After watching some of what Jack Danger is doing with streamers playing against each other in realtime using Zoom I'm interested in doing something on a much smaller scale with my local pinheads. I'm comfortable enough with OBS and a streaming setup to host and do the heavy lifting there and a quick poll on our FB group shows there's plenty of interest in participating and/or watching. The big issue however is going to be that most folks will have different games so it's not going to be a true tournament in that sense so I'm trying to think through the format and in what ways can it still be a fun gathering of people playing pinball together. I figure on the technical side while it won't be fancy, if people have a laptop they can position it in a way where we see them and the playfield. For actual gameplay I'm thinking we'd get a list of who has what games and if there are any overlaps we'd do some head to head challenges for like games first, and then switch over to just some random play with everyone like longest play on a single ball, one handed, etc. It's never going to be apples to apples with all different games but at the same time it would be fun to see who is playing what in their personal collection and part of the point is for a local group that hasn't met since early March to see each other and get to hang out doing what we love. Would welcome any thoughts or ideas as I start coordinating this as to what works and doesn't if you've done it or any ideas you might have.

Just to update here we held our first event like this last night. We had 7 people join a stream together and I put together a quick guide to walk folks through positioning their laptop or other device to angle towards the playfield. It ended up being a lot of fun! We had a few matching pins so did a few head to head with those and then some just random ones like Getaway vs Highspeed and Diner vs Lucky 7. Stream quality with many people made it sometimes hard to see the balls on the playfield and obviously scoring didn't matter at all, but it was great to hang out and play some pinball. After head to head rounds we did several where everyone played at the same time one handed, cross handed, and with lower 1/4 of playfield covered (slings and flippers). The fun rounds were a blast with lots of laughter. We streamed it to our local pinball group FB page and had many folks watching along and commenting there. All in all turned out to be a lot of fun.