Surely it's more simple but not more boring? (At least to many people, myself included, who spent more time enjoying pong than pinball.)
edit: If you wanted to answer the question "which is more boring, football(soccer) or baseball" you'd ask people their opinion, rather than call one of them more boring based on the complexity of the rules/playing field/number of players/etc.
It's completely subjective (though a fact about everyone, nobody, or somewhere specific between finding something boring can be objective if taken from a good poll or whatever).
>If you wanted to answer the question "which is more boring, football(soccer) or baseball" you'd ask people their opinion, rather than call one of them more boring based on the complexity of the rules/playing field/number of players/etc.
Even many baseball fans would say baseball is more boring, as soccer is designed to be 90 minutes of pure action while baseball is designed to spend much of the time waiting for the next pitch. People can like the "boring" thing more.
Similarly, pinball was designed to be exciting with a bunch of fancy lights and sounds. Comparatively, early pong showed nothing but the two paddles and a ball and could make one sound. It was boring, people still loved it and sank thousands of hours in.
I still disagree with you, boring is in the eye of the beholder not in the object itself.
Pinball machines may have many more elements to them, they may be more eye catching, but to somebody who doesnt enjoy playing pinball at all it's still incredibly boring to them. Someone who enjoys it probably isn't finding it boring, or at least not more boring than doing nothing.
Yes football has more actual playing time and takes 90 (well, closer to 110 after half time and added time) minutes compared to baseball's often hours, yes footballers walk/run an average of 3-4x further in a game on average than baseball players.... and yes, some baseball fans will think football is less boring (I'm one of them! I like baseball but far less than football)..., but to somebody who loves baseball and hates football, football is the more boring one. And they're not wrong, nor am I for thinking baseball is more boring. It's just subjective.
Your comparison for "most boring" really only applies to somehow who has a quick look at both things, maybe in an art gallery, then moves on having found one of them less boring than the other. Not to people who actually played and enjoyed one or both of them.
Describing soccer as “90 minutes of pure action” is … wow. I quite like soccer, but it’s about 5 minutes of action spread out amongst 85 minutes of preamble (the preamble is the interesting part, though, which is why I like it).
That applies equally to baseball, though. How is the catcher setting up? How are the fielders adjusting? How far off the bases are the runners stepping out? Soccer and baseball are remarkably similar in this regard, and very different from most other field sports.
What they actually mean is that pong is boring compared to video games that came after, hence this line.
> And yet as a Gen-Xer born too late to have enjoyed Pong as a child, I have trouble fathoming how anyone could sit in front of a TV watching a square dot—not even a round ball—bounce back and forth across the dark, featureless screen. Was this really fun?
As a Gen Xer myself, I enjoyed climbing trees, roasting marshmallows, playing chess, camping in the woods, and building tree forts from scrap and sticks as a kid, despite the fact (as I am led to understand) that these are not bleeding-edge activities. I also enjoyed pong, despite being created before I was even born, as shocking as that may be to the author!
Pong is enjoyable today for the same reason that IRL table tennis is still enjoyable today, and the reason isn't the graphical fidelity of the paddles and ball (in either case).
As a GenX'r myself who's first video gaming experience at a young age was a little console (no idea what it was, it wasn't a famous brand) that played Pong, it was enormous fun and 5(?) year old me was always bugging my Dad to get the "special TV" out and tune it into the console... years later one of my favourite public domain games on my Amiga was PowerPong
Since the entire point of pong was to compete with someone else, yes, of course that tiny dot moving around a black screen IS fun, because for many people, winning competition, no matter how trivial or contrived or pointless is very very fun.
