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Episode 34 - Bowen Brings Business

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 26m·analyzed·May 7, 2017
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Bowen Kerins on growing competitive pinball scenes through inclusive league design and tournament accessibility.

Summary

Bowen Kerins discusses competitive pinball growth strategies, emphasizing multi-location leagues with inclusive prize structures and accessible entry points for new players. The episode covers recent pinball industry news including legal proceedings around Skit Bee/Predator, Dutch Pinball/Big Lebowski manufacturing disputes, Total Annihilation renaming to Total Nuclear Annihilation, and IFPA's new Challenge Matches format. Key themes include league design lessons from New England and Pittsburgh models, tournament structure impact on player retention, and criteria for competitive-friendly pinball machines.

Key Claims

  • New England Pinball League has grown to approximately 250 players over five years with A, B, C, and D divisions offering equal prize pools to incentivize new player participation

    high confidence · Bowen describing league structure: 'we now have approximately 250 players' and 'the prize in C and the prize in A, the trophy in C and the trophy in A, they are the same'

  • Pizza West tournament format (redistributing entry fees so top half gets money back) shows significantly higher new player participation than 403 tournament's top-3 payout structure, based on 2016 IFPA data analysis

    high confidence · Dennis analyzing tournament data: 'I did an analysis last year or at the start of this year, using the 2016 figures and found that the average number of people who are not were not yet having five games in on IFPA... there was a significantly higher count that went to the Pizza West tournaments versus the 403 tournaments'

  • Total Annihilation game is being renamed to Total Nuclear Annihilation due to Atari renewing their trademark on the original Total Annihilation video game

    high confidence · Dennis: 'Atari has renewed their trademark on Total Annihilation, which is a video game. And so probably to avoid any sort of risk of issue, they just went ahead and renamed it'

  • Dutch Pinball's lead/only software engineer has left the company and started a new job, as revealed on LinkedIn, raising questions about future code updates

    high confidence · Dennis reporting: 'the lead, and I believe only software engineer who was working for Dutch Pinball and programming the game, has listed on LinkedIn they no longer work for Dutch Pinball and they've started a new job'

  • Big Lebowski code is quite complete despite manufacturing disputes, with Bowen planning to film a tutorial at Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco in June

    high confidence · Bowen: 'I have played Lebowski quite a bit, including the new code, and I do feel it is quite complete as far as code goes' and 'I will be filming the big Lebowski machine at the Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco'

  • New England Pinball League now operates across 10 locations (3 NH, 2 MA, 1 CT, 1 RI, 2 ME, 1 VT) compared to 3 locations when starting

    high confidence · Bowen listing league expansion: 'we have three locations in New Hampshire, two in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut, one in Rhode Island, two in Maine, and one in Vermont. So there are now ten different league locations'

Notable Quotes

  • “I think that gives a flavor to someone who's never played before to know okay we care about new players we care about people who are coming in who are not going to be the best player in the league”

    Bowen Kerins @ ~18:30 — Core philosophy on inclusive league design to reduce new player intimidation

  • “if I don't give you a good experience, you might not come back. And the hundreds of other yous might not come back. And that is, I think, very critical to growing competitive pinball.”

    Bowen Kerins @ ~44:20 — Key insight on market growth dependent on positive experience for average/new players

  • “Most of the people who show up for Papa, they play. Then a scoreboard tells them they suck, and they go home sad.”

    Bowen Kerins @ ~40:00 — Criticism of traditional tournament elimination formats harming retention

  • “I have played Lebowski quite a bit, including the new code, and I do feel it is quite complete as far as code goes”

    Bowen Kerins @ ~6:50 — Assessment of Big Lebowski code completeness despite manufacturing disputes

  • “Pinberg basically is a league season run in a weekend but everybody continues to play no matter how good or bad you're doing”

    Bowen Kerins @ ~38:30 — Description of alternative tournament format prioritizing player retention

  • “I'm extremely dry on on my extremely dry i'm somewhere revise that to somewhat dry”

    Bowen Kerins @ ~3:10 — Personal humor acknowledgment/self-description

  • “It's been amazing. The fact that we're able to continue making these is outstanding.”

    Bowen Kerins @ ~2:50 — Appreciation for Patreon support enabling continued tutorial video production

  • “I stay away from any of these financial fighting things that are going on... I just say I know nothing and let's move on”

    Bowen Kerins — Intentional avoidance of industry legal/business disputes to stay neutral

Entities

Bowen KerinspersonTonypersonDennispersonNew England Pinball LeagueorganizationPittsburgh Pinball LeagueorganizationDutch PinballcompanySkit BeecompanySpooky Pinballcompany

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Dutch Pinball ongoing manufacturing dispute with ARA contract manufacturer with no resolution achieved despite recent Friday meeting

    high · Dennis: 'Dutch indicated there was no resolution yet, but they're continuing to talk and they're trying to work something out'

  • ?

    business_signal: VirtuaPin default judgment in Skit Bee bankruptcy proceeding set aside; case will proceed to determine CNC machine ownership dispute

    high · Dennis reporting VirtuaPin hearing where 'judge did agree to set aside the default judgment' and case will move forward with trustee receiving small payment for wasted time

  • ?

    community_signal: New England Pinball League demonstrating successful scalability model with multi-location structure, equal prize pools, and party fund components creating inclusive competitive environment

    high · Bowen reports league growth to 250 players across 10 locations with identical prizes for A/B/C divisions and one-third of revenue allocated to social events

  • ?

    community_signal: Bowen Kerins' Patreon-funded tutorial video initiative enabling expanded travel schedule (Pittsburgh monthly, San Francisco June, additional locations) with community voting on featured games

    high · Bowen: 'I'll be traveling to Pittsburgh later this month to film. I'll be traveling to San Francisco to film in June... It's been amazing. The fact that we're able to continue making these is outstanding'

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Discussion beginning on criteria for competitive-friendly machine design (fair scoring, absence of luck-based BS) indicating ongoing meta discussion about tournament game selection

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.260

0:00
Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, May 7th. It's episode 34. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're joined by a very special guest this time around. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hey, good morning. I'm Bowen, Bowen Cairns from Salem, Massachusetts, and I play pinball. And for those of you who have probably heard of Bowen, he is seen as a pretty major pinball ambassador. I think for most of our listeners, they may know you for a lot of the tutorial videos that you do for the Professional Amateur Pinball Association. And in the show notes, for those that are interested, I have a link to those videos. I have a link to your Patreon for those that want to financially help support those efforts for you to continue to do those videos. And also a link to the Tilt Through podcast of which you are one of the co-hosts. So thank you so much for being on our show. We cover a mix of gaming, but we know most of our listeners are pinball oriented. So we're going to hit real heavy into pinball for this episode. I didn't know if there was anything you wanted to plug or promote or talk about at the start here before we get going into the news. but the floor is yours. Not really. It's an honor to have the support from the Patreon backers. We have plenty of support at this point to continue making these videos. I'll be traveling to Pittsburgh later this month to film. I'll be traveling to San Francisco to film in June. And it's been amazing. The fact that we're able to continue making these is outstanding. I used to just basically work in Pittsburgh every couple months, and that's how those videos were being made. And I just assumed that would be the end of it once I was no longer able to travel there as often. Well, I'm really glad that they have not stopped because they are ever so helpful to me to at least when I lose, it's only my skill. It's not that I don't know what to do on the game anymore. So they definitely come in handy, and you have an interesting sense of humor, so they're entertaining to watch as well. interesting that's not a good sense of humor interesting sense that's the term that's used to describe me a lot or dry i'm i'm very dry on on my extremely dry i'm somewhere revise that to somewhat dry um tony do you have anything you want to uh summarize though before we we get rolling into the uh pinball topic no it's just been a pretty standard crazy week for me so i i haven't had time to do much of anything other than i did start playing near automata and I'll talk about that at a later time because this game has a deep story, like a seriously deep story. And I'm in the middle of it. I haven't decided if it's as good as it's looking like it's going to be or if it's just a terrible, terrible tease. Yeah. I have a couple of video game things that we'll carry over to the next episode to talk about. I do want to mention a couple of things that kind of relate to the podcast, one more directly than the other. first is that one of our listeners Jake wrote into us on Facebook he heard our last episode and heard me mention my interest in trying to find a silver slugger the Gottlieb early system 3 one of their street level games turns out he has one so he sent a picture and he said that he's had at any given time over 50 games in his collection and it's actually his favorite from a gameplay standpoint so I guess I'm not totally insane for being interested in a Gottlieb And he also mentioned a title fight that was somewhat near us. Unfortunately, title fight isn't one that's interesting to me because the layout, I think, is too easy to exploit the loop in the upper right. But I am watching for a hoops or a silver slugger. So thank you, Jake, for writing in and confirming that my analysis is at least somewhat on target. I'm a big fan of hoops. It's a much better game than it has any right to be, honestly. and uh um title fight is a fun a fun layout i think that uh i often look at games from a point scoring and competition perspective and a title fight turns out not to be nearly as good from that perspective although it is it is quite good from a playfield layout and interesting shot perspective don formerly of the pinball podcast currently of the link cable podcast agrees with you about hoops he's he pushed me most on hoops saying that uh he thinks that that's the strongest of the six street level games that he's familiar with so and uh and hoops and uh silver slugger i think are the only two of the street level that had john trudeau involved on design but i think hoops he left while it was in production i think norris took it over so interesting little history there but but okay good i'm okay i'm keeping my eyes out but i don't see him crop up much uh the the other item is uh nick dangerous he was actually our very first interview we ever did last year right after the 2016 texas pinball festival he has been out during doing a tour of the continental ux uh fixing em machines he's got a thread on pin side that's running as a sort of travel blog and he's putting in lots of fun uh photos he's using a lot of humor and doing these little write-ups of these visits where he's going and he's restoring these EM or teaching people how to fix their EM machines so that they're functional and can be played. And unlike a lot of threads on Pinside, this one's actually very, very positive. There's no negativity with it. So I have a link in the show notes directly to the thread. So anyone who wants to follow along with Nick's adventures can do so. So let's move to the productivity portion of the podcast and Let's go on into pinball. And we got a few news things to hit on. And we're going to have some interesting discussions with Bowen. But I want to go ahead and tear through the news first since some people, shockingly, might only listen to us, which would probably be a huge mistake. But if we're your only source for pinball news, let me go ahead and do what I can here really, really quickly.

