A Potential New Global indicator: Public Pinball Machines per Capita

Caveats: This indicator is mostly a joke, 100% depends on the completeness of Pinball Map, and countries without a single registered pinball machine are excluded.

Posted by Rasmus Bååth | 2024-06-07 | Tags: R, Statistics

Public Pinball Machines per Capita: A new global indicator

2024-06-07

There are tons of well-known global indicators. We’ve all heard of gross domestic product, life expectancy, rate of literacy, etc. But, ever since I discovered pinballmap.com, possibly the world’s most comprehensive database of public pinball locations, I’ve been thinking about a potential new global indicator: Public Pinball Machines per Capita. Thanks to Pinball Map’s well-documented public API, this indicator is now a reality!

Here’s how this was put together (and just scroll to the bottom for a CSV file with this indicator for all countries).

Pulling public pinball locations from Pinball Map

Pinball Map is, from what I can discern, the most popular app for finding out where there are arcades and bars with pinball machines. It’s open for anyone to register new pinball locations, but not only that, the app itself is open source, and the data it collects is available through a public API under a permissive licence! Using this API, we will pull essential data for our Public Pinball Machines per Capita indicator: all registered pinball locations and their respective machine counts.

Loading packages

Code for pulling pinball stats from the Pinball Map API

                        name country          city  lat    lon num_machines
1 Arena Lanes Bowling Center      US      Oak Lawn 41.7  -87.7            3
2              Pete's Treats      US Union Springs 42.9  -76.7            1
3         The Summit Windsor      US      Loveland 40.4 -105.0            6
4             Skylark Lounge      US        Denver 39.7 -105.0            2
5         The Escape Gamebar      US       Atlanta 33.9  -84.3            5

The above shows a sample of five out of the 10,330 locations where you can play pinball, as of June 2024. As we have the longitude and latitude we can also figure out that the northernmost place to play pinball is in Rovaniemi, Finland, and the southernmost place is in Woolston, New Zealand.

Code

                       name country      city   lat   lon num_machines
1               Kauppayhtiö      FI Rovaniemi  66.5  25.7            2
10330 Fish & Chips On Ferry      NZ  Woolston -43.5 172.7            1

Or, why not just plot all pinball locations on a world map?

Plot code

Finally, we can now sum up how many public pinball machines there are in each country, where the USA, unsurprisingly, takes the lead.

Code

# A tibble: 65 × 3
   country n_locations n_machines
   <chr>         <int>      <int>
 1 US             7831      32287
 2 CA              511       1765
 3 AU              427       1247
 4 DE              129       1099
 5 FR              247        707
 6 SE               79        692
 7 GB              160        500
 8 FI               98        496
 9 NL               69        461
10 JP               86        351
# ℹ 55 more rows

Calculating Public Pinball Machines per Capita

Knowing how many public pinball machines there are in each country isn’t enough, we also need to consider the size of the population. Thanks to the WDI package it’s easy to pull this, and any other indicators you fancy, from the World Bank Open Data and to calculate the number of Public Pinball Machines per Capita (here per million people).

Code for pulling World Development Indicators

Code for calculating Public Pinball Machines per Capita

# A tibble: 58 × 4
   country_name  population n_machines n_machines_per_million_capita
   <chr>              <dbl>      <int>                         <dbl>
 1 United States  333287557      32287                          96.9
 2 Finland          5556106        496                          89.3
 3 Sweden          10486941        692                          66.0
 4 Denmark          5903037        323                          54.7
 5 Norway           5457127        266                          48.7
 6 Australia       26005540       1247                          48.0
 7 Canada          38929902       1765                          45.3
 8 New Zealand      5124100        171                          33.4
 9 Switzerland      8775760        267                          30.4
10 Netherlands     17700982        461                          26.0
# ℹ 48 more rows

Now, there’s out new global indicator! Looks like the USA is still in the lead, but now the Nordic countries have bubbled up as some of the countries with the highest pinball density.

Plot code

Public Pinball Machines per Capita VS other indicators

Let’s have a look at how Public Pinball Machines per Capita compares to some other indicators. How about Life Expectancy?

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So maybe playing pinball actually makes you live longer! What’s that thing they say about correlation, now again… Or what about the fertility rate (the average number of births per woman)?

Plot code

Nope, no clear relationship there. Actually, out of all the indicators I looked through, the one with the highest correlation to Public Pinball Machines per Capita was…

Plot code

… GDP per Capita. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s ever looked into buying a pinball machine and walked away in shock having learned that a new machine would set you back $8000, at least. Still, the correlation between these two indicators is strikingly high:

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[1] 0.815

With such a strong correlation with GDP per Capita, it can be interesting to look at the residuals of the linear regression line above. That is, what’s left after the influence of GDP per Capita has been “accounted” for (and I can’t stress the quotes enough here, as we’re not really accounting for anything).

Plot code

Here Hungary and Croatia show up as being relative pinball fanatics, considering their GDP per Capita. While Singapore and Luxembourg couldn’t care less for the silver ball. If you want to take a look yourself, here’s a CSV file with the full Public Pinball Machines per Capita dataset:

Code

public_pinball_machines_per_capita_2024.csv