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.