  • Pittsburgh Pinball League has been running longer than New England league and has approximately same size (~250 players), serving as model for league design

    high confidence · Bowen: 'the Pittsburgh Pinball League which has been running even longer and has about the same size'

  • PAPA League Manager free software (league.papa.org) is used by approximately 15 leagues around the country for match play and standings management

    medium confidence · Bowen: 'there's I think maybe 15 leagues around the country that are using it'

    • @ ~8:45
    Big Lebowski
    game
    Total Nuclear Annihilationgame
    Predatorgame
    IFPAorganization
    PAPAorganization
    Pizza Westlocation
    403 Clublocation
    Pinball Wizard Arcadelocation
    Pinbergevent
    ARAcompany
    VirtuaPincompany
    Nick Dangerousperson
    Ataricompany
    Scott Dasaniperson

    medium · Episode cuts off with Bowen beginning to discuss: 'Important to me is, first, that the scoring is fair. There isn't some crazy BS that's going to happen. Second, that the scoring is no...'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Atari trademark enforcement on Total Annihilation video game forced Spooky Pinball to rename pinball machine to Total Nuclear Annihilation

    high · Dennis: 'Atari has renewed their trademark on Total Annihilation, which is a video game. And so probably to avoid any sort of risk of issue, they just went ahead and renamed it'

  • $

    market_signal: Data-driven evidence that tournament payout structure significantly impacts new player participation; revenue-sharing format (Pizza West) shows higher new player retention than traditional top-3 payout (403)

    high · Dennis analysis of 2016 IFPA data showing 'significantly higher count' of new players (<5 games) at Pizza West vs 403 tournaments correlating with payout structure difference

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Dutch Pinball's lead/only software engineer departure raises uncertainty about post-release code support and future updates to Big Lebowski

    high · Dennis: 'the lead, and I believe only software engineer who was working for Dutch Pinball... has listed on LinkedIn they no longer work for Dutch Pinball and they've started a new job'

  • ?

    product_concern: Big Lebowski construction quality issues reported but code is complete and well-received by experienced players

    medium · Bowen: 'barring their issues with their construction, the actual game itself is not bad at all' and 'detail and amount of things that are in that game, it's quite good'

