Requiem for the Blue Civic followed the shaky Noumenal Yodeling contest with one that was generally described as solid. Requiem was based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and had been playing for 15 years before winning for the first time. (Mark Conger '89, whose house the team played from, had previously helped run the contest with We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes (1987), Can't Do Plaid (1995), and the star-crossed and streamless Worker and Parasite (2005). Carol Mohr had witnessed that disaster, but no one else had any experience running a contest.)

Technical Changes

The team made a number of technical innovations, whose value only time will tell. Foremost among them: Google doc answer sheets and IRC chatrooms. Both were implemented by Louis Moga.

Google Docs

When a team clicked on the link to submit a bonus, a Google spreadsheet was created for them to enter their answers. The advantages over the old database entry form are:

1. All members of a team can be adding answers at once.
2. Answers aren't lost if a team enters some and then accidently leaves the page or closes the browser.
3. Answer blanks in an answer sheet need not be lined up vertically; there can be two blanks on one line, e.g. song title and artist.
4. Answer sheets can contain directions and affordances. This is especially useful for audio and video boni.

The disadvantages are:

1. It was a lot of work up front to get the right authorization from Google to create and change Goodle docs programmatically. And the work is tied to a particular server, so it will have to be ported if used in future contests.
2. Some work has to go into the answer sheets.
3. Grading was rather slow, because the grader had to have both the answer sheet and the answer key on the screen at once, and either overlay them or keep switching back and forth.
4. Approximately 10 to 20 percent of documents didn't submit correctly, and had to be submitted via email. Louis is sure this is a timing issue caused by slow response from Google and teams clicking twice in a short time. That should be possible to fix.

Player feedback on the Google docs was generally positive. With some more software work, it should be possible to make the grading easier, possibly at the expense of more work up front on the answer sheets.

Chatrooms

In this contest, after registering, a team could simply click on a link and immediately be connected to a chat room with the hosts via their browser. That was how they submitted answers to onair questions and interacted with the hosts. The advantages over using AOL Instant Messenger, which had become the standard in recent years, were

1. No one had to install a program like AOL, which may have been a barrier to entry in the past.
2. Several team members could be in the chat room at once, typing answers.
3. The questions could be piped into the chatrooms automatically as soon as they had been read on the stream. The answers could have been as well, but this was deemed too risky (in case the questions got mixed up somehow), and also contrary to the spirit of Williams Trivia, which after all revolves around a live interaction between players and hosts.
4. A master controller could balance the load among the volunteers manning the chatrooms, so that everyone had about the same number of teams.

The disadvantages were

1. The system required an external IRC chat server, which is something many internet hosts are loath to allow, and the ISP who donates space for williamstrivia.com will probably not go for.
2. It required a lot of up-front programming to get the questions into the rooms and allow the load balancing. It was tied to teleprompter software, which displayed a question for the DJ to read, then played a song and copied it to the chatrooms when he finished and clicked a button.
3. Most importantly, not everyone had an easy time getting into the chatrooms. Some virus software blocks IRC, and some cookie problems kept people out. Most eventually connected (sometimes after many tries), but some gave up and went to bed.

Reactions to the chatrooms post-contest were more ambivalent than to Google docs.

The chat system was conceived, designed, and administered by Louis Moga of Requiem for the Blue Civic. It runs on his server, and can't easily be moved elsewhere. He believes the system can be improved to interact better with virus software and avoid issues with cookies, but it would be some work to do that. He can't provide the server for free to future contests, but a deal could be struck.

Other Technical Stuff

The stream stayed up, uniterrupted, for 9 hours. Requiem for the Blue Civic bought about $35 worth of bandwidth from Primcast, and spent $60 for software from NiceCast.

Mark did a lot of work on the website before the contest. Some of the changes:

1. Teams can now enter a picture when they register.
2. There is a gallery of all teams, featuring pictures and trash talk.
3. A field was added for teams to enter the Williams classes they represent.
4. The boni are organized by type on the main page.
5. Submitted boni appear in a team's scoring summary as "pending" until they are graded.
6. Teams can now guess the Ultra Bonus as many times as they like through the website. Before, the software limited guesses to one per hour per team. Teams can also see all theirpast guesses.
7. The header font changed.
8. The website colors were made to change throughout the night, beginning as blue and white and ending with purple and gold. It was revealed on the answer to the last question that the 11 schemes were the colors of all the NESCAC teams, beginning with Connecticut College and ending with Williams.

