Here's the deal about pinball: It's not such an innocent game.

In fact, for more than three decades, it was illegal in much of America. From Los Angeles, to Chicago, to New York City, police "pinball squads" swept through gaming halls and gambling dens, confiscating thousands of machines in a series of Prohibition-style raids. The reason: It was thought to be a mob-run racket that was a game of chance, and not skill, and therefore gambling.

But outlawing pinball didn't cause it to disappear. Rather, it went underground, surviving behind closed doors in seedy joints in Harlem and the Village, and making regular appearances in movies and TV shows. It is these appearances that cemented its image as the baddest game in town. For decades, pinball served as an efficient way for directors to convey to an audience that a character was a roughneck, an outlaw, and generally up to no good. Confused as to whether the Fonz is really a rebel? That pinball machine he's playing should clear things up. As Sideshow Bob said in The Simpsons (episode 137: "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming"), referencing the evils of television: "My foolish capering destroyed more young minds then syphilis and pinball combined."

And once you start looking for pinball machines in movies, you notice them everywhere-spreading their youth-corrupting seeds of outlawerry and rebellion.

I'm giving a lecture on the topic on October 8 at NYC's monthly Nerd Nite event (info and tickets at: http://nyc.nerdnite.com), but until then, here are some of my favorite examples of pinball-gone-wrong in the movies:

Heavy Traffic, 1973

In 1972, director Ralph Bakshi released Fritz the Cat-the world's first X-rated cartoon. For his follow-up feature, he did the only thing that could one-up the lewd, rude, antisocial imagery of Fritz: He made a movie about "Michael: a 24-year-old pinball-playing virgin". Check out the trailer and opening scene, embedded below, in which a game of pinball is juxtaposed with shots of pimps, hookers, addicts, dealers, and street urchins (with a chilling rendition of "Scarborough Fair" serving as the soundtrack). In Heavy Traffic, pinball isn't just a metaphor for rebellion-it is a symbol for all that is chaotic, unpredictable, and dangerous about urban life.

Trailer:

Opening Scene:

Tommy, album: 1969, movie: 1975

The Who's rock opera may forever be associated the image of a a deaf, dumb, and blind pinball wizard, but the game's inclusion was apparently a cynical, last-minute addition. The story goes that Pete Townsend brought pinball into the story as a cynical attempt to curry favor with British rock critic Nik Cohn (the guy who wrote the New York magazine article that inspired Saturday Night Fever), who was apparently a big pinball fan. Either way, the album was released in 1969-a time when pinball was still illegal in much of America (and a few places in Europe too). And viewed in this context, the titular character isn't merely a kid with a quirky talent-he's a rebel and a rabble rouser, who was going against the grain. In fact, the movie version even includes a scene where Tommy's legion of followers go on a rampage, indiscriminately smashing pinball machines in a series of images that are nearly identical to the old news photographs depicting police raids on pinball machines in the 1940s.

The Accused, 1988; South Park, 2008

In what is perhaps the most disturbing portrayal of pinball, The Accused shows Jodie Foster (who won an Oscar for her role) as the victim of a gang-raped performed on a bar pinball machine. The scene was later parodied by South Park, which showed Steven Spielberg and George Lucas committing the deed to beloved icon Indiana Jones-also on a pinball machine.

The Accused (sort of NSFW):

South Park:

Bad Santa

This one is fairly self-explanatory: While courting a prospective lass, Billy Bob Thornton's foul-mouthed (and definitely anti-social) mall Santa goes overboard with a pinball machine's tilt mechaism.

Further Reading:

• 11 Things You Didn't Know About Pinball History
• Top 8 Most Innovative Pinball Machines
• Top 6 Pinball Machine Mods
• Top 17 Science-Fiction-Themed Pinball Machines
• Top 6 Weirdest Pinball Machine Designs

Seth Porges is an editor at Popular Mechanics magazine and a frequent lecturer on the history of pinball. His next talk is at NYC Nerd Nite on October 8. Tickets and info at http://nyc.nerdnite.com. Seth can be found on Twitter at @sethporges.

A New York University professor teaches a course in the history of hackers and hacking. Oh, to be back at NYU and be able to take interesting courses like this.

