Comment by tombert

Yeah, exactly my point.

There’s always an infinite number of variables in a real pinball machine. Slight imperfections in the playfield surface making it not completely flat, slight imperfections in the shape of the ball so it’s not a perfect sphere, slight imperfections in the shape of the bumper. I could keep going, but I think there’s literally billions of potential variables that can modify the game.

These might seem insignificant, and in some cases they are, but it’s a chaos theory thing; small imperfections multiplied across enough of a timescale become pretty significant, and that’s a large part of what makes real pinball so much fun.

Of course there’s plenty of things we can do to approximate reality; adding a bit of randomness to the experience probably provides enough chaos to give us something more or less like reality in a lot of cases, but that is just an optimization hack.