Also, on the administrative side of the website:

1. Max scores for boni are now saved with the contest, and also with each bonus. That should discourage the situation we had last May, when some boni graders gave their boni more weight than others.
2. That allows for a page to translate from raw bonus scores to final scores easily. It takes into account lateness and whether or not a team used the internet, and has the ability to set a grading curve if a bonus turned out to be too hard or too easy. You can override if necessary, but in general it only took a couple of clicks to translate from raw scores to final scores.
3. The software was originally written with the assumption that the contest was midnight to 8 AM, so many things were stored only as times and not as date-times. Starting at 10 had been accomplished by a series of ably-implemented kludges by Drew Wagers. There is also the problem that the server hosting the contest might not always be in the Eastern time zone, although we want to report times as EDT or EST. The new system has all times are stored either as UTC date-times (contest start, submitted bonus timestamps) or as time offsets from the beginning of the contest (release and due times of boni). The interface always asks for and reports Eastern times. Moving the start time of a contest now just means changing one thing.

Trivia

The trivia in this content was most often described as "solid".

On-Airs

The main objection to the on-airs was that they were too long-winded. Mark Conger takes the blame for that. They were also tilted heavily toward movies and TV, with a big dollop of "news of the weird". And they skewed a little old, because Blue Civic had few people under 30.

Note: Blue Civic had an "all-vinyl hour" from around midnight to around 1 am (questions 27 to 39), featuring actual records played on an actual record player. The only glitch was that no one remembered to bring a 45 RPM adapter ring, so when it came time to play "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron", a previous recording of the 45 was played instead. Here's a video of Gumboots playing on the turntable. The record was warped, but still sounded good!

Also note: for the first time in many years, there was a question which required teams to call up and sing a song. Although chat has replaced phones as the normal method of submission, it occurred to Mark that even if we didn't use phones for most things, we could still use them once or twice during the night, provided the chat hosts agreed to share their phone numbers with their teams. They all did, and as a result most were serenaded repeatedly with the Meow Mix jingle.

Action Trivia

At the last minute, over Mark's objection, the team decided to have 7 action trivias. Previous years had seen a decline of actions to the point where many topics weren't done at all, so it seemed likely that those 7 ideas would lie there like dead fish in the sun. But no! A total of 52 action videos were submitted that night, and the top 5 teams each did all 7 actions. It was a close contest all night long, so the actions were numerically important as well as emotionally engaging.

So this contest marks the triumphant return of Action Trivia. In the old days there were always people who loved action trivia, but as the contest moved to the Internet, they seemed to disappear. It seems now as if maybe they were there all along, but filming and uploading videos was just too difficult. Advances in tecnology may have taken away that barrier. Blue Civic also gave teams an hour and 20 minutes per action, to allow time for upload.

Hour and Super Boni

Most reaction to the hour and super boni was positive. Diagrams and Pixar received praise as accessible by many people, and "Several Actors, Same Role" as being classic trivia. People loved the fact that the audio bonus contained an Easter egg, but felt that the clips were too short.

Ultra Bonus

The Ultra bonus proved very difficult, with the first correct answer coming from Running Dog at 4:56AM. It was unfortunate that one of the first three clues was intended to be a picture of actress Rebecca Hall (representing the movie Rebecca), but the image chosen was a mis-captioned picture of another actress, Jaimie Alexander. This threw some teams off and miffed fans of Jaimie Alexander.

Reactions

From Tom Gardner of BOMO, who played from Hong Kong

You will hear many kudos in the coming days and weeks, and more from me in due course. You've waited a long time to run one and wow did you guys nail it, right on down to sticking the landing with the "proper" scoring summary! Quite a recovery from last May's debacle! You are my hero!

And many thanks again for Five O'Clock World and my brother's BOMO letter about YoYo from 1976. I sent it to him and he was amazed and very pleased. Mitch Katz of Geezers enjoyed it, too. And I've been in touch with Steve Wertimer '77 and Larry Pensack '79 as well. Werts was "running" BOMO for that contest (I "succeeded" him when he graduated, and he and I and Mitch, Larry, Bob Berry '79 and the late Tom Soybel '79 (whose picture graced the Geezer's team page) basically put that particular contest together (with help from many!). My brother, who had graduated by then, helped with the PR, hence the letter from his pen...

From Mitch Katz of Geezers on Stun:

Congratulations on a great contest, especially the technical innovations, including the wonderful Google Docs for boni, despite it not allowing me to enter answers for the brilliant fifth hour bonus. You have restored luster to a great institution... And you played one of my all-time favorite songs, Build Me Up Buttercup.