    • 6:19
    Skit B, the company, quote, unquote, that was behind the Predator pinball fiasco, there have been two new legal hearings that have happened. One is involved Kevin Kulix, who is the owner-operator of Skit Bee, his wife, and one involves VirtuaPin, which was contracted to make the cabinets for the job. I have links to both audios of those hearings in the show notes. The one with the wife is mostly about the house and the photo equipment that she possesses and interest in exploring whether or not the predator money went towards acquiring those things. I know that the trustee's office very much thinks they have evidence of a paper trail that the house was bought with that money. And it seems that based off the hearing that I have listened to, that the wife isn't contesting that that's how it looks. And it seems more that she's trying to find a way to come up with money to keep the house rather than have to give the house over to the estate. The VirtuaPen hearing was more about the default judgment. They had not shown up to court, so they received a default judgment that they had to turn over a CNC machine, which is used to cut cabinets. This was a hearing where VirtuaPen asked for that default judgment to be set aside, and their lawyer attempted to excuse why he was derelict in actually getting to court on time. The judge did agree to set aside the default judgment. The trustee gets a small payment of money because their time was wasted basically having to deal with this restoration of the ability to defend themselves. But the case will get to move forward. So Virtual Pin will be allowed to present its evidence as to why the CNC machine is legit and doesn't belong to Skitbee.
    7:57
    So that's what's going on with that. Big Lebowski, minor update there. The contract manufacturer ARA and Dutch Pinball had yet another meeting just this last Friday. Dutch indicated there was no resolution yet, but they're continuing to talk and they're trying to work something out. Separate from that, but what was revealed the same day is the lead, and I believe only software engineer who was working for Dutch Pinball and programming the game, has listed on LinkedIn they no longer work for Dutch Pinball and they've started a new job. So some people are wondering if that means there won't be any additional code updates. It's no idea. I haven't seen any comments. Dutch has not weighed in on that. Someone else was just looking into it because they wondered why there hasn't been a code update since the initial run started. But others argue that the game is fully programmed, so it's not a big deal. Bowen, you've got a tutorial coming up on Lebowski, don't you? You have revealed information that is not public yet, but yes. Really? Because I found it on a public site. Well, if it was for me, I screwed up.
    9:08
    No, it wasn't. It wasn't. I found it in a forum. Okay. There were a number of people who do know this because it was voted on by the Patreon backers. So I said I was traveling to San Francisco in June, and I will be filming the big Lebowski machine at the Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco, as voted by the backers. So I'm excited. I have played Lebowski quite a bit, including the new code, and I do feel it is quite complete as far as code goes. there are certain things of course that Dutch in its original design was thinking about doing like having a bowling mode where you just play bowling the whole game instead of playing pinball which isn't programmed but I would not expect that it seemed like a bonus thing to throw in at the last minute I haven't got the Wizard yet so I can't vouch for its quality or its existence but But the detail and the amount of things that are in that game, it's quite good. And considering it's the very first full game from them, it feels nice. And it's nice to flip, and the rules are great. I've heard a lot of people talking about that, barring their issues with their construction, the actual game itself is not bad at all. I've enjoyed playing it every time I play it. And so I stay away from any of these financial fighting things that are going on. I try not to learn too much about them unless people ask me what I know because then I can just say I know nothing and let's move on. You know, that's probably an approach we should have taken. I have fallen into a legal morass on tracking. I mean, I have to run and follow the legal documentation on Zidware, Skitbee, and hopefully not Dutch. So far, Dutch has been much simpler because there's nothing legal going on right now. It's just negotiation. Oh, I thought you were saying that you just didn't want to read it because it wasn't in English. Oh, no, no. But I won't teach myself Dutch. I had a hard enough time with Spanish. I ain't going any further in languages. Okay, so that's it on production. well no we do have one more production thing a little quickie apparently Total Annihilation which is as we've mentioned is going to be produced by Spooky Pinball that's Scott Dasani I believe is how his name is pronounced his Total Annihilation game which Tony and I played at Texas Pinball Festival and we both really really liked it quite a bit as you see you know single level that's what that Silver Slugger Hoops stuff I'm just a sucker for single level but it's getting renamed it's going to be Total Nuclear Annihilation. I guess that was indicated on the latest Spooky Pinball podcast. And it sounds like Atari has renewed their trademark on Total Annihilation, which is a video game. And so probably to avoid any sort of risk of issue, they just went ahead and renamed it at this time. And it fits with the theme because you're destroying nuclear reactors is sort of the plot. So a little bit of a change there. I'm fine with that. And I actually kind hope the Atari thing means that they're making a new Total Annihilation because that game was awesome.
    12:34
    I mean, they do have because there's the Total Annihilation spinoff game that they kick-started a couple years ago.
    12:47
    But I don't know if that's still Atari. I thought it was going to be based off of the real-time strategy game. I just assumed it. I wasn't a big TA player, though. So it wasn't a big deal to me when I found out it was an original theme. Last news item that I have is just IFPA, International Flipper Pinball Association, announced that they're doing something called Challenge Matches in 2018. Not a lot of info yet. The base outline is that there wouldn't be a fee associated with it. You don't have the 30-day calendar submission requirement. It's not for Whopper points. It's just for rating. But it'll let you challenge another person head-to-head in a best-of-seven game series. So it seems like a from what I understand, it's a it's a way that they're trying to get the rating to be used a little more and offer like if people like to play dollar games and stuff, maybe converting that into something that's actually submitted. You know, I don't know, given it's not worth whoppers, if there's going to be a high volume of submissions on that or not. Time will tell. Yeah, we'll see what happens. I'm not it's not something that interests me. So, yeah, I I could you know, I don't know. I could care. I could see doing it if I, you know, just for the fun of it, maybe trying it out. But I don't think, you know, where I'm rated against other players is kind of already determined by the tournaments I play. So I don't think that's going to really sway it very much. On the Total Annihilation front, Bowen, have you played Total Annihilation? I have been itching to play Total Annihilation for many months, having seen some video of it and some live streams. And I just never end up in the same place as the game. And hopefully I'll end up in Chicago soon and be able to play it or just get it produced. It really looks outstanding. And the action of that top area and the inline drops for the locks, it's just clever. Oh, that locks thing is amazing. I don't have a sense of how it comes together strategically to know whether there's depth to the rules or you're just trying to do that thing as many times as you can. but that doesn't make it bad. I mean, Barracora is a great game, but you don't have 17 different things to do. You don't have to have a huge pile of variety for a game to be awesome. That's because those end lines up at the top require all mental capacity so you can try and light the 4-5-6.
    15:13
    Yeah. All right, let's go ahead and go into our discussion topics then, because it was a pretty light news week in pinball for once, which is good. And one of the topics I thought is you, of course, are well known for being a participant in competitive pinball. And this is sort of driven by a conversation I had with one of our local area Kansas City players. And that was, what can folks do at the local level to help increase the popularity of competitive pinball? You know, not involving any of the international or national organizations like PAPA, just like, I want to grow the scene. What do we do? And this was sort of driven by last summer we had someone, he tried to run a selfie tournament, and we didn't get any new players involved in it. And we sort of discussed what went wrong. Could we have advertised it better? Some of the hardcore local players weren't really big fans of the selfie concept. So what was planned to be a three-month thing only happened one month, and then it just sort of pittered out. And so you've been in this for a long time, though. So what do you think? What can people like us do if we want to try and get more new people involved into the competitive pinball scene? So I think one of the stories I would tell about this is how the New England Pinball League has grown. It's been running now for about five years. And a couple of things that the league was built on have made it possible to grow to the point where we now have approximately 250 players. and the first big concept is almost all these concepts are stolen directly from the Pittsburgh Pinball League which has been running even longer and has about the same size.
    17:00
    One of those is that you take the money that someone contributes to a league and you put it towards multiple purposes rather than just putting it as prize money for the top players in the league. I think that the impression that a lot of new players get when they come to pinball is that the elite players, the top players, whoever the best players in the league are, that they're going to take their entry fee and hand it over to those players. And they're reluctant to even join a league because of that. So either having leagues that are free with no prize money at all or having leagues that are equal contributing leagues. So in our league, we have multiple divisions. We now have A, B, C, and D. When we started, we had A, B, and C. And one of the tenets was that the prize money in A and B and C is identical.
    17:55
    So every person will have an eligibility to be in one of those divisions at the end of the season with a chance to play for a prize. And the prize in C and the prize in A, the trophy in C and the trophy in A, they are the same. and I think that gives a flavor to someone who's never played before to know okay we care about new players we care about people who are coming in who are not going to be the best player in the league and it's grown it's grown a lot I don't know if that personally was responsible for that We also take one-third of the money that would be going to prizes and put it into a party fund so that the finale of the league is not just a prize fest to chase the victory, but it also becomes this nice event with free food and I don't know where you have your league, but drinks. the other thing that worked very well for our league that again we stole from pittsburgh is the ability to run the league at multiple locations and you may have one location i don't know how many locations are in kansas city i know about the uh what 504 club is it your club 403 sorry no that's all right 504 is the uh 504 is from high speed it's the uh it's the car the police car sorry um so one of the one of the things that's happened with our league is we've been able to encourage new locations to open to have more pinball machines because they can become league hosts and our players choose one location to go to each week some people play in cambridge some people play in providence because we're in new england we actually have now nine locations all over New England that had grown out from the first season we had three locations.
