This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Pinball article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1, 2Auto-archiving period: 120 days |
Pinball is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination failed. For older candidates, please check the archive. | ||||||||||
|
This
level-4 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||
|
The following references may be useful when improving this article in the future:
|
|
||
This page has archives. Sections older than 120 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 4 sections are present. |
In "The primary objective of the game is to score as many points as possible, often within a limited time." I removed the limited time part, as each game usually consists of a number of balls for which the player has unlimited time. Individual tasks may be set that offer points for completion before a countdown finishes, but the primary objective of the game is to score points, however long it may take, rewarded with free plays and/or your name on the hi score list. Completing time-bound tasks just makes it quicker to get a high score. Regards Guffydrawers ( talk) 20:39, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
There have been a few edits recently on the lead for the article calling into question just how much detail the lead should have. Figured we should start a discussion on it here.
Generally, the lead for an article should give enough information to:
In this case, there's no question that pinball, as a concept and style of game, is notable. It does require some basic explanation about how it's played and the general structure of a machine and a typical game. I agree that it doesn't need a LOT of detail, but the most essential elements in my experience are:
The lead could (and probably should) have a brief mention of its history - at least discussing when the first pinball game was created and briefly touching on its evolution. One or two sentences should suffice. — KieferSkunk ( talk) — 23:28, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
The section on Scoring right now has a lot of things mixed into it in a kind of haphazard manner. I think we need to rework this whole section to clearly divide these concepts from one another:
Additionally, this section should be devoted only to topics on scoring. Mentions of pinball/video hybrids, video modes, etc. should go in a different section on how games have evolved over time. The bit about display tech can be separated out into that, since it has more to do with the game's presentation than strictly with scoring, so I'd say the bit about display tech within the scoring section should focus more on how scores were limited (how many digits could be displayed) by the tech used.
It's worth noting that the entire article's subject is basically about scoring points - that's the goal of all pinball games. Therefore, saying that hitting targets scores points is kinda redundant. Focusing more on HOW the machine processes hits is more appropriate here. — KieferSkunk ( talk) — 00:05, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
There's a lot of overlap between the "1970s Solid-State" section and the "1980s/90s Digital Age" section, where both sections mention things like Bally selling its assets to Williams and video games generally taking over arcades. We should separate these sections a bit.
Here's my suggestion:
This way, we can avoid saying the same things more than once. As time allows, I may try to take this on. — KieferSkunk ( talk) — 19:51, 26 May 2021 (UTC)