Bowling

What is Bowling?

Each ball has two beats. First the wind-up: the ball waits and you move, with the amount of movement filling a power bar and the left or right lean of that movement setting the aim. The moment you stop, the ball is released and there is nothing left to do but watch it roll, hook and hit the rack. Ten frames of proper bowling scoring follow, strikes and spares included, up to a perfect 300. It is the only game here built around committing and then watching.

How to bowl

1. Press Play now and allow the camera when the browser asks.
2. Let the count-in finish — nothing you do during the 3, 2, 1 charges anything.
3. Move, to fill the POWER bar. Anything counts: wave, march on the spot, swing an arm, bounce in your chair. The bar climbs while you move and holds where it is the moment you stop.
4. Favour one side, to aim. More movement on your left drifts the ball left, more on your right drifts it right. The dashed line up the lane shows where it would arrive if it left now: yellow lands on the deck, red in the channel.
5. Then stop — completely — for about a third of a second. That releases the ball; after that you can only watch it roll. If the room is too dark for stillness to register, SPACE bowls immediately.
6. Ten frames, then a final score. SPACE plays again from the end screen, H goes home, M turns the music off, F is fullscreen.

If the lane appears but the room behind it does not, the camera never opened. The camera help page tests it in one click; on many laptops the answer is a sliding cover over the lens.

Why the fastest ball is the wrong ball

The two things you set during a wind-up pull against each other, and that is the whole game.

Power sets how fast the ball leaves; your left-or-right bias sets how hard it slides sideways. But the slide is a steady rate, not a fixed distance, so how far it wanders depends on how long it is on the lane — an empty bar takes nearly two seconds to reach the front pin, a full bar one.

• At full power the ball barely bends: the strongest lean still only arrives about halfway from the middle of the lane to the channel.
• At the bottom of the bar that same lean crosses almost the whole lane, and can run out of room before the pins.
• Dead centre at full speed is the classic way to leave a corner pin standing. A ball that hits the front pin square just deflects off it; the strike comes from arriving a shade to one side, so the pins cascade — the pocket a real bowler aims at.

A full bar is not the answer, and you do not need one: a three-quarter ball on the right line still clears the rack. Whole-body movement fills the bar in two and a half seconds or so; a single hand may never quite fill it.

Hard leans on all three. The bar will not hold — roughly a fifth of it drains away every second, so you cannot build up and coast. The lean bites harder: a weak ball at full tilt is in the channel before it reaches the rack. And there is less carry, so a scrappy hit scatters fewer pins. The ball is dark red rather than purple, and hard keeps its own best.

Stopping is the shot

Most games here react while you move. This one decides everything at the instant you stop.

• About a third of a second of genuine stillness sends the ball. Not a pause inside a gesture — actually still.
• Your aim is latched from the last moment you were still moving; there is no adjusting once you have stopped. The last second of a wind-up is where the shot is decided: glance at the dashed line and freeze when it points where you want.
• Under about a tenth of a bar, stopping does nothing, so you can settle and start when you are ready without firing off a ball by accident.
• There is a deliberate gap between moving and stopped. Drifting half-heartedly does neither: it will not fill the bar and will not count as stopping.
• The clock is the thin strip under the POWER bar. At three and a half seconds the ball goes regardless of what you are doing.

Then the part you cannot influence: the roll, the hook, the crash, and a callout — STRIKE, SPARE, a pin count, or a gutter ball's long slide.

What it asks of the room

• Sit or stand centred. Left and right are measured against the middle of the picture, and the lane is drawn down that middle, so it shows you where the line falls. Settle off to one side and everything you do lands there, with the aim pulled over before you have tried to aim. Anyone walking behind you drags it the same way.
• Size does not matter, balance does. A hand on one side pulls as hard as a whole body leaning that way, so it plays sitting down, one-armed, or with only a head and shoulders in shot. Two children can wind up one ball together: one each side rolls it straight, both the same side hooks hard.
• No space needed. Nobody travels and nobody jumps, so you can play it at a desk.
• How loud. A low rumble following the ball down the lane, wooden clacks as pins topple, a fanfare for a strike, and a bouncy loop underneath. M turns the music off; the lane sounds stay.

A ball takes about ten seconds all in, and a game runs to between twelve and twenty-one balls — a few minutes.

Ten frames, scored the way a real sheet is

The strip across the top is an actual ten-pin scoresheet. A strike is an X in the right-hand box of the frame, a spare is a slash, and a ball that knocks nothing down is a dash.

A frame shows a dot instead of a total until its bonus balls have landed, and that is not a fault: a strike is worth ten plus whatever the next two balls knock down, so there is no number to write yet. Throw a good one and three frames fill in at once a few balls later.

Between the two balls of a frame the fallen pins are swept away and the survivors put back on their exact spots.

The tenth frame is the strange one, as in a real alley: a strike or a spare in the first two balls earns a third, and a cleared deck re-racks so the extra ball has something to hit. Twelve strikes in a row is 300, and your best is kept in that browser.

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