[ifyouwantto]

Pinball machines are in an interesting middle ground where it seems like a good physics simulator should get you damn close to the real thing, with such a limited scope and size of play field. Like, convincing video pinball ought to be achievable. Nobody looks at, say, football and goes "we should be able to very closely recreate the experience of playing football as a video game" because it's plainly impossible short of a real holodeck. You can have football video games but they can't replace football, they're totally different activities. Pinball? It looks so tantalizingly close.

But the physicality's important. You play with your hips, it's not just button input or even physics limited to the explicit input interface. Hobbyists get sort-of close with lots of time, money, and clever tricks on DIY systems, but you're never going to get as many of those around and as accessible as real machines that you can go play without building one yourself. Certainly, you can't get terribly close on a general computer or gaming system that's not purpose-built for pinball as a real pinball-machine-sized object. [EDIT] I should add that these lose out on the ability of pinball machines to be different sizes—you build one of these, you're got a max size in both dimensions. You also don't get a real 3D playfield that changes depending on how you look at it, lets you peek around the sides while not playing to get better ideas of how to play or what's going on, and so on. It may be (usually is) rendered in 3D but you can't change your perspective by moving yourself around it—the screen's still flat. Even the very-best simulators are pretty far from the real thing.

There's also something magical about what people can accomplish in the designs within the constraints of having to actually move physical steel balls around. It's like modern movie making-of videos where the answer for every single thing is "a computer did it" and it's just so boring compared with when people had to hack reality to make the magic.

[tiltowait]

I play video pinball (the Williams packs in PinballFX), and I own a machine (Elvira’s House of Horrors).

Video pinball is better than no pinball, but real pinball has it beat, hands-down. Cost and bulk aside (and those are big asides, yes), there is no comparison.

Sound is an underappreciated difference. Even the best simulations don’t come close to capturing the punch of a real machine.

I do wonder how close we could get if you were able to go all-out: best simulation, running in the best AR goggles (AVP?) superimposed over an empty pinball cabinet. It wouldn’t be enough (real physics differ greatly from the best simulations), but it would be real fun to see.