The title phrase of this post means nothing to almost everyone now. It may mean something if you read Tracy Kidder’s book “Soul of a New Machine” and have an excellent memory. I will elucidate briefly: In pinball, (as in many if not most commercial, coin-operated video games) the reward is the game itself, in the sense that if one “wins” the game (with an especially high score, usually), one gets free games as a reward for winning.
The point made by Tom West (a now-dead--engineer made briefly famous by Tracy Kidder’s book) is that many professional creative activities like engineering a brand-new product (a new computer for example), or producing a play using paid actors to make money, and so forth—these activities are like pinball, in the sense that if you are successful, your reward is that you are allowed to do more of the same, sometimes on a bigger scale, with more at stake, but essentially you get to do more of what you did.
If you fail, then pretty quickly you are forced out of the game—you are laid off and find difficulty getting equivalent work; or your backers go elsewhere; or something else happens that forces you out of the game. You may still have a job—sometimes even the same job in the sense that you still work for the same corporation from the same cube or office that you had, but you are no longer actually “playing pinball”, at the level and in the way that you did before.
The term “signing up” was also coined and presented in Kidder’s book (“Soul of a New Machine”) to mean securing serious commitment. The young engineers working on the computer (the “machine” of the book title) needed to work 60-hour weeks, weekends and nights galore, in getting their new computer out the door, which had an effect of saving Data General as a company at the time. (Data General later faded and was bought out by EMC in 2002). When Data General hired folks to work on getting the new computer built and readied for manufacture, they needed to secure commitment for extraordinary effort on the job. Those hired needed to “sign up” for the duration, like joining the military during war time.
So the point I want to make in this post is that there is still an enormous part of our economy where extraordinary effort is needed to meet deadlines and accomplish the mission, and the immediate reward is that you get to turn around and do more of the same—you are being asked to “Sign up to play pinball”. There is nothing particularly evil or unjust about this—it is in the nature of (much of) creative economic activity in a complex economy, especially the “create something new” parts of the economy, as opposed to the “simply do something useful” part of the economy.
The moral of the story is that it is important to find some economic activity, some profession, you can “sign up” for--- something that is in some way rewarding to you, in and of itself. Because if you play this game, you have to successfully play, and win; or you will find it harder and harder to stay in the game. Not to worry unduly, however—you can always fall back on a “do something useful” job for a wage that gets you by.