"the randomness that emerged from such precisely set-up machinery ... where, in the end, gravity always won"
From "Transition" by Iain Banks - in the voice of Patient 8262:
In Detroit I played pinball, in Yohohama pachinko, in Tashkent bagatelle. I found all three games enthralling, fascinated by the randomness that emerged from such highly structured, precisely set-up machinery knocking shining spheres of steel from place to place within a setting where, in the end, gravity always won. The comparison with our own lives is almost too obvious, yet still it gives us an inkling into our fates and what drives us to them. It is only an inkling, because we are submerged within a vastly more complicated environment than the clicking, bouncing steel balls and the pins and bands and buffers and walls they collide with - our course is more like that of a particle within a smoke chamber, subject to Brownian motion, and we are at least nominally possessed of free will - but by reducing, simplifying, it allows to grasp of something otherwise too great for us to comprehend in the raw.
