cacophony of bells, lights, and frantic movement? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
