The Great American Bowling Game

(version 1, 2020/02/24. I didn't finish this properly, but it's okay! A submission for the speculation jam: https://itch.io/jam/speculation-jam)

(update: the idea here was to speculate what it would be like if my studio gets bought out in a few decades, Marina and I quit, the studio gets flooded with tons of capital, creates an expensive game but still somehow keeps some of analgesic's weird DNA/my desire (which I shouldn't fulfill) to make a bowling game)

I go home and turn on my PS8. I play a new game: "The Great American Bowling Game."

At first I thought it was one of those cash-in bowling games: one featuring gimmicky bowling types like "double balls", one meant to be played at a party. The kind that's been on every console and platform release ever, throughout history, an unbroken lineage of straightforward, boring bowling.

But it's not! Actually, I've played GABG for almost fifty hours, and I still haven't beaten it. I don't think I ever will, which is why I'm writing my review.

The premise of GABG is to win the day-long state bowling tournament in O'Fallon, Illinois, a small city far, far, in the south of Illinois. You play as 16-year-old Roger Chen, a boy from some northern suburban high school. His team is surprisingly diverse: teammates come from a variety of backgrounds (many children of immigrants, or children with family in Chicago), though the coaches are white.

The premise is simple: win the tournament, as a team, and if you really feel lucky - as an individual. But it feels less about winning the tournament and more about an experiment in how far single period of time can be pushed. If you don't know the background, Analgesic Productions made this game, and they're the first game company to reach 100,000 employees. They made so much money from their previous franchises that they decided to pour their whole workforce into this game over the past few years. Some say it was due to the CEO's weird controlling personality and his desire to see his love for bowling reflected in a game, but who knows!

Now, the strange thing, compared to other contemporary AAAA games, is that GABG takes place on a single day. The protagonist, Roger, technically, is experienced. He's a varsity bowler. But he's only as good as you make him. And it's not about playing for a whole season, training - no. His technique is fine. It's about making sure his mental state going into the tournament - and throughout -remains stable.

The game starts you waking up at sunrise at a hotel around Springfield, changing your clothes, packing, using the bathroom, with a nightmarish amount of choices in terms of what to do. Each one - I think (as there's no way to see) - influences Roger's mood in some way. You constantly have to be maintaining Roger's outer appearance, too: everyone on the team is nervous. If you look nervous, that makes the team perform worse. I've played through maybe 6 or 7 times and I still don't know the best way to behave, and I've managed to figure out that Roger and the others' relationships influence what happens. If you ask me, there's too much about their pasts for you to change over the course of a day. So I just did what seemed normal: use the bathroom, shave, shower, eat a 'balanced' breakfast, make small talk.

It's enough up and down noise that I ended up deciding it's pointless to figure out what to do, but at the same time the game kind of convinces me that it's accurately tracking all this stuff over time. Sit too long on the toilet in the morning? Maybe your teammate won't be able to get ready. Eat too many granola bars in the morning? You might feel sick on the bus. On my third playthrough I drank too much orange juice at the continental breakfast and the bus had to pull over on the side of the road so Roger could pee, which made Roger embarrassed and caused him to perform poorly.

On the bus from Springfield to O'Fallon, you have to wait the whole time. Sure, you can stand up... but your teammates will yell at you, raising stress levels. So you have to sit quietly, or nap, or play your Game Boy. But it's important to assuage the other teammates' anxieties. I don't know WHAT is effective to do here, but I know that doing nothing is useless. Everyone will just play terribly later on in the day. And if you play your Game Boy, you just get carsick... regardless, I consistently felt a lot of relief when the extensive cornfields gave way to the small city of O'Fallon.

The bowling alley is crowded: you have to slowly roll a 30 lb bag of bowling balls around the alley, looking for the team's first lane assignment. You might lose a teammate in the crowd and have to run around and find them.

Immediately, Ryan, one of the benched bowlers - throws a tantrum because he thinks he won't get to play. You can try talking to him, but it'll make you late for warm-up stretches. Eventually I stopped helping him entirely, although if you do talk to him you learn a bit about what's going on in his life.

The bowling matches are excruciating. You have to watch every teammate play in real time, because your words to them affect their performance. Did they miss a strike? You have to choose (in real time) from 30+ (randomized, but realistic!) possible responses to hopefully bring their morale up. The other team doing too well? You'll have to choose to give a quick pep talk with the team.

You can watch the other teammates' turns, and give them advice on what they did wrong. Bowling (which I played in grade school) is a lot about analysis of invisible things. They might need to stand a bit more to the left, or to aim the ball a bit more to the right. But it's also important to watch the teammates' wrist position when releasing the ball. The coaches' and other teammates' advice help, but it's clear that Roger's expected to know a lot, so sitting by and not giving advice is a quick way to failure.

