Playfields

The playfield of a pinball machine is the surface on which the game is played: a sheet of wood under glass, studded with Pins, Bumpers, Lanes and Targets that score.

Before the flipper

The playfield used to be almost the entire game. On a machine with no flippers, influencing the ball was mainly confined to how the player pulled the plunger and nudged the machine as the ball rolled across the playfield, meaning the arrangement of pins and holes decided almost everything.^[1] That is the inheritance from Bagatelle, and it is why the earliest pin games were argued over in court as games of chance.

Standardization

The playfield settled into a standard shape, a little over a metre long and half a metre wide, across most manufacturers since the 1960s^[2].

It settled on an angle too. The surface is inclined upward and away from the player, usually by about six and a half degrees.^[3] The figure is a compromise: shallow enough that a player can send the ball back up and keep it in play, steep enough that it is always falling. Operators move it deliberately, extending the levelers on the rear legs or shortening those at the front to steepen the slope, which makes a machine faster and harder to play.^[4]

Variations

Not every machine is a single sloping sheet.

Some games have multiple playfields that the ball travels between,^[5] whether a small raised surface set into the main one (Mini-Playfields) or a full second level the ball climbs to and returns from (Multi-Level Playfield).

Other machines break the assumption that the surface holds still, letting the game itself tilt and swing it while the ball is on it (Tilting Playfields).

And a whole family of machines abandons the slope altogether, standing the surface upright so the ball falls down its face rather than rolling down its length (Vertical Playfields).