After watching the video [thanks for sharing!] and also this past weekend’s golf and bowling, it occurred to me that one key item in making watching any game / sport interesting is the possible range of outcomes. In that regard, foosball rates lowest, especially singles, since it’s a rather narrow range of moves and results [goal, no goal, who controls the rebound], and the same pattern is repeated the entire game. [Even though basketball is similar in that regard, there’s a much wider range of shots to take.] Bowling, much as I like it, probably rates next lowest. Golf and pinball share the advantage of … having a greater number of ways things can go wrong! Great shots are fun to watch for both, but seeing how players try to recover from their mistakes is frankly more interesting. Having Trent and Steven struggle with the right ramp on Kiss holds my interest more than watching Zach or whomever start lock multiball on AFM for the third time in a game. As both a viewer and an announcer, being less certain of the outcome makes things more watchable / fun to announce. While the foosball video was nice to watch, it’s not someting I’m likely to do again, nor would I really want to do PBP for it; there’s not enough variety.
One thing lacking from the bowling this week which helps to have, and is good for pinball on those rare occasions when it can be done, is drawing out things on-screen, i.e. what happened on that shot or where should the player put the next shot. Those lines / pointers help when the viewer is less familiar with the game, or when a viewer is using a small screen. Golf and football have done well with this at times, and I think it would help us even more since those games are more familiar to their average viewer. When we talk about stacking, it would be nice to always be able to sketch how to set it up for the audience.