I don't have time to go into all of the bowling system, but in real bowling there are thousands of balls. Each has a different, irregularly weighted core, which reacts to the oil on the lane differently. Lanes have oil patterns: more oil in one part of the lane means the ball rotates slower, which makes it harder to hook into the pins. When a ball hooks more, it has a better chance of producing a strike. Some bowlers pick certain balls because they're stronger and have a more aggressive throw style. Some pick them because they're scented (really!)

The lanes are oiled once at the start of the game. Over the 6 games of the tournament (meaning each lane experiences roughly 150-200 ball rolls per game), the oil pattern gets spread out and "breaks down". It soon gets really hard to get Roger to bowl a strike near the end: controlling his walking pace, wrist angle, wrist release, follow through, target, standing position, throw strength - becomes more and more of a nightmare. Roger only has two balls: an Inferno (his special ball), and a straight ball (a uniformly weighted ball for getting spares - or picking up pins that were left standing after failing to get a strike). Not only is it hard to figure out where to throw, but Roger's body is breaking down near the end. Everyone is tired. I'm tired.

The teammates are crying or giving up at the end: their hands perhaps injured from the friction of the fifteen pound bowling balls: their hopes for victory dashed . Speaking to them only does so much. The realism on the parents' face as they realize Roger's team will lose is convincing. I guess this is the end result of Hollywood realism... I can tell the team really did care about this bowling tournament. I almost want to tell everyone that it doesn't matter too much! There's something after high school, after bowling! But everyone has travelled eight hours to the end of Illinois for this, they need to win - they want to win. Especially the seniors on the team, who have worked for four years to win. Bowling's popularity has waned in recent decades so it's interesting to see people caring so much about something that doesn't exist anymore. You can try telling teammates to give up but the coaches will immediately bench you (take you out of the game and replace you).

At the end of the day the results are tallied. I've never won: I can't get Roger in the top 10 individually, and the team hasn't even come close to winning. So far the game always ends in a depressed bus ride to a Friday's, but before you get there, the world is enveloped in a white light, and you're back to waking up in the morning, to try again I guess, or quit. Can you win? Does it matter? I'm not sure. Is roger dead, in the afterlife, living out his wildest fantasy? Or is he in hell? Maybe you're meant to do stuff like walk to the bathroom without changing your shoes, or to only eat gatorade the whole day. Maybe you can treat the game like an experiment, a joke. Or you can try to win. Each twelve hour playthrough (provided you don't kill off Roger early) has an endless number of questions that, well, I guess could have only been made by a team of 100,000 people and a budget of over a billion USD. So far, thanks to Analgesic's all-encompassing marketing plan - there's been a saturation of this on all livestreaming channels. There's a whole subsection of YouTube dedicated to just messing around at certain times of day. And the only settings are the hotel, the roads, and the bowling alley!

Given that this is a loop that goes from 6 AM to 6 PM, you can imagine the game is tiring to play over and over again (especially with the bus sequence!)

But there's something fascinating about it - the amount the game seems to home in on the teammates' surprised me - how you can slowly piece together Roger's relationship and views towards each teammate. Some of them, Roger doesn't want to get too close to. Others have subjects you shouldn't ask about. At some point I was wondering what the point of it is, and there is no point! There's nothing to be gained from chatting with one teammate over the other, except maybe a slight edge in the bowling matches. Despite the absurdity of the realism, there's a love for the characters as well as a deep knowledge of the history of the suburbs they come from. You can chat up anyone in the bowling alley about ANYTHING and some know deep history of O'Fallon, or the sport. Or you can about their lives, but they'll respond realistically and ignore you if you ask something weird.

I've started to wonder if this game is an experiment in realism - in the early/mid part of the 21st century, games started to resemble part-time work a lot (open world task lists, gacha games). It's still up in the air but I wonder if Analgesic was betting on trying to capture a market of people who are desperate for any kind of connection or connection to some kind of history, given the terrifying depth of the 'lore' you can find out about the game's world (did you know about the nutrition facts of a circa-2010 gatorade? I didn't). So maybe GABG has more origins in the dating sim and girl-raising genres than I thought (in addition to obvious influences like funny physics games.)

Looking back, it's funny what Analgesic did by moving from these disposable party bowling games to something that's realistic to a fault. It's a weird thing to spend a billion dollars on, but. Ever since I sold off Analgesic a few decades ago, I guess I don't have a say anymore. Was this how I wanted the history of games to go? I'm not sure. But it did.