You will never match if you won a free game by high score. For example, if the machine has been idle for more than three minutes, the match probability is boosted upward. No, the match probability is not uniform and yes, it is strategically manipulated depending on who is playing and when. While adjustments to the high-score threshold is textbook price theory, the adjustments to the match probability is pure behavioral economics. ![]() The other tool is the match probability: you win a free game if the last two digits of your score match an apparently random draw. Then anytime an above average player gets on the machine, he’s getting free games all day long. The WGTTC problem is where a machine has adjusted down to a low replay score because it is mostly played by novices. Later designs would allow the threshold to rise quickly to combat the wizard-goes-to-the-cinema problem. The algorithm would compute a histogram of scores and set the replay threshold at the empirical cutoff of 5%. The score level that would implement this varies with the machine, location, and time. The goal was to ensure that a fixed percentage, say the top 5% of all scores would win a free game. But later implementations were more sophisticated. The early versions of this algorithm were crude, essentially targeting a weighted moving average. It was pre-loaded with an algorithm that adjusted the replay score according to the distribution of scores on the specified machine over a specific time interval. ![]() Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually re-programmed the software. All pinball machines offer a replay to a player who beats some specified score. ![]() They had two instruments at their disposal: the score required for a free game, and the match probability. Pinball developers began to see how they could take advantage of programmable software to monitor, incentivize, and ultimately exploit the players. In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever. In doing so it also set the pinball market on a path that would eventually lead to its demise. Black Knight brought pinball to a new level, literally speaking because it was among the first games with ramps and elevated flippers, but even more importantly because it brought a new challenge that drew in and solidified a pinball crowd. In 1980, pinball went digital, multi-ball, and multi-media starting with the game Black Knight. It turns out these were also major turning points in the history of pinball itself. ![]() And he designed the two pinball machines, Black Knight in 1980 and High Speed in 1986 that are bookends for a period when the most important stuff I was learning about life was learned within a few feet of at least one of these machines. Tonight I met the guy who once made a living designing the classic pinball machines. No, its because after all the dolls are asleep we get to go to their parents’ mansions for parties and there’s always at least one parent who makes a living doing something incredibly interesting. And it’s not because, as Sandeep would put it, I like to get up 30 minutes earlier than otherwise so that my daughters can put their hair up and dress like beautiful little dolls to match all the other dolls in their classes. There is a reason I live in Winnetka and not in Evanston.
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