From Laurie Brink of ANUSTART:

First of all, thanks to Requiem for the Blue Civic for running a great contest! I think I speak for all of ANUSTART when I say that it was a lot of fun and we're really glad we played. (Special shoutout to our companion on chat all night, Kristen, who was charming and did a great job!)

So, I thought I'd get the overly-verbose post-mortem ball rolling:

If there's one word I'd use to describe this contest, it's "solid." There weren't a lot of moments that made me go "oh my gosh, this is a brilliant, amazing bonus/question/song/whatever," but there were even fewer moments that made me think anything resembling "this is an inadequate bonus/question/song/whatever." It was just consistently GOOD, and that's a darn good thing.

On-airs:

First, and most importantly, what a joy to have a stream that worked all night! This is one of very, very few contests in the last decade where I've actually heard every single question without any issues. The only slight problem was the weirdness with volume - I had to keep turning my speakers way up for music and way down for questions, but that was hardly an insurmountable obstacle. The questions themselves were all enjoyable - the only one I can recall that made our team harrumph a bit was the nitpickiness of Hillary Clinton not changing her name "upon marriage" because she took her husband's name a few years after marrying him. I loved the terrible Mt. Rushmore pun, and remember giggling when I figured out "most homers by a Homer."

The music, too, was largely well chosen, with a nice mix of the recognizable and the truly Trivial. I am particularly glad to have been introduced to the insanity of that loving ode to the bathroom.

Actions:

I am so happy action boni are back and successful! I don't have a video camera that would work for me, so my only action bonus participation personally was Historical Pets (my dog is very good at putting up with stupid hats), but my teammates seemed to enjoy the ones they did, and as someone who's long been one of the loudest people waving the "Trivia is better with actions" flag, I was very glad to see actions that got people playing. My own taste in actions runs more towards the knowledge + performance + stupid twist variety ("perform the entire original Star Wars trilogy in under three minutes using only props from your bathroom! also make it a musical! starring porn stars! on fire!"), so these ones were a little less my style than some actions of the past - but they were clever, they were doable, and most important by far, people willingly did them and had fun, so I've got no complaints whatsoever.

Super Boni:

I would have liked a little more variety in the Pixar bonus - an "identify these minor characters by their pictures" section would have fit right in, for example - but it was a good bonus topic and a good bonus. I liked the Cars bonus as a concept; I don't recall seeing that topic before, and that in itself is pretty exciting in my 25th (oh god I'm old...) contest. My only slight critique of it was that it seemed just a touch slanted towards older players - it's entirely possible that I overlooked some newer examples of cars in TV, movies, and song, but it seemed like the majority of them were from the 20th century. A few more recent pop culture cars would have been great, but it was still a darn good bonus from what I could tell. (As for the actual knowledge-of-cars-outside-of-the-media section, I knew absolutely nothing, so I'm not going to try to weigh in on whether those were good questions or not. They seemed like someone who knows more about cars than I do would probably enjoy them!)

Hour Boni:

Again, a lot of good here. The weakest link was pretty definitely the audio bonus, which was rather too hard. The "easter egg" concept in it was really, really clever, though. If that easter egg concept had been paired with clips long enough that we could hear them better, it would have been a brilliant bonus. Several Actors, Same Role was my personal favorite - I really like boni that take a broad, general topic like "movies and TV" and then approach it from a narrow perspective, and that one did so admirably, and had a really good range of difficulty and several questions that had me banging my head into the wall going, "I SWEAR I KNOW THIS" - always a high point of Trivia!

Ultra:

This drove us CRAZY all night. Unfortunately, I think we suffered both because I'm a Marvel movie fan and thus recognized Jaimie Alexander as Jaimie Alexander and not the actor Blue Civic apparently meant to include, so we kept trying to come up with answers that included "Alexander," and because we also immediately recognized the "generic piece of music" as the Hallelujah Chorus, and thus kept trying to get "Hallelujah" or "Messiah" or "Handel" to fit, too. The topic itself was a good one, though, so I think the main takeaway is just to make very sure, when crafting Ultras, that you don't accidentally use the wrong picture! :)

Technical stuff:

The website tweaks are GREAT. Seriously. Bravo. I love how easy it is to submit boni now, and the chat rooms are a brilliant innovation. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of brilliant innovations is that they don't always work perfectly on the first try - I was fortunate in that I had no problems with the chat, but some of my teammates had a heck of a time getting on (at least one eventually gave up and just went to bed without ever getting on). I suppose it wouldn't be Trivia without some piece of tech going wacky on us. That said, I do really really love them in principle, and I very much hope the techie-types can figure out how to get them working even better for everyone come spring!

