If it's stacked on top with laundry, crafts, cat litter boxes, a train set, holiday decorations, cookware or leftover pizza, it's a table.

Otherwise it's a pinball machine.

I just noticed a major rise in the last 2 weeks. I was surprised more people didn't complain until today.

Learn your pinball history. The origins of pinball begin with the lawn games of Europe, where balls were rolled into holes in the ground. Parlor versions of these games were called “Bagatelle” tables. To play these tabletop games, a stick or plunger would propel ball bearings up an incline. The balls would then roll down the incline, bouncing off pins and landing in pockets labelled with different scoring values. It is these pins that gave pinball its name.

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It occurred to me in another thread that "table" is actually a better term than "machine" for what our beloved pinball games are and do.

For one thing, they resemble a table to a far greater extent than they resemble any machine. This is a self-evident fact. What machine has four legs and a great big empty space beneath it? (AT-ATs aren't real, btw.)

But mainly, a machine is a device that performs work! Look it up! Which is the exact opposite of what a pinball game does! You don't do work with a pin, you play it!

Pinball machine must calculate points to advance balls; machine

Not "work." In the physics sense.

A pinball table reminds me of the atrocious coffee tables that people make out of pinball machines. Some that appear to be perfectly serviceable...outside of the fact that they are typically destroyed in the process of being "up-cycled" into a coffee table.

An otherwise nice Stern Nineball comes to mind.

Beyond that tomayto, tomahto.

: a mechanically, electrically, or electronically operated device for performing a task

I dont see work anywhere

My dining room table has some little gears that do something or other when I need to extend the table to add leaves. And it performs the task of fighting gravity to keep my sandwiches off the ground. Should I be calling it my "dining room machine"?

Also, props to Pinsiders for keeping this debate going for five years. And to teekee for the wining entry back at post #2.

Let’s end this whole debate and only use this term from now on: Four-legged electro-analog gravity-dependent entertainment apparatus. FLEAGDEA for short. You are all welcome.

Ugggh, I cringe when I hear table.

Harry Williams called them tables, that’s a good enough endorsement of the term for me.

Also, a lot of folks seem to think by saying ‘table’ folks mean the whole machine, when it’s really just a way to refer to the playfield layout and gameplay, not the glass top itself. When I say a game is a great table, it’s relative to the layout and gameplay of other games I’ve experienced in comparison.

"Table" makes more sense when describing a virtual pinball (video game basically) but a physical pinball MACHINE is just that.

It doesn't resemble a table nor is it used as a table. It is a very complex 'electro mechanical MACHINE'.

Do you say 'Electro Mechanical Table?' (when referring to your kitchen table) - I don't think so.

Hey look at my completely stable, nothing moves, non-electronic Kitchen Table.......they are two completely DIFFERENT things.

It's like calling your motorcycle a car because it has wheels and an engine.

"Even on my favorite TABLE, he can beat my best."

In a song called "Pinball Wizard", sung by a guy playing "The Pinball Wizard", during the most famous and most watched pinball tournament ever. I think that should be enough to make it acceptable.

What about pinball couches?

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Too late!

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For one that song is cheesy and annoying. Two, I hardly think The Who knew much of anything about actual pinball machines when they wrote their “rock opera”. Using Who lyrics to decide proper terminology is like referencing a movie like “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter” as a biography on his life.

Table just sounds off to me.

Because everything else in the arcade was a table before video games (and even some of those came in cocktail table format), i.e. pool tables, foosball tables, shuffleboard tables, etc. Hey, if you can set your drink on it then it’s a table, right?

I think the use of the word “table” to describe a pin rubs people the wrong way because the people that use it oftentimes use it in a way that makes them sound like a “know it all” or an “insider” who are trying to make it look like they know more than you do.

Ooof, that's bad.

How about pinball machine table

What about a pinball machine thats a book about pinball tables?

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^^This^^ Calling it a 'table' comes off as an incredibly pretentious term.

