Simple motor actions, like moving marbles upward or downward between two cardboard boxes, may not seem meaningful. But a study published April 2010 in Cognition shows that motor actions can partly determine people’s emotional memories.

Moving marbles upward caused participants to remember more positive life experiences, and moving them downward to remember more negative experiences, according to Daniel Casasanto (MPI and Donders Institute, Nijmegen) and Katinka Dijkstra (Erasmus University, Rotterdam). ‘Meaningless’ motor actions can make people remember the good times or the bad.

When people talk about positive and negative emotions they often use spatial metaphors. A happy person is on top of the world, but a sad person is down in the dumps. Some researchers believe these metaphors are a clue to the way people understand emotions: not only do we use spatial words to talk about emotional states, we also use spatial concepts to think about them.

Read more at Science Daily

via

Pinball number count, all 11 of them.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to see games like these made today?!

7th Annual Fairfax Pinball Open – March 5-7 – Fairfax, Virginia, USA

Balac’s Pinball Party – March 12-14 – Alingsås, Sweden

Texas Pinball Festival – March 19-21 – Grapevine, Texas, USA

6th Annual Ohio Pinball and Gameroom Festival – March 26-27 – Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, USA

Midwest Gaming Classic – March 27-28 – Brookfield, Wisconsin, USA

Cupids & Canines 3 – March 27 – Scott Township, Pennsylvania, USA

And if you’re a tournament director interested in adding PAPA 13 certificates to the prize pool at your fine event, get in touch with us here at PAPA HQ.

Good luck out there.

Big Buck Hunter:

Addams / Simpsons Pinball Party:

Twilight Zone:

(Pat Lawlor’s “Bad”, starring Richard and Phil)

‘grats to Sweden’s Patrik Bodin, first player registered for this year’s World Pinball Championships!

http://www.igniteseattle.com/2010/02/how-to-not-suck-at-pinball-greg-dunlap

This rather extensive piece ran in Billboard Magazine’s 1943 Summer Special, a full four years before the advent of the electromechanical flipper:

Pinball is a modern game developed from an ancient idea known for many years as bagatelle. The word pinball was probably first coined by a Kentucky circuit court and used in Kentucky newspapers; it was first used in an unabridged dictionary in 1940.

It is easy, of course, to imagine the gradual development of bowling and pitch-in-the-hole marble games from these humble beginnings, but history itself leaves a gap in the development of bagatelle…

Fill in the juicy gaps for yourself – read the Billboard Magazine article in its entirety via the Google books archive. Really is quite an exhaustive study.

Can anyone identify which machine it is?

Update: The think tank that is rec.games.pinball has identified the game as a 1973 Williams Travel Time

Props to the Internet Pinball Database for the flyer.

Case closed!

Online ticket sales are open again.  I know this event conflicts with some other pinball events in the area, but it was really the only date that worked for the shelter and the majority of our organizers.  We’ll schedule it more carefully in future years – I don’t think it will be a February event anymore, given our luck with the weather.

Anyone who has already purchased tickets, your tickets are still valid.  You should have received an email from me already, with details about how to refund or transfer your tickets, if you cannot attend.

Nothing else has changed except the date.  We will still run the tournament and give away a machine.  You can view all of the details here: http://papa.org/cupids/2010/