Pinball is a type of arcade game in which a player uses paddles (called flippers) to manipulate one or more balls inside a pinball machine. A pinball machine is a glass-covered cabinet containing a play field populated with lights, targets, bumpers, ramps, and various other objects depending on its design.
The primary objective of the game is to score as many points as possible by hitting targets and making various shots with the flippers, before all balls "drain" at an exit usually situated at the bottom of the play field. Most pinball games are divided into turns (referred to as "balls", having the same meaning as "lives" in video games). The game ends when all balls have ended.
Pinball and gambling
Pinball machines, like many other mechanical games, were sometimes used as gambling devices. Some pinball machines, such as Bally's "bingos", featured a grid on the backglass scoring area with spaces corresponding to targets or holes on the playfield. Free games could be won if the player was able to get the balls to land in a winning pattern; however, doing this was nearly random, and a common use for such machines was for gambling. Other machines allowed a player to win and accumulate large numbers of "free games" which could then be cashed out for money with the location owner. Later, this type of feature was discontinued in an effort to legitimize the machines, and to avoid legal problems in areas where awarding free games was considered illegal, some games, called Add-A-Ball, did away with the free game feature, instead giving players extra balls to play (between 5 and 25 in most cases). These extra balls were indicated via lighted graphics in the backglass or by a ball count wheel, but in some areas that was disallowed, and some games were shipped with a sticker to cover the counters.