This was a very well-received contest. The consensus was that [citation needed] did a great job their first time hosting. There were no technical glitches to speak of other than the WSO archive being down, which made it harder to pass the Captcha required to register a team. That was beyond everyone's control.
Hi there! 2nd time Williams Trivia participants, Cylon Boarding Disco Party (previously "Havana Mints") chiming in with thanks to [citation needed], and props to Too Early For Flapjacks. Doing the quiz in Osaka, Japan means it runs from 12pm to 8pm, and we chose to set up in our friend (and teammate)'s board game cafe, The Hearth. Highly recommended little spot if you're ever in this part of the world.
Last time we were working remotely from multiple locations and countries (I was in China for work), so it was nice to be in the same room for a change. The banter the quiz provided was a great source of hilarity, and spawned several in-jokes. You know the quiz is good if people are laughing about it.
Just like last year, we struggled with the Ultra Bonus, and finally got it in the 7th hour when a friend (who showed up very late) clicked to it. Mis-labelling the organ in the first picture as a pancreas did not help us. We had what we felt was a strong case for the "seven main taxonomic ranks", with the first clue described Genus, ebay/craigslist etc. respresenting Order, the Hillbillies/Brady Bunch being Family, and the maps representing Domain. Admittedly a stretch to get Episode 1 in there, but I really enjoyed the guess, despite it being incorrect.
Highlights included Space Jam (esp. the Come On and Slam mashups), the palindrome section of Civics, and the "This or That" round (esp. Dating App or Part of Horse, lol). Lowlights were rare, though we struggled with the "Name your representatives", as none of us has a US address (hailing from NZ, Canada, and the UK).
Action Trivia were also great, in particular Futurevision, where we had a good time describing the terrible sequels/reboots that are sure to plague the movie industry in the next 10 years. I look forward to checking out all the other submissions (Flapjack's one is pure genius).
Anyway, that's our two cents, and once again, thanks to all involved in making an unforgettable trivia afternoon (as it was for us).
Tim (Cylon Boarding Disco Party)
This was my 50th contest! But also my lightest! I was at a Williams Alumni meeting in Portland, Oregon, and we had an evening event and quite a late night. (I am currently the President of the Society of Alumni.)
At 2 AM Pacific I was with a group of alums and said, "Oh my god, they are about to play Five O'Clock World" in the trivia contest!" and raced upstairs to catch it (5 AM EST). But I got there at 5:04 AM EST and missed it. Ugh! (I assume they did play it?)
I played for a few minutes to record 8 points....BOMO's all-time low!
I'll check the archive soon!!!!
Best, Tom (Gardner '79) from BOMO
"So please make the effort to write a postmortem!"
You know, I will. I really, really liked this contest. I only played until halftime (because I'm old) but the on-airs were sweet and kept a good pace with a nice mix of music matches. The technical problems that plagued some contest were minimal.
But I *loved* the boni. I've long been advocating that because of the rise of the search engine, Trivia needs to adapt to more of a "puzzle" format. The Anti-Match Game was a great example of this format: trivia, yes, but with a twist along the lines of Scattergories. Same with "This or That" (I checked it the next day) was beautiful trivia with a humorous twist. There was a lot of effort put into all these boni and it really showed.
So "bravo" to [citation needed]! A most excellent game.
Eric
"The Shirt!" and many others
Some notes from Finland and the "Tasmanian Treebiters of the North!"
We overslept and got a late start, but still managed 6.5 hours of fun. I was surprised to hear at the end that this was [citation needed]'s first outing as contest runners. Despite a couple of bobbles with streaming, the contest ran smoothly and the content was assured and confident.
The difficulty level must have been lower than past contests, since I didn't feel like a complete idiot. The proportion of easier questions paid off several times over the course of the morning, as my 8-year-old was able to give answers on recent Pokemon games and other topics she knew. This was a Big Deal for her and contributed a lot to our enjoyment of the game as a family. Overall, it was a very casual-friendly edition of the game, and I'd like to see more like it.