Promotion:

This, above all, is apparently where Blue Civic shone, because SO MANY NEW TEAMS! YAY! I am thrilled to death that we had such an impressive collection of new players, who clearly did a great job - ANUSTART had to work pretty hard to beat them! And speaking on behalf of ANUSTART, I know my teammates will all agree with me that we sincerely hope all those new players will come back in May and kick some more ass! SpAc3 Tigers and Mills 3 in particular look well-poised for an epic Battle of the Frosh come spring, and I can't wait to see it. I promise we'll do our best to run a contest as good as this one and keep you guys hooked into our crazy hobby for years to come. :)

Eric Lindholm of Tugboats and Arson:

First of all, a standing ovation for Blue Civic. This was the most polished, well-run, and fun game we've had in a while. I'm so inspired, I'm thinking of writing a Des-length review.

There was a game a while ago with a "Doonesbury" bonus and I felt the same lilting excitement when I saw Pixar. It was an early bonus so my wife joined the fun before she went to bed.

Arielle Masters of Bite My Shiny Metal Ass

I very much appreciated that the streaming was up all night, although I couldn't get it to stay up on my Mac for most of the evening (we ended up listening to most of the contest from a mobile phone). I couldn't get into the chat room for the first hour or two, but other players on our team could; it turned out to be a cookie problem on my machine and worked after I fixed the cookies. Thank you for keeping the site up to date and for fixing problems promptly as they arose (what few problems there seemed to be on the active end).

Using Google Docs was infinitely better and more convenient than the previous setup - thank you! SOOOOOOO much better. There are still some bits to iron out, but minor ones (I think) - neither of our Supers apparently made it through submission and we did a lot of work on the Pixar one; our Dance bonus has a 0.000000 score even though we had a lot of answers and submitted it (there's even a submission time listed on it); and other members of my team did some work on Big Bang Theory but everyone thought someone else was submitting it (with some of them not knowing how to use Google Docs, let alone understanding the submission process) and we got 0 credit on that one :-< In future contests, hopefully this will go better.

Thrilled to see the return of the Action Bonus as a big thing in the game. That's always been one of my favorite parts of Trivia. Wasn't able to participate in all of them this time around but we did a couple (maps; dressing up the dog) and I look forward to seeing what other teams did.

The music - mostly entertaining to listen to. There were some very obscure groups; there were also a lot of song titles that could be guessed from the first few words or the chorus. Always good to have a Shatner song :-> and 5 O'Clock World :->

Q&As - there were some tip-of-the-tongue questions (like George Takei's "Eau Myyyy" perfume) and some that were fun and could be deduced easily even if you hadn't heard the news on the radio (Ramadan above the Arctic circle chosing times from Mecca so they wouldn't starve). I liked those. the one about the green polar bears was amusing but came down to a guessing game as to which color I hadn't tried yet. Would have been better if rephrased. On the other hand, there were way, way too many incredibly long questions and/or answers, particularly the ones with several parts or several items required for the point. A lot of very obscure answers - needing to know the names of the mother/son (or was that father/daughter?) team from SNL years ago??? And how anyone but the gentleman himself and his own teams (then/now) would know about that one question many years ago, I've no idea.

P.J. Morello of The Lone Bayonette

To: Mark and all the members of Requiem for The Blue Civic -

Thanks for a great contest!

As, probably, the oldest Williams College Trivia veteran (still playing), I hold two major beliefs regarding the contest;

1) that the trivia be "memorable" rather than "Google-able"
2) that trivia is based on pop culture (and wasted childhoods) rather than a bunch of esoteric "fun facts"

Therefore, I was very pleased to see that this contest stayed closer to the original roots (realms) of Williams College Trivia than some of the other recent contests that I've sampled. The questions also played to multiple generations.

Your Cartoon bonus was an excellent example: Looney Tunes and Hanna Barbera questions for the geezers and Nickleodeon/Pokemon questions for the whipper-snappers.

The one thing I personally miss most are the "oldies". While a couple of mid-Sixties songs found their way into the contest, I don't think there were many pre-Beatles songs. I still believe that oldies are a "classic" music genre that can be used more frequently.

All in all, the technical innovations were a great success. Despite getting disconnected from the chat room a couple of times, the format for the on-air questions was terrific. Likewise, the Google-doc bonus submissions were a plus.

Thanks again for the shout out (Question #66).

Having been there in the early years (as the Agard Memorial Tube Team who saved the contest in 1970, as well as The Bayonettes, winner of the first over-time contest), the Williams College Trivia Contest provides some very cherished memories.

I'm grateful that the tradition has continued and that the contest is in good hands.