By Sean Sullivan 

“I was kind of a child of the 80s,” said Tasker Smith.

Walking among rows of pinball machines that rule his backyard barn, visitors can testify to that.

The Natick resident is more than a casual collector of those machines that thrived in popularity even through the golden age of video games. 

Smith’s barn bars the biting wind that harries New Englanders during winter months, but cold air still seeps in and makes itself at home within its walls.

A portable heater raises the temperature during such times, when Smith might be tinkering in the space that also serves as a workshop. During this darker season, he might also warm things up within the barn to play a few games of pinball.

On a night after work in February, Smith switched on the bulky machines that stand stalwart on legs seeming too slim to support such heavy cabinets. 

Each is a carnival of blinking light and sound when activated, a show designed to attract players and quarters in the context and competition of a busy and noisy arcade.

“I kind of fell into the whole arcade, video game scene,” said Smith. 

Born in 1968, he was of age to appreciate the heydays of the pinball machine (1970s), and videogame (1980s).

A few centuries in Florence, Italy witnessed the Renaissance’s flowering of creativity.

Hundreds of years later, these two decades of modern Americana hosted the dawn of the digital age, and the masterpieces of electronic entertainment that filled galleries with light, sound, adventure and imagination.

Smith has written an ode to this era, or more precisely the pinball machines that played such a starring role in that story. His new book, “Pinball, a Quest for Mastery,” delves into all things pinball.

The work serves as a how-to guide to becoming a better player, and also a treasure map for those on a quest to find pinball arcades. The book touches on the history and anatomy of the machines that have captivated players for decades.

Smith is a shop manager and technical educator at Boston University’s Engineering Product Innovation Center. Immersed in a world of emails and data during work days, the tangible technology of pinball has always been a touchstone that helps keep him grounded.

“I think it’s the analog nature” that’s so appealing, said the author, who during warmer months will pop into the barn for a quick pinball fix while burgers sizzle outside on the grill. “There’s something for me about that.”

The author calls the mid-1970s the apex of artistic design for pinball. A machine’s front display is a flashing billboard to prospective players. Each has its own theme, and is a backlit fresco designed to intrigue and entice pinball enthusiasts and amateurs alike.

Smith says some in the pinball world will swap out modern LED lights in displays when the old ones fail. But the author is a purist, preferring the old-school bulbs to their modern descendants.

Smith has his favorite videogames from the arcade era as well, classics like Joust, Galaga and Missile Command. Games of that era reflected the science fiction and fantasy trends prevalent then in pop culture.

Invest enough time (and quarters) in those early games, and you could internalize the patterns of characters playing out on the screen. Armed with those patterns, a player could navigate and even dictate the script, accruing big numbers on the scoreboard and a high level of skill.

Not quite with pinball. That silver ball never takes quite the exact same path twice.

“It’s much more interactive,” said Smith.

There’s something infectious about another person’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for a particular subject.

“Ready Player One,” the New York Times bestselling novel from 2011, is an ode to 1980s nostalgia. The book owes its success to author Ernest Cline’s encyclopedic knowledge of and affection for the pop culture trappings of the Decade of Excess.

The novel’s hero Wade Watts lives in a dystopian America set several decades from now. It’s a dark future whose denizens can briefly escape into a virtual-reality multiplayer game/universe called the “Oasis.”

Watts puts his adoration for 80s culture and minutiae to good use in the novel, wielding his knowledge of the decade to advance in an all-or-nothing contest devised by the Oasis’s late creator.

Cline lets his geek flag fly with abandon in the novel, taking readers along for the ride in a pageant of pop culture. The author manages somehow to get readers to care about the obscure origins of video games that are, even now, decades old and laughably primitive by today’s standards.

Music from the era permeates the pages of Cline’s novel, those songs often turned into yet more pieces of the narrative puzzle. The author even draws from Dungeons & Dragons, the analog role-playing adventure game that uses dice to determine the fates of its characters.

Reading on, we become invested in these things because Cline (and Wade) care so much about them.

More recently and virally, millions of fans have likewise been captivated by the young heroes of Hawkins. The streaming series “Stranger Things” has been a worldwide phenomenon for a decade, just ending its fifth and final season late last year.

Set in 1980s, the Duffer brothers (the show’s creators), wear their nostalgia for the decade on their sleeves. Supernatural and science-fiction narratives aside, the show is a carnival of 80s cool and kitsch. Its seasons are replete with dial-up corded telephones, 80’s pop anthems, and the ever-present atmosphere of the analog.

Even among the youngest watchers of “Stranger Things,’’the absence of the internet and mobile phones in the show didn’t seem to dampen fans’ enthusiasm for it. Indeed, the Duffer brothers’ celebration of a more primitive, unplugged and outwardly adventurous life is likely what drew so many to a party that’s spanned ten years.

“It’s a nice departure from that” digital and demanding world, said Smith of his pinball pastime.

The author said that a bit of ambivalence came with the acquisition of his first machine about 15 years ago. With kids then on way, he wondered if a pinball machine might be a selfish extravagance.

But along with Smith’s family, his collection of classics has grown just fine.

“It just kind of took over my life a little bit.”