The Atlantic Monthly presents a "syllabus-as-essay" from Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist and assistant professor who teaches Hacker Culture & Politics at NYU.

An excerpt from the essay:

Week Three: Phreaking

The canonical (and I think misleading) story about hacking is that was born at MIT and evolved outward from there. We reappraise this version of history when we pay visit to another class of technologist, the phone phreakers — the direct ancestors to the hacker underground. In the late 1950s, they started to study, explore, and enter the phone system by recreating the audio frequencies that the system used to route calls. To learn about these technological spelunkers of the phone system, we rely on a few of the early chapters in Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown and on Ron Rosenbaum's riveting Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box". The institutional independence of phreakers, in combination with some early political influences, such as the the Yippies (Youth International Party), made for a class of technologist whose aesthetic sensibilities and linguistic practices proved to be more daring, vivacious, audacious, and more transgressive than university-based hackers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford.

Coleman writes that she does try to fit gaming into the course, if possible:

I often teach a section on gaming, assigning a chapter from [Steven] Levy's Hackers covering the creation of one of the first video games, Spacewar and assign Julian' Dibbell's first hand account on the economies of virtual world, Play Money.

Too bad I graduated from NYU a long time ago.

The Anthropology of Hackers [The Atlantic Monthly, via KillScreen]
For further reference: Coleman's Spring 2010 Hacker Culture And Politics draft syllabus [PDF link]

Are you finished talking about video games? No? Well, okay then. Talk about them here. Or call in and talk about them on the podcast later, if you're brave.

Thanks to The_Saint for today's Rubens riff. Get your own name in lights here by submitting a great image to #TAYpics.

Don't forget. Mark your clock! Today's podcast day. Drop by at 1 p.m. eastern, 10 a.m. pacific to chat about Civ V, achievement ski bums and, inevitably, Dante's hair.

To: Brian
From: Luke

Last year, I moved into a brand new house in a brand new suburb. Pros: everything in the thing was brand new. The cons? The suburb is a work in progress, a point which came screaming through my bedroom window this morning at 6am when the block next to mine, empty for two years, finally sprang into life. I'd expected construction crews nextdoor to be disruptive, but opening the kitchen window at 6am to see this is taking the piss.

Anyway, here's what you missed while I spent the day searching for earplugs:

Report: Nintendo 3DS Hardware Specs Revealed
That's One Way To Sex Up Team Tennis
Why I Won't Be Liveblogging The Tester Season 2
Weta Is Making Halo: Reach ATVs (And You Can Have One)
Blizzard Making Its Own Starcraft II Mods
The Dante That Almost Was
Retro Games vs Modern Games, To The Death!

One of Marvel's most cherished heroes and one of Capcom's most persistent villains face off in these new screens for upcoming fighter Marvel vs Capcom 3.

Here's a neat little stunt: MTV has sat down some of the actors from the latest Resident Evil movie, and had them read lines from the first Resident Evil game.

It says something about how awful the first game's dialogue was that these actors, taking the piss and then some, still sound better.

Would have liked a Jill Sandwich or two, though.

(Warning: the video may not be available in all regions)

'Resident Evil' Movie Actors Read Quotes From The First Game [MTV]

British firm Head First, not content with designing the front cover for the upcoming Dead Rising 2, figured a more enjoyable way to commemorate the game's release would be to build a replica of protagonist Chuck Greene's dirt bike.

This involved taking a real dirt bike, stripping it back to its bare bones, repainting everything to match the in-game model then adding extra body parts and detail so that it looked as close as possible to the "real" thing.

Bringing Dead Rising 2 to life [Head Blog]

That's not street art. Those are the "suicide nets" erected at console manufacturer Foxconn's Longhua complex in Shenzen, China. Part of a great read over on BusinessWeek.

Starcraft II's first official patch, v1.1, is now ready for download, and changes, they have been made. Such tweaks are hard to visualise in your head, however, so let's look at a video guide to them instead.

YouTube user PsyStarcraft has posted this handy guide to the updates made to many of the game's units, showing you the changes made to things like build times and damage, as well as little additions like a frames-per-second counter.

He gets a little...internetty at times, heavy on the whiny commentary, but it's still worth it to get a proper handle on how things have changed since Starcraft II v1.0.

[via Fidgit]