Thank you to [citation needed] for a great contest! And congratulations to "Too Early for Flapjacks". We're looking forward to getting up at 5 am for your contest in the spring. I wonder what we'll have for breakfast?
Best wishes,
Chris Aylott '91
It's been a wild week over here in [citation needed] land, but we're looking at making sure that everything is archived appropriately. The emails from your mothers were HILARIOUS and I want to make sure that you all get to see them.
But I figured that I'd take a moment while I have a little bit of downtime right now to talk about our boni construction. Shortly after we won the contest, the core four had a meeting where we started planning out how we were tackling this, and I set a couple of guidelines for how we were going to approach creating boni.
Boni should consist of 1/3 Easy questions, 1/3 Medium questions, and 1/3 Hard questions. Our definition here was that we would expect every team to get the easy questions without the use of the internet, medium questions should push people who aren't familiar with the subject while being straightforward for those who considered themselves an expert in the subject, and hard questions should push those who consider themselves experts.
Now, we did not treat these as strict limitations, if for no reason that they are incredibly subjective and differ vastly from team to team. (For instance, on [citation needed], every bit of music identification is harder for us than for other teams - we just suck at it.) But it did guide us to make sure that many of the boni had lots of in-points for every team. Now, this wasn't the case for every single section in a bonus, some sections had harder questions than others overall (compare the ordering section in the Space part of Space Jam to the identify the planetary models part), but it usually averaged out over a whole bonus.
As an added help, unless the section needed them in a different order for shenanigans reasons, we generally put the questions in a section in the order Easy, Medium, Hard, so that the first questions you looked at were good in-points for the section. This is most obvious in the Jam part of Space Jam, where all 4 of the sections work like that.
Now, obviously this was our opinion (like many of the other things in this email), but it's a thing to think about in the future. There is a place when writing trivia questions for making the players feel smart, for pushing the players to the limit of what they know, and for putting hard stumpers out to see if anyone can get them. Hopefully the Easy/Medium/Hard breakdown allowed us to get a good mix of all three.
Boni should do a variety of different things. In Four Oreos from Paradise's contest, we really enjoyed the Miniatures bonus and the Memes bonus, which made us think differently about how we were answering the questions. (Seriously, props to whoever wrote the Memes bonus - I think that was the most fun I've ever had solving a bonus.) Anti-Match Game was spawned from that feeling, and also one reason I was so excited for This or That.
But we also wanted to make sure that boni did different things inside of each bonus. This was a major reason why there were so many sections inside of each bonus, and why they sometimes did very different things. Find the max score on a scale/in a game! Identify these video games from their clips! Add the diacritics for these words! These engage different people differently, and with lots of short sections, it stops boni from becoming a slog.
Boni should look nice. I learned a lot about Microsoft Publisher this year. I realize that because we were preparing for a winter contest as opposed to a spring one, we had more time to polish up our boni than those who were run the spring contests, but people are more confident in your questions and feel better about answering them if it looks nicer. We had a big lead time on finishing most of the boni this year, so I had plenty of time to give them a consistent look. (We had everything but This or That and Games done a month before the contest. And Games might even have been done that early - it was a bonus that replaced an idea that needed to be scrapped.)
Attempting to give them all a consistent look also had some other small advantages. Measure for Measure was the first one I put together, and I found the "metric" joke pretty funny. This led to the jokes at the beginning of each of the section. Also, the backgrounds on the super boni were there to make the super boni look more "super." (And also I liked the idea of the background of some pages being a basketball.)
Audio boni (and audio sections of boni) must be in numbered videos. I personally find it really annoying when there's not a numbered video on an audio bonus. I always lose count, and I can't refer to songs with other people on my team easily. I also can't imagine how much of a pain in the neck that it makes grading.
On a similar note, I purposely chose longer sections of audio clips for the boni because I find that much more interesting. For Rock Around the Clock, it would've been totally valid to clip the songs down to the time, but hopefully what you solved was more interesting. In fact, not only did Spelling Counts have long clips for some of the songs, but also each clip had the title of the song left in it! (Hopefully you spelled them correctly!)
