The bowling example reminded me of how all the problems about bowling as a group activity. It's rather easy to imagine why these people are on their phones instead of chatting together or cheering for the other players.
1) You are often playing against the other players. When your friend gets a strike, it generally means that these points are scored against you. That makes it a little hard to be enthusiastic about your friend getting a lucky strike. Two-player coop in games is great because you get to win together.
2) The ball is pulled from your hands the moment you start getting into the motion. Then it's back to more downtime. Bowling with friends is almost 80% downtime, but it's just short enough that you might consider just sitting it through and not necessarily engaging in conversation with someone that you don't really know.
3) When you do have a good conversation going, the last thing you want to do is to have to leave it there to go throw the ball at the pins for a minute and have a hard time resuming the conversation afterwards.
I've only played bowling once or twice, and while I agree it's not the most entertaining sport ever I thought one of its most compelling use-cases was to bring people together.
Yes, you might be "less enthusiastic" when your friend gets a lucky strike, but that's the whole point, you don't go there as a professional player keen to win no matter what, what you did describe would be the perfect moment to make fun of said friend, a third friend might reply that "you're jealous cause he's better than you" etc etc, I mean things that people usually talk with friends and that do make life less stressful.
I agree that playing to win isn't the right approach to have fun at bowling with new friends. I still find that's it's hard to care about the game (to enjoy your own good moves), and then at the same time not care about who's winning.
I guess what I'm saying is that it seems like we're playing bowling because of tradition. Someone could come up with a better-designed game, maybe involving pins and balls, played in a bowling alley. People would still enjoy feeling like they're going out and having fun, but they'd be playing a more compelling version of bowling.
1) You are often playing against the other players. When your friend gets a strike, it generally means that these points are scored against you. That makes it a little hard to be enthusiastic about your friend getting a lucky strike. Two-player coop in games is great because you get to win together.
2) The ball is pulled from your hands the moment you start getting into the motion. Then it's back to more downtime. Bowling with friends is almost 80% downtime, but it's just short enough that you might consider just sitting it through and not necessarily engaging in conversation with someone that you don't really know.
3) When you do have a good conversation going, the last thing you want to do is to have to leave it there to go throw the ball at the pins for a minute and have a hard time resuming the conversation afterwards.