    19:56
    And that allows you to have this expanding capability to where you don't have a capacity that you might have at 403 to say, all right, we can have a league, but we can only have this many people. You're at that point limiting how big your scene can get. And I think that the Pittsburgh model of having multiple places to play and multiple days of the week to do it gives flexibility. It gives lots of options for people.
    20:27
    And lastly, we use free software that's been provided by Papa and FSPA called the Papa League Manager, and that will run your league. It gives people standings. It gives people badges. It gives people all sorts of little trinkets to go on so they can see their scores, they can see their progress. and Papa provides that service completely for free for any league to join. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I didn't even know about that. The website is league.papa.org, and there's I think maybe 15 leagues around the country that are using it. I'm not sure about internationally, but it's quite useful, and it allows us to run match play leagues and then have all the standings immediately recorded and updated, Even though we have 250 players, we get instant updates. It's great. Wow. Yeah, our league scene has been a – I mean, we do have multiple locations for pinball, which is good in the area.
    21:28
    And the issue is all the leagues, though, that have happened have always cropped up around a specific location. So there been like a 403 league and then there been like a Nub Pub league that run on different days in case people want to attend both of them But the times have always been at least in all the cases for me I never actually participated in any of the Kansas City leagues because they all start so late at night that for me it just not practical Whereas the tournaments are on weekends, and these are always on weekdays, and they start at 8.30 p.m., and it's just with my work schedule, I can't do it. But I like this idea of moving it around, about using the different locations, because that's something we actually have. I mean, we have on the Kansas side, we have three major locations. So just to be as specific as possible, we don't move it around. We use all the locations. So a player in our league can go to one location on Monday night, one week, and then the next week they can go to a different location on Wednesday night and have both of those count as their weeks. We play for eight weeks, and a player's bottom two weeks are dropped. So you only have to actually show up for six weeks out of eight in order to be a full participant and be eligible for the finals. Oh, so they can go to any of those various locations, and that will count as their one week? That's right. And so in your case, if you say, well, I've got games at my house, I'll just have my own league night on Tuesday, and people can come to me. And that's how we have, I think, four different private homes as locations and I want to say five different public locations. But I could be wrong about that. I don't quite have the number. That's good. I mean, I don't even know how many places our league plays. That's how big it is. I'd never even thought about using private residences as part of a league night. I mean, my mind was just kind of like a bowling league in my mind. I just, oh, league is this, league is that. But, I mean, that makes, and the flexibility of that, I can see where that really would make things a lot easier to run a league, especially a large league, compared to trying to fit, you know, 50, 60, 70 people somewhere. Right. And that's, even if your league, let's say that you ran a league at 403 and it turns out to be super successful and you have more people than you can cram, because that's what's going to happen. If you're seen as successful and growing, that will happen eventually.
    23:54
    What then? You either have to push half those people to a different night, or you have to push them to a different place. And, again, I'm not going to say that we did this because we're completely stealing the concept from the Pittsburgh Pinball League originally. Well, it sounds like a good setup overall. I mean, it's something that I can definitely see why it would work as well as it seems to work. I mean, it sounds like both have such huge leagues. and I think that's been what's always hurt us in this area is our leagues have been small and while we might get big tournament player turnouts, we don't get big league player turnouts. Right, and I think that a new player is much less likely to want to join a tournament as their first inroad unless it's a tournament that they know that they can get a high value out of. So a lot of qualifying tournaments or three strikes tournaments, a brand new player might end up feeling frustrated by that because they're eliminated fairly quickly and then they look around and they see like this thing's still going to go on for another six hours and I'm already out I guess I suck goodbye pinball is not for me that's been my biggest issue with tournaments especially when I was first starting I helped to run pinberg also one of the things we wanted to do it in pinberg is to give the lowest players in the tournament the same experience as the highest players in the tournament so pinberg basically is a league season run in a weekend but everybody continues to play no matter how good or bad you're doing that the tournament goes on where in a three strikes format or even the papa qualifying format Most of the people who show up for Papa, they play. Then a scoreboard tells them they suck, and they go home sad.
    25:55
    It's the nature of the beast because of how many people come through. And the only way to get around that is to increase the volume of the number of machines you have available. At location play, you can't do that. You've got some cap on how many games there are at 403. There's only so many.
    26:17
    And that tells you how many people you can fit in there. And you want to do better than that, you have to find other places.
    26:24
    So let's see, New England Pinball League. We have three locations in New Hampshire, two in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut, one in Rhode Island, two in Maine, and one in Vermont. So there are now ten different league locations in New England Pinball League.
    26:44
    And it works. It really has worked way better than I thought it would, and the play is friendly. It's very fun.
    26:53
    The only problem we have now is that, unfortunately, because of the closure of the fantastic Pinball Wizard Arcade in Pelham, New Hampshire, we no longer have a location that we can bring everybody to play together for finals. We used to just invite everyone, but now we have to figure out how to do finals, and I don't think we've solved that problem completely yet. Yeah, we shared that closure because it was – I think a lot of people were surprised when they saw that, probably just because pinball has been growing so much. But I guess there were some extenuating circumstances that were involved there. Yeah, it's completely a location lease issue and not anything to do with the success of the location. They were successful. Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, this has a lot of ideas that are new to me in terms of ways to possibly structure leagues. Yeah. In terms of locations in this area, we've got three on the Kansas side that would be seen as, quote unquote, high quality. One's opening up here very soon on the Missouri side of the border. And there are arguably a couple other locations with sufficient machines that if you want to just do public venues, all that. It's real weird in Kansas City. All the all the tournaments take place on the Kansas side. but it makes a weird split on the state level because all the kansas city missouri players all play in kansas so they're all in the kansas state and then the missouri tournaments are all dominated by players from like st louis and columbia it's like the columbia st louis eastern corridor controls missouri so the kcmo folks play on the kansas side they play on they play on the Kansas side on purpose. Oh, sure.
    28:40
    We welcome them with open arms. It tells you that some sort of regional decision might have been... Anyway.
    28:52
    It raises some interesting questions, but beyond the scope of today's discussion. Some of the stuff like on the making everyone, even on the lower tiers, feel welcome. That's something that we've seen some, I think, some evidentiary-based results on the tournament side. We have two regular monthly tournaments that happen in the Kansas City area. There's the 403 one that we've talked about. There's also a location at Pizza West. Those tournaments run almost identical in terms of fee to get in, head-to-head, double elimination sort of stuff. But the big difference is at Pizza West, that operator takes all the entry fees and he redistributes it so the top half of the field gets at least their money back. Oh, OK, good. Whereas 403 does a standard payout to the top one, two and three. And I did an analysis last year or at the start of this year, I guess, using the 2016 figures and found that the average number of people who are not were not yet having five games in on IFPA. So, quote unquote, new players that there was a significantly higher count that went to the Pizza West tournaments versus the 403 tournaments. And the only discernible difference I know of is that payout structure. So I thought that does make a difference where it feels like, because I never win money at 403, I never have, but at Pizza West I've won my money back. I can get in the top half of the field sometimes. That, I think, is a real lesson that if you look at who plays pinball, there are a lot more of, I don't want to say of you, but the way you've described yourself, there's a lot more of you than there are of me. And frankly, I'm going to have a great time at any pinball tournament. I don't care what format you use. I'm going to enjoy it. And maybe I'll complain about its format online or something. I don't know. But if I don't give you a good experience, you might not come back. And the hundreds of other yous might not come back. And that is, I think, very critical to growing competitive pinball. You have to provide quality experiences for all players. and double elimination, for example, I would rather see more of what's called a Swiss system where everybody gets the same number of matches and then at the end you just say, okay, we're done and the best records win the prizes.
    31:18
    If you have enough machines like at 403, for example, to run an entire round at once, then you don't really need to eliminate anyone.
    31:27
    And so it is at Pinberg. At Pinberg we have 300 pinball machines. in the tournament so that we can support 800 players. And your point's well taken, yeah, though I am a super special snowflake, so no one is quite like me. But I think that leads to a good transition here to the next pinball topic I wanted to go over with your point that you would enjoy a tournament no matter what. But what if the pinball machines are not good machines for competition? So I wanted to talk a little bit about what do you guys think makes for a good and a bad pinball machine in the sense of competition, not home ownership or just playing for fun, but actually what makes a good pin for competition purposes? Important to me is, first, that the scoring is fair. There isn't some crazy BS that's going to happen.
