Serious and maybe stupid question, also note I don't live in the US. Is this really needed? If you put a scoring pad and a couple pencils in each lane would your customers say "what is this shit", turn around and walk out?

Oh yeah. We even have one lane pair the auto-scoring isn't working, we just can't assign most people to either lane. The machines themselves work fine, and we do have a way to bypass the failed unit - but for the generations that have never seen paper scoring, you'd think had asked them to file their taxes for fun.

In high school, I was invited every time even tangential friends wanted to go bowling because I was the only person who knew how to keep score on paper (the nearby lanes didn’t have electronic scoring). And that was over 30 years ago.

Not that it necessarily justifies the difficulty in making it work (which I just learned about, thanks OP!), but I absolutely adore the silly animations that play after you bowl. It's seriously make or break for me. I can live without beer and snacks, but it just isn't the same without the goofy animations.

actually, maybe yes for some people, it's been so common to have computer tracking forever