I admit: one of my first notes to myself from the first day of class was “How can I make pinball my final project?” It felt a bit unserious at the time, but I’m so glad I gave myself that as one of my lenses for assess the digital projects in the syllabus each week. When we learned about The River Poem, I wondered if I could write text that would flow across the page to mimic the experience of playing pinball. I wasn’t sure I had the coding chops for that kind of undertaking. Then the image maps of The Pines at Walden Pond by Deena Larsen and Wunderkammer by Shelley Jackson came up in back to back weeks, the coding for which felt much more achievable to me.

An image map with associated text, I could do that. But which table would I pick? I knew I wanted to pick a table that I could spend a lot of time playing, entirely in the pursuit of this project of course! And I knew I wanted to incorporate the sound from the table. Most pinball I play is in a loud bar, so there’s too much background noise to listen to the table, and it can get expensive pretty quickly. I’m very fortunate because the captain of my pinball team has a collection of tables in his basement. And as luck would have it, he had the perfect table to inspire me: Gorgar, the first pinball table with a speech module.

The premise of the game is relatively simple: you are a barbarian warrior who must defeat the big and simply evil Gorgar, a giant red demon who has taken your woman from you and has her trapped in his volcanic lair that is apparently filled with snakes. Gorgar only speaks seven words (Gorgar, speaks, beat, you, me, hurt, got), which are combined into eight possible phrases. They are simple, for example, “Me hurt,” but does that mean Gorgar is simple? How might he communicate if he had a full and robust language toolkit to aid him?

Inspired by my love of erasure and found poetry, and the work by Kenneth Goldsmith of repurposing of existing text to write poetry, I wanted to incorporate text from the Gorgar Instruction Booklet (the owner’s manual and official rules of play). I went back and forth on how to incorporate this. Could I use just the text from the manual to give Gorgar more speech? Or would I use it as a jumping off point and mix it in with my original writing?

Jeff, your feedback on trying to incorporate procedural rhetoric to think about the prison house of language was immensely helpful, and I think it pushed my project from some fun little thought experiment into something I’m quite proud of. It’s very common on pinball tables for a repeated shot to increase in value. On the Gorgar table specifically, there are many shots that increase in value when you hit them as a set of three: the G-O-R and G-A-R, each a set of three drop targets; the three A-B-C rollover lanes at the top of the playfield; the increasing values of the eject scoop on the left; and the 2-3-4 ADV targets across the playfield on the right. So the procedure I use mimics hitting a shot on the table in triplicate.

As Gorgar has eight phrases, I used those as the starting point. I tried to locate those phrases on my image map to roughly where the shot is that triggers the speech mechanism, or else where on the table thematically or visually it made the most sense to me. When you click on a silver circle (representing the silver pinball), you see and hear what Gorgar says. You could just keep clicking around and hitting new shots from the image map, or there’s a button below the text giving you the option to hit the same shot again. When you hit the shot a second time, you have the found poems I cut and pasted together from the instruction manual. Gorgar has more speech, but it’s still limited to the speech used by his creators. Another button appears, and you can hit the same shot a third time, and then you read the speech that I found myself wanting to give Gorgar. I used a different font for each of these to help visually reinforce the change that was taking place in Gorgar’s speech. In this way, I think I’ve combined a bit of Ian Bogost’s verbal, visual, and procedural rhetoric. The sound effects are mostly for fun; I wanted you to hear what Gorgar sounds like, as well as try and replicate the beating heart background sound that speeds up the longer you play. I do think the increasing pace of the heartbeat lends itself to the urgency with which I want to expand Gorgar’s speech, so perhaps there is aural rhetoric at play too.

In terms of the inspiration for my own writing, I turned to the artwork on the table to guide me. Gorgar can speak, and it’s assumed you are the male warrior, but who is this plot device of a female character? Only Gorgar has speech baked into the table, and you as the player could presumably give the barbarian speech, which leaves her utterly silent and sidelined. I don’t even think you ever see her face except in profile (she’s seemingly lifeless in the main design on the back glass, and on the playfield she’s standing more or less in profile view.

The design choice to put an image of the barbarian on the drop targets that spell Gorgar’s name was also incredibly fascinated to me and seemed to inextricably tie the two of them together.

Also, there are many different scenes from the battle depicted across the table. Are they all from this one fight? There are demonic and human skeletal remains scattered across the art; are Gorgar and the barbarian continuing a battle started by their ancestors? Or are all possible timelines from their fight being shown a top one another?

Lastly, as much as you are trying to slow the game down and aim for certain shots and create a sense of order, the pinball table wants you to go fast and craves chaos. I tried to replicate this delirious, perhaps ilinx-inducing, experience through the many inter-hyperlinked passages for every shot.

I hope you enjoy playing Gorgar Speaks: A Literary Pinball Adventure! as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Note: The main playfield image used for the image map was provided by Robert Gonyo, my team captain, without whom this project would not have been possible. The rest of the images and audio files were captured by me.