Ok, done. Peer pressure. 
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Sorry, have a crapload of work to do on the site before Thursday to get it ready. No worries, fill it out when you arrive on-site.
I don’t know if another broadcasting bunch did this, but the one thing I wish I would have discussed / asked on the LAX stream was why so many groups were picking Godzilla.
So far, the “social protocol” is for the broadcasters not to interact with the players during matches, so we don’t ask the players the reasons for their game choices. That said, besides the general observation that players choose games they played well on in qualifying, they tend to prefer long-playing games to short-playing ones most of the time to “let their superiority come out.” They also want ones where they’re fully familiar with the rules. The longer playing games at LAX were Godzilla, MET and Avengers. Xmen was playing a bit tougher than usual; GOT is still a bit unknown as far as best strategy; Taxi, Party Zone, WCS and Full Throttle played shorter. Among the long three, MET can hose you off the magnet or sparky, and Avengers is just chopping wood boredom at times, so Godzilla seemed to be the game of choice, and the long games on it show that the choosers got the game length they intended, if not the result.
All that said, one thing to consider going forward is to what degree do the players want to give information to the broadcasters? At last year’s Circuit, I think Bowen asked each player as they cycled into a match why their game choices were what they were. Other than that, not much goes on.
I’ve also been toying with the idea of expanded player profiles, specifically for those in the Australian scene anyway.
I had two angles for this which was to do a professional shoot of a player as part of a ‘player feature’. And then to also have a data feed from the IFPA profiles into an expanded stats dashboard with, potentially, gamification medals or ‘achievements’ so to speak.
I ended up, for brevity sake, doing the player feature component first, with a view to complete the data feed later. You can check out the player feature here and click through to the full set: gamethesystem.co/people/
I enjoyed seeing what Karl did with the INDISC stream. I believe that for the non enthusiast crowd to engage with pinball as a spectator ‘sport’, you need to humanise it. You need them to understand who the players are and contextualise the experience. It also makes watching and participating in pinball more fun for those who are already involved, when they know a bit about who they are playing and what motivates them.
I’m certainly keen to share ideas and read everyone else’s thoughts on player profiles. At the moment I see IFPA as a data repository rather than people’s profile. There’s a lot of opportunity there to expand on that, but who knows if that’s a path IFPA are interested in going down.
For the record, I meant internal discussions amongst broadcasters re game choices, not looking to interview Gregg Popovich during a game 