    32:17
    Second, that the scoring is not one-dimensional. So the best example of this is Data East Star Wars. You will never see Data East Star Wars at a major tournament because the strategy comes down to looping a simple ramp as many times as you can for huge scores. I guess there's a new version of the Star Wars software now that tries to rebalance that and does a much better job of making a fun machine. Yeah, chat H code, yeah. If a game is so one-dimensional that no one would want to play it or watch it, it's not going to make for a very good competitive game. and I think that for me there are two more categories to make it a great game instead of just a good game one is to have multiple dimensions of strategy where one can try for say a medium score or high score by pursuing different goals so an example of this is World Cup Soccer where if you need to get a good score you can go for multi-balls If you need to get an amazing score, you change your mind and you start going for cities because getting to the final match is worth a ton, but it's a risk-reward strategy.
    33:34
    And last, having games that have nonlinear scoring is really important to making things interesting. So an example of this is Creature from the Black Lagoon has these ridiculously high jackpots and super jackpots. that is good because if you get a player to that point where they're near the jackpot it ramps up the tension the player feels it differently because they know that they're near something big and important and when it does come it's a big moment for the player for the viewer for the commentators for everybody where if you're playing a game that's like monopoly is a good example of a game that's pretty linear. If you're playing Monopoly, not too much different happens. In multi-ball, the jackpot is a million. Now you relight the jackpot, it's a million again. And the only big thing that happens in Monopoly is if anybody gets a land grab, which is the wizard.
    34:33
    But besides that, it's mostly just grinding away at a reasonable amount of points over and over again, and there are no big moments. The most recent great example of this is Metallica. with the crank it up modes, and that is a spectacularly programmed game because you get those big moments much more regularly than almost any other game I can recall. Yeah, I find games with a lot of just like chopping wood,
    35:02
    where you see the same shot being made over and over and over again. I liked Case in Point at the tournament yesterday.
    35:09
    Rob Zombie, really beautiful Rob Zombie score got put up, but it was literally just chopping wood on the same shot, and it was like an incredibly long ball, but it wasn't exciting to watch, and I don't know how much you could really consider it to be fun because you're just shooting the same shot over and over and over and over again. I think stuff like that really drags down a game from both a player perspective and a watcher perspective, and with how big pinball is getting on Twitch and stuff and how many tournaments we're seeing out there, I think the actual watchability of pinball is something that's becoming a lot more important than it was four, five, ten years ago. I agree with that. Yeah, that's a good point on that one. Yeah, and I hate those – yeah, that chopping description, that wood chopping, which – you know, party zone is a case in point for me. We had a party zone on location in tournament for a long time, and oh, gosh, it was just painful because it's just those two ramps, alternating those two ramps. I'm really big into for competitive purposes things where there's a risk reward and I can take different strategies so attack from Mars for example is one I really like in competition even though everyone knows it because there are multiple options so I do what I consider a very beginner strategy and I only attack saucers that's what I do because it's a risky shot but I will get rewarded if I'm successful you're a fool that's what I do man I attack the saucers and you're judging me Oh, I was in circuit final in the first round, and I attacked saucers to survive because nothing else was working.
    36:50
    As a four-player game of top players, we went through two balls, and the first place was $250 million. Oh, wow. And I was up as player one, having made no progress at all. And I'm like, okay.
    37:07
    And I survived through saucers. I just had it not be the last. But you're absolutely right that Attack is a great example of a game with multiple options. And I think that one of the other things it does really well, which I didn't mention before, and you mentioned Twitch and the viewer experience, is that these strategies need to be explainable in a short amount of time to new people who barely know pinball at all so that they can have a good viewer experience. and some of these big scoring strategies on games are complicated and layered in ways that don't make sense to players or viewers, but others like Attack from Mars it does make sense, they're clear visible progress and it's this very difficult delicate balance that the designers and programmers have to go through to make these games that are good for all levels of play and still have interesting decisions to make. I'm not envious, but I'm amazed that they can pull this off on a regular basis with new and interesting rules. And I was wondering, do you think that the whole Twitch thing will be something that affects more designers as things go on, as it becomes something that is much more actually watchable than just sitting there watching over somebody's shoulder, that they'll lay things out or make adjustments to code in such a way that will make it so it's a bit more accessible to people who are just watching? I don't think so, because I think that their market of locations and private collectors is not necessarily the same market.
    38:56
    And maybe there would be a shift if there was some kind of incredible growth in, further incredible growth in the size of the player base for competition. I think that the move towards screen displays, above dot matrix displays, is a plus in a couple of ways. One that's subtle is that some broadcasters may be able to get the direct feed off of those displays and use them as part of their inlays.
    39:29
    Like Carl D'Angelo has done for Hobbit, He has the actual feed off of that mini book thing on his Twitch when he broadcasts.
    39:43
    Even the inline displays like the one that Alien has, that means that now someone watching just the top-down camera can still see the scores. They can see the progress. They can see all of that without having to manage the multiple screen effect that Pinball already has. And it's good for players, too, because they don't have to look up all the time to see what's going on. They can keep their eye much more on the ball than they would otherwise. Yeah, I found that with a lot of the, like, especially the, like, full throttle and stuff that had the actual screen in the play field and stuff, it made the game feel completely different because I wasn't having to look up. Because I know, like, on Jurassic Park, I've missed that shoot the dinosaur, the velociraptor shot so many times because I just don't see it or don't notice it.
    40:34
    The ability to be able to see that kind of stuff without having to look up as much is a real plus to me as a player.
    40:42
    Yeah, like for example, one of the videos for Alien shows the tilt warning animation. And it is, I haven't played Alien yet, but it looks like the best tilt warning I've ever seen. like this the display that's right in the middle of the game just kind of lights up red like warning you like uh that that the ship is about to explode uh and uh yeah yeah you get the instant feedback that tells you how many warnings you have left and and it's right there right in front of you it's it's it's immersive and that's a thing that i think is necessary to to continue bringing in new players.
    41:27
    I've talked to Mark Steinman, who runs Papa and ReplayFX, recently about what types of innovations there are, because in the end, the display isn't really an innovation in gameplay.
    41:40
    It's an innovation in information. So I wonder if any of these new technologies are going to carry over into innovations in gameplay, something like we saw with Pinball 2000. or some other mechanism that allows the play of the game to change as a result of new technology. And that is what I see that needs to happen for there to be like a new super revolution in pinball growth, perhaps.
    42:13
    And competitive play is great, and it's grown the game, and I love it. It's still the same game we've been playing since 1990, basically, and even before that. There aren't really very many changes in the way you play pinball since Funhaus, for example. Yeah.
    42:30
    So speaking of – we were focusing here on games in particular and competition, but locations. Bowen, what are your thoughts on what makes for a good, unique pinball location versus what might be just seen as a more pedestrian location or mundane? because most people aren't going to buy pinball machines. They're going to encounter them out on the wild. But just sort of what triggers that and is like, this is a special place for pinball versus, oh, it's a place that has pinball. Oh, geez, there's so many answers to that. The first thing that came to mind is that it should be tucked into a mountain in Colorado and have games from 1960 to today.
    43:12
    I thinking very specifically of Lions Classic which is one of the greatest arcades I ever played in I was going to ask why a mountain Is that just to prevent cab fade or what
    43:24
    I don't know. It just looks good. Like, you've got to make the trek to get there. Just ski down, and at the end is Hot Doggin' waiting for you? That would be nice. That would be very nice.
    43:37
    Yeah, some mountains don't have pinball machines. I go to Park City, Utah, and there's no pinball there. You'd think with all these ski people that they would at least have a wipeout.
    43:49
    They definitely don't have that, thankfully, and they don't have hotdogging either. Ah, fools, all fools. I don't know. I think that the really important part of that is the operator, and you think about some of the best locations in the country, like Lions Classic, like 82, to like Pinball Wizard, like all of these places are places where an operator has put in the dramatic amount of effort and time to make the thing theirs.
    44:27
    And that also means that the game selection at those locations doesn't have to be some specific set that is my dream set. It should be that person's dream set. so the games are free gold watch are not going to be the same games that are at 82 or lions or at um i'm just trying to think of all the other great locations that there's so many locations now that i haven't played at more more locations that look great uh and it's it's so much work that that person or people put in to make that place theirs that when you say that most of the people who play pinball are encountering it on locations those operators are the ones that are really driving the growth of pinball to me that you look you think about what the growth is in portland and the growth in portland the growth in seattle have come from operators and locations and growing a scene place by place. And it's that. And yeah, I think tournaments are a part of that and competitive play is a part of that. But the real core of that is those dedicated people who decide to start new locations or to take a location that has been decrepit and turn it around. I can give you a bunch of examples right here if you want me to go on forever about this. Oh, no, that's a good point in terms of – and that's what we've seen in our area as well. You know, 403's reputation, Pizza West and the recently opened Nub's Pub, which has the same operators servicing and providing those machines, the location that's going to be opening up here soon in Kansas City. The unifying thing that all of those had going for them is that the operators and owners and their collaborations in terms of the facility and the machines have been such that they're all different. They all feel different. They all offer a different sort of service when you go in, and the machines are well maintained. And that's why, at least for those that regularly play in our area, if those operators are the ones involved, people get very excited. And it's just because they know it's going to be a quality experience. And you don't expect to go and you don't see a lot of the same machines. Occasionally, you will. We might have a Ghostbusters at two locations, for example. But by and large, it's just that's what we've seen, at least in our area. We're a smaller, smaller area. But that seems to be what's working. And we're seeing growth in our area in terms of more locations willing to put them in place. So it's exciting. Exciting for me because I can't afford to buy all this stuff. Yeah, and this is also a major shift in the way things were from the 90s because there were more pinball machines being sold in the 90s than now. But they were being sold to lots of locations and operators that didn't necessarily care about the quality or setup of the games. so there were a lot more Twilight Zones than there are Ghostbusters but I would say on average if you encountered a Twilight Zone in the wild in 1995 you were unlikely to play one that felt right because you were playing one that someone had just set up and they come to collect the coin box every couple weeks and they don't necessarily do the maintenance for most of them now you get these places and having been to Logan Arcade and C-Bar and Flip Flip and 82 and Free Gold Watch.
    48:11
    Now, like, Flat Top Johnny's in Boston. It's all these places where there's so much care by a particular individual or a small set of individuals to make that location theirs and to give them, whether it's their dream or what, who knows. But those people, they need, like, lots of massage gift certificates or something because they're the reason we've got pinball. Yeah, I've noticed just the difference in because I've got a bar and grill nearby that always has a pinball machine in it, and it has no care taken. They had a hook in there for a while that the left flipper didn't work for, like, a month. It was just dead. and then I came in one day and it was gone and had been replaced by South Park. And the next week I came in and it was doing the ball detect problem issue. And it had that ball detect problem up for about three weeks. So, I mean, you can tell when there's a difference between someone who really cares and pours their time into it and someone else who is just like, eh, whatever. And I think competitive play and leagues can feed back onto that. and turn a location that might not be a very high quality into one that is by giving them business, but also saying, hey, look, you'll get even more business if this gets fixed and that gets fixed.
    49:39
    Like bar leagues that happen on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday nights, you're getting a lot of people into a location that might otherwise not have very many people coming through it on a day. and if the location then says hey, we do better when we have working games or new games then that becomes a thing and it snowballs Awesome Okay, well let's hop over to what I've so blandly titled New Pins Roundup where we were going to go ahead and just talk about some of the machines that are kind of out or are about to come out but have at least a number of test units so people have been able to try them out and just sort of get some of your thoughts, Bowen, on them. Batman 66. Played it? I have played it, and I'm impressed. It flips really well. The rules are clever. I like the Batphone concept as the way to start modes. I like the variant on the original Batman's multiplier, where you still earn multipliers, but the first one you earn is 2x. Then you earn a 3x if you get a second one. So it presents an entirely new risk-reward where the biggest you can make something is 6x now, but you want to wait for it because you may not even get the chance to put a 6x on something.
    51:02
    And the longer you play your turn, the more opportunity there is. I haven't played the updated code with the bat signal multiball, so I can't speak to where it is right now. But I had fun playing the one I played at Pinball Wizard Arcade and I played earlier than that at Ship Ahoy in Portland, Oregon. Yeah, I haven't played the latest code either. I got to do the prior update. We have an area person who won one as part of one of the pinball charities and invited a bunch of us over.
    51:35
    And yeah, it was really cool. I liked it a lot more than The Dark Knight. And I love that risk-reward with that Gordon shot before you want to cash in on the phone. I was terrible at it, but I like the idea of it. I think it'll be really special once they get those minor villains coded into the system too. Yeah, the minor villains look great. I mean, I'm like, I want to pick shame. I just want to pick shame over and over again. Bookworm. It's got to be the bookworm. Aerosmith. I've only played a pro. I've enjoyed it. I definitely get that Kiss layout vibe. But have you got any time in yet on Aerosmith? I played Aerosmith a little bit at Papa Headquarters and at Flattop Chonies and at Quarter World and at 8-Bit Arcade in Seattle So once or twice? A couple times It's definitely got a similar layout to Kiss, although I feel like the shots are in different places and some of the shots are a lot harder like that center ramp, it feels like it ought to be the Kiss ramp but then it's not.
    52:41
    I think that the rules are interesting. There's a little bit of a scoring imbalance, and Batman 66, too, has some scoring imbalances that hopefully will get worked out in the long term, and I think they will. But it leads you to doing things in a particular order on Aerosmith. And that was the same. Aerosmith, actually, to me, is most similar to Star Trek in its rules.
    53:06
    And its layout is Kiss. but Aerosmith has this crank it up, and you think it's crank it up like Metallica, but no, it's like Away Team on Star Trek. And there are certain modes where the Away Team or the crank it up end up being worth a crap load of points.
    53:28
    And it presents a very clear path through the initial game if you want to get a decent score going. The toy box effect is really cool. I like that there's some flying ball stuff going on. That's always fun. It reminds me a little bit of the kicker from NBA.
    53:51
    When you shoot the free throw in NBA and it kicks it up into the basket, it's a similar type of kicker. That's not easy to get right, and it looks like they've got it working very well. I like that option to cash in or out on that ball like Mustang style with the multi-ball for the toy box. Yeah, it's nice, and I think that there are still some variations on the rules.
    54:15
    Though when I play a game like that, often what I'm trying to figure out is, okay, well, where is this from and where is that from?
    54:24
    It must be difficult to have complete innovation in the game at this point because how long have we had these games? Everything's kind of been tried at some point where you say, okay, this multi-ball rule is carried over from Mustang, and this 2X thing is the same as the Snake, and this crank it up, that's just a way team. But just even to mix those ideas into a working thing is nice. And Aerosmith has a different variety on the Supers that you get from completing modes that is unique, where if you complete the mode that's about ramps, you then get Super ramps. So there's even variety in those rewards in ways that are consistent with older games but are new at the same time. All right. Dialed in. Any experience on it? I played it once at Texas, so I can't really say much on it. I got to play a number of games on it at Papa Headquarters at Papa 20, and I really enjoyed it. It flips very comfortably. It's fast. It's way faster than Hobbit.
    55:34
    And the rules and mode design, I don't have quite the flavor for yet. But what I found was that the modes were worth a lot of points. and the feedback that the modes give you is very good because you have that second screen that acts like a cell phone and it basically FaceTimes you in the middle of making mode shots. So you'll make a mode shot and it'll be like, hey, blah, blah, blah. And on the one hand, it's great feedback. And on the other hand, it can be interfering feedback too because it doesn't tell you what to do next. It just tells you, hey, you did something. Hey, hey, hey. I don't know how to get that right and they do get it right as soon as that person shuts up the little mini display changes to tell you what thing you're supposed to do next in the mode and the big display is also telling it to you at the bottom which means you don't have to look up as much as you would otherwise these new displays we've been doing dot matrix for so long that these new displays present a lot of issues with what information you convey, how you convey it, and how difficult it is even to create something that looks good. It's much harder to make an LCD look good than it is to make .matrix look good, I think. All right, that's my impression. Maybe it's just that they had longer to do it. So you get games like Hobbit or Wizard where a new player is going to be really intimidated by that display. There's so much information being conveyed that I don't think there's very much you can get from it. Where on Dialed In, I think it's been distilled a little better. And that may just be a manufacturer growing up or figuring out, like, okay, this is what we did the first time. How can we do it better? And just iterating and improving.
    57:30
    I think, and that's one thing I think is a lot of the LCDs, and I especially noticed it on Dialed In, but I've noticed on Hobbit as well and this and that, is they seem to do a lot for watchers, not players, with letting them keep up with everything. But I know every time at Texas that I went past, dialed in, and the selfie mode was active, there were people laughing and joking and having fun with it. And just the way that lets them play with people who aren't actually currently in the game, I think is a really good addition to pinball all in all.
    58:10
    In terms of the newish games, new games coming out, the only other main one I wanted to hit on was to find out if you'd had a chance to play Alien pinball. I got one game in at Texas Pinball Festival, and that's it. So I can't say a whole lot. I thought it was pretty clever.
    58:28
    I'm trying to compare it to Full Throttle, which we did have on location for a while, and it didn't do very well, so they got it out of there pretty quick. No, it's too bad. I've played Full Throttle many times on location. I love that game. They were having mechanical issues with it, was I think the main thing. I haven't gotten to play Alien yet. I've seen some of the videos, and I've read feedback from other players who have played it. I really like the layout. It feels pretty unique. The variety of shots, like those upper flipper shots, are cool, and the the magnet grabber looks neat um they've got that second display and they're doing um doing interesting things with it it's um i'm very eager to play yeah it has a good look uh in terms of other things i mean uh i don't know if there are any bowing that you want to hit on uh spookies jetsons uh multimorphics p3 systems finally uh in production so i i mean there's lexi light speed or any of the other uh sort of mini game setups that they've got going on with that? Or Domino's? I didn't know there were any there that you've played around with and thought, oh, there's a lot to work with here. I haven't played Domino's or Jetsons. I think that they're definitely clearly making simple concept games at that point for casual play where, like in Jetsons, it's clear what you're doing, and anybody who walks up to the game and never played before, they can see the spell outs. there's sort of a double-edged sword to that, that if your game is nothing but spell-outs, people who are interested in playing and getting better, they give up on it pretty quickly. And like you were saying, oh, I guess South Park kind of fits into that category, but Lebowski, by comparison, also has spell-outs. But then the things that are behind those spell-outs and the other modes that are available make it a more fleshed-out game. I did get a game in on Jetson, It was harder, actually, to control than I had expected, given the simplistic look to it. But, yeah, it very much reminded me of some of those Pinball FX2 tables that they do on the video game side. Some of those are very prone to doing spell-out setups when they do multi-packs, it seems. So that's what it reminded me of. I know Tony had some questions back on the topic of pinball tutorials for you. I did. I know you've got such access at Papa to pretty much everything, but I was wondering if there's a game that you haven't done a tutorial yet that you kind of look forward to getting a chance to? Well, at Papa headquarters, we do have a lot of access to games. So I think if there were a game that I would really be excited to tutorial on, we'd have done it by now.
    61:16
    We've been trying to do a tutorial on a couple of tutorials that haven't worked for mechanical reasons. Like, people keep asking us for a tutorial on Wizard of Oz, and we've tried. We've tried to do it twice. So I want to get that done, but it hasn't happened. Is it machine issues or camera issues? It's been mechanical issues. And then my other question was less of a question, more of a thought experiment.
    61:43
    I'm going to open with apologies to both yourself and Charlie Daniels. But Say the The devil's decided You haven't done a tutorial On his favorite game so he forces You to choose one of his four favorite Games to do a tutorial On which do you do With the choice being Super Mario Brothers Viper Knight Driving Bugs Bunny's Birthday Ball And Magic Girl Well I suspect that if I did Magic Girl I could at least be done pretty quick so I would probably pick that um Viber Night Driving has a lot of interesting ideas and its rules it just kind of gets it kind of gets hamstrung by that ball uh the ball just isn't the right kind of ball for pinball and it doesn't feel right to play but uh it's not actually a bad game there were like you mean the big one or the little one the big one yeah we had one on location for a while and I hated oh it felt everything you did felt wrong. It didn't feel right at all. Yeah. And that was their, their decision to go with the glow balls is, is what happened there. That having those different balls, man, it, well, you know, from having played it, it just, it just doesn't work. But if you had the same play fields with a regular pinball, it might've worked gangbusters. and the play field isn't that different than some of the other successful play fields like GoldenEye for example has the same overall structure of wide sweeping ramps and modes and it's a great game but that game is just a disaster no I agree that game was definitely the low light of tournament while it was on play yeah it was interesting but okay so Magic Girl for speed Which Super Mario did you make? We had a blue Yeah, we had a blue cat If it's the Redemption game, I'm all in That game's great, that game's terrific I played the Redemption at Texas Pinball last year And actually thought, oh, that's actually alright But I guess that one would be almost The big one's almost as fast as Magic Girl Because I guess it's just left ramp all day Yeah, well, there are There are even some games that We do tutorials on where the strategy you would want to use in competitive play is very clear and simple and straightforward, but you can't do that when you're doing the video because it's boring. I was like, I'm just going to sit here and shoot this ramp all day. And then who would watch that? So we mix it up. We have to play the whole game and try to show the strategy or show the different things, even the ones that are clearly ineffective for playing for score. And I think that one of the things that is we get feedback sometimes on the tutorials about the ways we explain things that some players don quite catch on to that we need to explain it from the perspective of someone who just hasn played this game at all or wants to learn about the full variety of what available even the things that aren as effective Right Yeah that makes sense And yeah I would quit watching if you only shot one ramp all day so I'm glad you don't.
    65:07
    Those are it for the pinball topics. I did have a little segment I wanted to do because I know, Bowen, that you kind of like math. You're kind of into mathematics. So I've added a little math section. the first thing is I know you're really familiar because of some consulting you've done with mathematics in terms of their involvement in game shows I was just wondering maybe you could do a summary for the listeners in terms of the importance of actually using mathematics and coming up with certain probabilities in order to actually make game shows both be successful from a viewership standpoint and successful from a financial standpoint yeah it's much more from the perspective of the show creators than it is from the perspective of the player even.
    65:52
    So, for example, in Deal or No Deal, they might say, look, we want to be able to give away this much money per episode.
    66:02
    And then you have to then construct, okay, what should these suitcases say? What should the deal offers be like? All these things need to be prescriptively laid out. But what my job often comes down to is making estimates for the show about how challenging a game might be to win and then how much money it ought to be worth in order to satisfy both the viewers who want someone to be able to win a large amount of money every time and for the network who wants nobody to ever win a large amount of money ever. and that balance is pretty difficult to strike so the feedback I often give includes some measure of uncertainty to say I think that you're going to give away this much money but if things go bad or things go good it could be this or that and I've worked on I think now maybe a dozen shows maybe about half of which have made it to TV the worst show I ever worked on was an extreme musical chair show called Oh Sit I don't like the name but go on and you might think why would a musical chair show need a mathematical advisor but they need to give away money on this show so I have to tell them how much money everyone earns by sitting in chairs when you finish the round everybody has to go to the chairs and the chairs are worth money and not only the person who doesn't find a chair they're out but the person who has the least money they're also out and building that and simulating it turned out to be a pretty involved process where I would tell them you're going to need to tell me how fast people run and then they went and did it they like brought in people to run all of their test obstacles because it was a mix between musical chairs and Wipeout which is a much more popular show people just fall on stuff so imagine Wipeout plus musical chairs that's what this show was I'm still not really picturing it working no it doesn't work and I have no idea why it was renewed for a second season. Oh, this one went to air? This one went to air for two years. 20 episodes. How does that happen? Oh, shit. Hosted by Jamie Kennedy. I can't believe it even made it to one episode. Oh, my God.
    68:49
    The real answer is that it was on the CW, so it was fine. Oh, okay. Okay, that makes it all clear now to me.
    69:01
    But yeah, so all of this is being described to me in text pretty much because it's not like I can see the show. It doesn't exist yet.
    69:10
    Then when I actually watched the show, my perception of what the show was going to be like was totally different than what I thought it would be. And people are running around and climbing over these ice and water obstacles. and then the chairs themselves are in the center of an arena that they all have to take bridges to get to when the music stops. They're pushing each other off the bridges and falling in because the bridges are obstacles themselves. It was crazy. And the mathematical problem I needed to solve was twofold. One was setting the money up so that the show would give away a certain amount of money but look like they were ready to give away more. and also to answer to them the equity question of the chances of men versus women being in the final round as well as winning the show.
    70:04
    Because if you've seen Wipeout, often there aren't very many women winning that show, just because of the natures of the types of obstacles they're using, I suppose. and so my job was to figure out what are the chances of a woman winning the show or of a woman making the final three and the numbers I came up with turned out to be exactly right which was surprising impressive yeah I would say how do you even mathematically figure for something like that given the differences between people do you just use like averages for people, how people work, what's the word I'm looking for, how they handle situations or how well they do? They ran their test contestants through the obstacles, men and women, and they gave me the distributions of how fast people ran. And I then used that as a basis for building a full distribution of what it would mean to pull men and women out of a bucket, basically, and say, all right, the show is six men and six women, so reach into the bucket of men and bucket of women and pull out six men, six women, that's our show. Now run the show. And each of those men and women would then run as fast as it says they're going to run and then sit in random chairs.
    71:36
    It wasn't, I wouldn't say it was completely accurate statistically, but it was the best I could do on a small amount of time.
    71:46
    Okay. That's really interesting. A more recent show I worked on was on MTV, a dating show called Are You the One, which is also surprising that a dating show would need a mathematical advisor. But this dating show is basically Million Dollar Mastermind because the show has set up secret pairings of men and women in advance of the show, and the contestants have to figure out the correct pairings. And if they can figure out all the correct pairings, they win. But the show only gives them the feedback of how many pairings they have right on a regular basis.
    72:30
    So how often when somebody comes to you looking for your help and they give you a proposal for a game, do you just sit there and look at it and like what were you on when you came up with this idea usually not because by the time it gets to me it's already gone through multiple levels of thought so it's very rare that someone will say i need a math advisor for this and they've already gone through probably a network and a producer and a production company uh so they there are still some very bad ideas that come to me that I'm like, this is not going to succeed on TV, I don't think.
    73:10
    But I'm often quite wrong about that on both sides, where the show that I worked on that I thought would be the most successful never even made it to TV. And some shows that I didn't think were going to be very successful did. I worked on a show last year, two years ago, that said, oh, this would be really good if it ever gets to TV. And that show is on now and it's called The wall, and it has been quite successful. It's on NBC.
    73:37
