It happened a month ago, at the comic book shop. He spotted a Simpsons pinball machine and took a shine to it, and I thought, “Let’s see what happens.” See, my kid’s four, and at that age, every day’s a turning point. He’s still little and baby-faced, but he’s learning to make faces at us – and the rack of life is just starting to stretch his skinny, gangly limbs. He’s not cynical yet, and he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body - or a competitive one. His world has no winners or losers: there are plenty of bugs, robots and ice cream cones to go around.

At least, that’s what he thought until I gave him two quarters, a folding chair to stand on, and help pulling the spring on that first ball. And on that first game, he was pretty good.

The next few games, he got better. And after that, every weekend, we made a habit of hitting the local bowling alley, where a 2007 Stern Spiderman pinball game offered even cooler lights and sounds and higher scores than that Simpsons game. My kid’s high score crossed five million, then six, and then he scraped nine. Some games he flopped, others he improved, but every time he came at it with a good attitude: no tantrums, no explosions of joy or frustration. He was just having fun playing pinball. And then I made a fatal error: I decided to take a turn.

Growing up, I loved arcades. I wasted plenty of allowance at Aladdin’s Castle, blowing through quarters as I got pantsed by one videogame after another – Centipede, Ms. Pac-Man, and later, Gauntlet and Dragon’s Lair. But pinball? That old thing with the flippers, that didn’t even have a screen? I never played it, any more than I listened to Doris Day albums or collected swizzle sticks from hotels. It was a little before my time.

Still - how hard could it be? Well, it was harder than I guessed, because I stank. I couldn’t keep a ball in play at all. Every time I hit the ball with the flipper it would lob up a couple inches and then dart straight down into the hole. My score was lower than my kid’s lowest score, and the digitised voice of J. Jonah Jameson mocked me for the fool I was. And after that, I was too embarrassed to try again.

Now, to be fair, I should tell you my kid’s reaction to all this. After he watched his old man flop, he said, “I got a better score than you.” But he said it matter-of-factly. It was an observation, not an accusation. He had learned something new about the world. Daddy is taller, has a little less hair, and sucks at pinball. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But I couldn’t let it lie. I started to hit that bowling alley at lunch, to run through a few games and try to improve my score. I went online, looking for pinball advice. Pinballnews.com gave me a list of tips and techniques to study: passing the ball, trapping the ball, the drop catch, the death save. Before then, I thought it all came down to, “Hit the flippers and score.”  (At least, that’s the part I had the most trouble with.)

I kept pumping in quarters. My eyes ached and my arms burned. But I didn’t give up until finally, I had a breakthrough: a new high score that blew past my kid’s. I even took a photo:

Eat that, kiddo! Everything’s coming up daddy again.

I ran home, giddy. I figured maybe I’d kid tease him a little, or maybe just rub his face in it. And I got home, and I realized, I can’t be that mean to him. Plus, my wife was not impressed. “It’s not very cool to compete with a four year-old,” she told me, just as I had burst through the front door with an 8½” x 11” print of my score in my hand.

So my kid still thinks he has the high score in the family. And to him, it’s still nothing – just another fact to file away in his ever-growing banks of Things He’s Noticed. He is – for now – admirably generous in victory. In fact, the other day he told me, “I’m going to make a new Spiderman game, and we’re both going to be good at it.”

And then something flickered in his eye, and he said: “But I’m still going to be better.”

Chris Dahlen writes about games, music, pop, and tech for a number of venues. You can find him at http://www.twitter.com/savetherobot, or drop him a line at chris [at] savetherobot.com.