Ball goes up an incline - that's 'work'
Ball goes up from tough to playfield - that's 'work'
Everytime a coil fires.. that's work...

Work in physics is easy to define in a pinball machine.

Nope... it's a backlash against the use of 'table' in virtual pinball. Otherwise, it's more of a language difference.. like the british call it a boot, and the US call it a trunk.

But when so many people were coming into the hobby after rediscovering pinball from the virtual world.. many people were using the word 'table' here domestically .. and a backlash started because of the association of virtual pinball and the idea 'thats not REAL pinball'.. and 'table' gets a negative stigma.

Mainly - it's this negative stigma combined with our American stubborness to ignore dialects from other countries.

Many people here would freak out if people started calling it 'flipper' like is done in several non-english speaking countries.

Maybe some people feel it's 'snooty' like its some old english phrase.. but pick your poison.. is it snooty because it's non-natural, or because it has other stigmas?

This is exactly what I was trying to articulate. Pretentious is the perfect word to describe it.

I respectfully disagree. It’s not a language difference. Everyone that I’ve ever heard use the word table to describe a pin is native to the United States. If some British dude walked up to me and called it a table, I’m smart enough to realize the terminology may be the result of a cultural difference. However, that’s never been the case.

and then read the rest of the post of where people were getting 'table' domestically....

And what is the end result of all that "work"? A game. Play.

"Hey Bob, bring me that pinball machine, I need this ball to roll up an incline temporarily."

Machines are created to accomplish something. The only work a pinball manufactures is getting the player all worked up!

And I'm still waiting for an example of a machine with four legs and a big empty space under it.

A table saw, maybe? But, wait, we have no problem invoking the nomenclature "table" for that!

Finally, a few minutes of Googling reveals the term "pinball table" was in use long before that silly Who song, in Billboard magazine on Feb 26, 1949 for instance. https://books.google.com/books?id=OPYDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA109&dq=%22pinball+table

So, to answer the original question, why do some people call it a table? Because that is a word some people use to describe it! That is how language works. If it bothers anyone, that's on them for being narrow minded. Maybe they'd be happier speaking a simpler, less flexible language.

And language also changes over time. It works that way as well. Give it a few more years and no one will refer to a pin as a table. So few people do now anyway.

Friends don’t let friends be prescriptive grammarians.

From reading this thread, what you say is definitely true. Lots of people do take it that way. I can’t imagine why they let it affect them like that though.

Table sounds fine to me, because of Pinball FX being my gateway drug to the hobby, and also because it’s backed up by history. Machine sounds fine to me, because on here that’s what people almost universally call it. When I’m having an irl conversation about it, I default to calling it a pinball game, because machine sounds soulless and joyless to me, and because I know some people get fussy when they hear table. When I listen to or read other people’s pinball thoughts I let them say machine, table, deck, or whatever other term, without correcting them, because I know what they mean regardless of what word they use, so they have successfully communicated, which is the entire point of language, and also because it’s basic manners.

Why is table a pretentious word? I don’t get it. If anything, machine seems more so. Like someone is trying to make what is, essentially, a man-toy, seem more substantial than it is. That being said, I don’t have a dog in this fight because I don’t care what any one calls any thing. Also, see my prior post where I solved this debate for the entire community! If you’d all just go along with FLEADGDA!

There is nothing pretentious about the word table. It’s just that in my experience when I’ve heard someone use it to describe a pin it is used with a pretentious overtone.

I am going to stick to “pinball machine” and giggle like a child when i hear it called a “table”

you're the one who wanted to use the physics description. *shrug*

Yes, Townsend used the lyrics because it was the language in use. No one claims its the origin of the use - just that people living today in the states... that's a common exposure people have had to the usage.

Nobody will ever win any arguments, people like what they like.

What if you consider individual mechanisms as machines? A pop bumper, a bank of drop targets, etc. - individual machines. Then you could use both terms simultaneously: Its a pinball table full of pinball machines