    Oh, yeah. I've seen the commercials for that one with the chinko-looking thing. Yeah, Million Dollar Plinko. That's Chris, what's his name's show, isn't it? He's on it? Yeah, Chris Hardwick is the host. Chris Hardwick, yeah. LeBron James is one of the executive producers, and they have a really well-crafted game, so it keeps the viewer interested there's always stakes even throughout the entire episode there's always something at risk or something more to play for sometimes on game shows you get to these boring phases where you kind of know what's going to happen and it's a foregone conclusion almost and the wall never happens that way I have a since you've been used looked at distributions and such to help determine and the goals that these show creators often have with shows. So I'm going to pivot this a little bit on pinball, because I need your help on this. We know that geometry on pinball machines is obviously a major component of how well they play. It is my belief, and I'm right, that wide-body pinball machines are totally inferior to the standard body geometry. But I need a proof so that I don't have to argue this anymore. Can you give me this proof? No.
    74:56
    There is no such proof. Because you're wrong. I'm not wrong, but I was afraid that it was just too hard. Well, I mean, there are some great wide bodies, and there are some terrible wide bodies. You were half right.
    75:09
    Would you say, for example, would you say Twilight Zone would be better with three inches narrower? Sure.
    75:18
    Okay. Where? Got to get rid of that horrid pop bumper section and that huge outlying problem, dead-end zone spot. That's the big issue, I think, for most of them is they've got this space down below, and they don't know what to do with it. So you either stick in a whole bunch more in lanes or you put in some massive horrid out lane. And I think that's what kills it. But that's just, you know, I just wanted the proof. I just wanted to be factually right. I guess I don't get to be. Star Trek Next Generation? Demoman? Slings are too high. Demoman. Amazing game. Almost as good as Judge Dredd. Demoman I think is better than Judge Dredd and is a decent white body but still it would have been better as a standard Popeye? Come on man Oh Popeye I get so much hate on my Popeye dislike. My big thing with Popeye is in its width is that I feel like 20% of the time I don't see the ball I don't know how you manage to see the ball 80% of the time on that game I just trap up and look at it and think oh that's what it looks like I forgot All right. I got a different one for you then. This one is one that was applied on a – I'm staff on a video game site called True Achievements, and this predates me being on staff, and I work on genre assignments. I don't work on the math on this, but full disclosure, I was opposed to this change when it happened. So and I'm dredging up ancient history. But the way the site works in a nutshell is it exists to take Xbox achievements, which are things that they unlock when you accomplish things in video games. And they wanted to create a system so that they could determine how difficult the achievements are. And the way they do that is as a proxy with rarity. So the old system was very straightforward. and this is still how they do the base games. They take the square root of the gamers who own the game and they divide by the gamers that have unlocked that particular achievement. And that's what gives them their score for how rare it is. Oh, and then you square root that. You're not saying square root that. Because the other thing would be wrong. It would be wrong.
    77:26
    And this is how they used to handle downloadable content. And the way they determine if you own is if you have one achievement in the game, then they say, okay, you own it. Oh, because they're only seeing your records of your achievements and not your... The game won't show up on your profile unless you have an achievement. So it's the best they feel they could do. And I don't have an issue with that. That's how they used to handle the downloadable content, which are for sale packs for video games that developers tend to do after the fact. And it's become more prevalent nowadays. So the way it used to work on that is the same approach, except they only determined if you owned the DLC, if you had a DLC achievement unlocked already. And then if you did, that's the population.
    78:11
    However, there were people who complained because some DLC packs have very few achievements and they can be all very difficult to unlock. So there was a lot of concern that there were a lot of people who owned these packs, but they weren't getting tracked because they couldn't unlock any of them. It was too hard. So to solve the problem, the site switched systems just for the DLC. And the way they decided to do it is they now use the geometric mean of the population to determine what the count is of the DLC ownership. So they take the population of the main game, the population that they know because they have at least one achievement, have the DLC, and then do the geometric mean of those two figures and say, that's how many people we've decided own the DLC. So it's the geometric mean of the number of overall people who have the game and the number of people who have DLC achievements. Have at least one DLC achievement, correct. Yeah, that's a total fart. That's not right. Okay. I wasn't really familiar with geometric means. I had never used them. Well, because let's say, for example, that you have an achievement in a DLC that's a cakewalk. Like, shoot a guy with the new gun. Boom, 10 points. and 90 to 95% of the people who own that DLC have that achievement. Now you look at your number. Your geometric mean will be way above 100% of the people who have that game. It's just completely wrong. For example, say a million people own the game and 100 people own a DLC, but then all 100 of them get an achievement because they really care about it. now that your geometric mean will claim that 10,000 people own that DLC and that it's, and it's a rarity of 1% because that's the geometric mean of a hundred and a million. That is ridiculous. The right way, the right way to do this would be to sample, to sample individuals from the, from the ownership of the game and to ask them whether they own the DLC. And in some cases, in some cases you wouldn't need to ask them because those, The people you sampled would have DLC achievements, and you would already know the answer. But you would need to then ask the other people that were sampled, do you have this DLC? And most of them will just say no, and some of them will say yes. And then that's it. Then you've got your estimate. Okay. I was a part of a five-person task force that got put together to try and hammer out a quote-unquote solution to this. I pulled specific examples where I had the DLC totally falling apart because I had easy to unlock things, and it was huge scores. And they put it to a site vote, and no one understood what was going on, and they just knew that the new system would give them higher points. So that's what passed. Yay, points. Yep, that's what it ended up being. I don't even think I got 20% opposing it in the end because they just inflated the scores on the site so much. But I was pretty sure it was mathematically wrong. I needed an expert to confirm it. So Bowen, I thank you for confirming it for me. You haven't confirmed my wide body dreams, but at least my video game nightmares have been confirmed to be real. I only have one last math question for you. I think this one's pretty straightforward, but I mostly do administrative work at this point, but I actually started my career as policy analyst and I still do policy analysis for government. And I put together reports. of course what do people want they usually want the mean they always ask about the mean sometimes i'll have things where people want to talk about medians and that comes into a lot of play for things like dues payment analysis and stuff for for me because it's so different from what the average is but you know when people are getting their stats 101 lesson they're told the three big m's mode median mean can you explain to me why i should ever care about mode i have never had anyone ask me for mode ever ever nope nope nope okay good i won't bring it up i will direct you to something i wrote either on twitter or facebook recently no it was on twitter this was uh just earlier um about three weeks ago so can we stop talking in math about mode stinks nobody uses mode i wish it were not a thing wow that that was pretty that was pretty blunt but but what about figuring out the most common girl's baby name of 2016 because that is not a that is not a um a numerical data set that is a categorical data set in categorical data you have family feud mode you have categories of things and then you look for the number one answer because you can't what is the mean name of babies it doesn't make any sense to ask that question it's jenna nor does it nor does it ask nor does it make sense to ask for the median baby name of 2016 okay okay that's okay so that i mean that was the only instance i could imagine someone would argue would be something like that. And then my follow-up is that right now, my job, I write math curriculum. And we are writing curriculum that meets the Common Core State Standards, which is the standards that most states in the country have decided to adopt. They're very good standards. They're high quality. They make it clear what to do every year.
    83:50
    They do not mention the word mode once. in the entire standards for K-12. All right. Well, I guess that's definitive then. And they mentioned mean and median quite a few times. Well, those are very useful. Those are very useful. Those are great. Mode is disastrous. And what happens is students then, when they're introduced to these things, mean, median, and mode, they mix them up. And then the next year, they don't know which is which and you have to teach them all over again. And it still doesn't work because, I don't know, it sucks. Mean and median have value, very big value, and mode has no value. What's the mode income in the United States? Who cares?
    84:37
    Right. I mean, the answer is zero. Oh, yeah, I didn't even think about trying to solve for it. Oh, yeah, that's right, because of kids, yeah.
    84:47
    But even if you only include adults, the mode is still zero. Oh, really? I guess I would make sense because you'd have somewhere on the order of 4.7 to 6.5% of the population depending on state that is unemployed.
    85:01
    So what value does that give us for overall information? Not very much at all. That's why you put people in the categories of ranges of income and not specific numbers. And you can say which is the most common category. That makes a lot of sense. and at that point that is a little bit like mode but it's not mode mode is stupid all right excellent good i won't ever have to bring it up again uh well we're at the end of the show so i bowen i want to thank you very much for coming on we really do appreciate it and expertise both in pinball and mathematics sure man i want to know what the mode length of your show is probably not anything because i don't think we've ever had any uh land exactly the same. I once got within four seconds, I think. That means they're all the mode. Oh, okay. They are all. All are one and one is none. Anyway, for those that want to contact me about anything other than the mode, you can email the show, eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com. You can also reach out to us on social media. Facebook would be facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. We're available on Twitter and Instagram as eclectic underscore gamers. And Bowen's contact stuff in terms of the Patreon is in the show notes. The Papa YouTube page is in the show notes. The Tilt Through Pinball podcast, which is the best competitive pinball podcast, in my opinion, that's on the air, is in the show notes. So go ahead and check those out. They're really good pieces of content. And until next time, I'm Dennis. I'm Tony. And goodbye, everyone.