Same Player Shoots Again - by Andreas Bernard (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This is an ode to the lost golden age of the pinball machine. These vivid, flashing portals of entertainment were mainstays of nearly every bar, pub, and amusement arcade from the 1960s to the 1990s, but today they have all but disappeared. Andreas Bernard, looking back on his coming of age as an avid pinballer, reflects on what the disappearance of pinball machines tells us about the modern transformation of leisure time and public spaces.

The demise of pinballing at the end of the 1990s converged with huge social shifts which eroded the distinction between work and leisure. Now we use the same screen to organize both work and leisure, and games have been absorbed by a professionalization of daily life that is impossible to escape. Is our free time, as we know it, really free? Bernard also shows how the replacement of pinball machines by pocket-sized vessels of distraction was accompanied by the ebbing away of social critique.

At times nostalgic and lighthearted and at others bitingly astute, this book will appeal to all pinballers, past and present, and to anyone interested in the changing world of culture, gaming, and entertainment.

Review Quotes

"Part memoir, part cultural history, Same Player Shoots Again beautifully evokes a lost world through a single object. It offers an illuminating window on that strange and unknown land, the very recent past."
Joe Moran, Liverpool John Moores University

"Charming... often poignant... Reading this book was like my experience of playing pinball: it was all over much too quickly."
Will Wiles, Literary Review

"Touchingly Proustian... Bernard's genius is to communicate something of his life's grand obsession, while recognising how pinball machines are emblematic of an industrial culture that was slain by digital in the 1980s."
Stuart Jeffries, The Spectator

"The German writer Andreas Bernard is right: a pinball machine belongs to the bar, the arcade, the pier and other places of ill repute and misspent youth."
Will Hodgkinson, The Idler

About the Author

Andreas Bernard teaches History of Science at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany.