Yeah, totally agree on this. Needs to stay fresh. Curious if you've seen other ways of keeping people engaged.

People will stay engaged if standups are valuable.

If enough people are having trouble paying attention that it's becoming a problem, your standups suck. Your team may not need them (they may be communicating just fine without them) or may need them to be run differently. You may have too many people in them, implicit or explicit expectations of saying stuff just to have something to say (which contributes to people losing interest and tuning out), you may have multiple barely- or not-at-all connected teams in the same standup (I've seen this! And of course every member of one team tunes completely out when someone from another team is talking) or any number of other problems. Or, again, your team may just not need daily standups because they communicate fine without them.

Sounds toxic-ish! Why pick on someone who isn't paying attention?

It doesn't have to be toxic. If the team gets along well, it's all a bit of fun.

Haha i bet people hate the person that introduced it. However if you use a randomizer it might be ok.