Of course, while my opinions were the [citation needed] guiding principles, that does not mean that they need to be the guiding principles for every contest. But hopefully this explains why the boni might have felt a little different for this contest, and hopefully gives future teams some thoughts about how to structure boni in the future.
You'll hear more from me later!
-- Jen McTeague [citation needed]
Personally, I would like us to consider an all non-internet contest. We already expect "honor code" for songs and a choice for boni. It's not a big leap to go all in. Assuming content and songs are adjusted accordingly, it would be more fun. (Trust me.) Nothing like the joy of simply knowing something, that tip of the tongue retrieval! Or the wonder that a teammate knows something that is totally alien to you. Googling is not much of a skill. They don't play Jeopardy with laptops handy.
Best, Tom from BOMO
I'm not 100% against, it, but I will admit that I like the charm of the internet being allowed for on-airs. I'll mention some stuff about the on-airs later, but we took the general tact that on-airs should be good stories or interesting things to learn, as opposed to hard trivia questions. I kinda like that dichotomy of the on-airs versus the bonus questions - and it's one of the reasons why I enjoy reading through the archives of previous contests that we didn't participate in.
That being said, if I understand this chart on the website correctly, there were only three answer sheets all night that said that the team used the internet on that bonus, so for all intents and purposes, the boni were internet-free.
Yes but the on airs don't need to be hard ones. Just good ones. There is a massive difference.
If you like it for the boni, think about it...why would it not be better for the on airs as well?
After all, it is a "trivia contest." And as founder Frank Ferry memorably said, "good trivia detonates megatons of nostalgia."
Tom, I've been playing in the Stevens Point trivia contest (http://90fmtrivia.org) for going on 46 years now (I grew up there). Ever since 2009, the organizers of that contest have been doing a live fall event called Trivia Unplugged. It’s not over the radio/online, but is a six hour "live" contest, like a bar trivia one. No notes, books, internet (you can't even be wearing a Smartwatch like an Apple Watch), it's 100% off this top of your heads. It's a terrific amount of fun, and as someone who doesn't "do notes" and isn't the greatest at Google-Fu, I love it (off the top of the head stuff is where I shine). An edition of Williams that's structured similarly might be worth a try.
Christopher Fisher Collective Foole trivia team
Thanks for this, Christopher! Totally agree!
Two other thoughts based on data points revealed in this recent flurry of emails.
If almost every team chose to do "internet free boni" in this contest....then what does that tell you?
And how about everyone's thrill at the 8-year old child knowing Pokemon trivia? As I recall, it was the highlight of the contest for that team. Imagine their reaction if the child had googled the answers. Parental pride at a nicely executed Google search, sure. But "thrilling"? I doubt it.
A little context about Trivia and the internet:
Longtime residents of the Trivia mailing list will recall that in the late '90s/early 'oughts we had a knock-down, drag-out fight here about whether to allow the internet in Trivia. Basically, old-timers felt that the internet was changing the contest they loved (which was true), and younger people, notably undergraduates, said that they had no interest in playing in a contest with no internet, because they just didn't see the point.
We were stuck at that impasse for several years, and hosts spent a lot of energy trying to "Google-proof" questions. Large swaths of formerly staple questions were rendered unusable by IMDB and Wikipedia. The Ultra bonus became, usually, a set of pictures instead of words. There was a lot of worry that Trivia simply couldn't survive the rise of the internet.
Then, in January 2005, came the mostly disastrous* Worker and Parasite contest. In retrospect the great innovation that came out of that night was Joe Francis's suggestion that we grade boni on two different scales: one for teams who used the internet, and one for the rest who went "commando", and that we allow internet for on-air questions but not for songs. (I know the bonus idea was Joe's, and I think the other part was too, but someone correct me if I have it wrong.) In order to accept the rule we had to accept that Trivia is on the honor system, which would have been hard in the days of cutthroat on-campus competition in the 1980s, but doesn't seem to be an issue today. After all, Williams College has an honor code.
The Great Compromise seemed to solve the great debate we were having, and in general Trivia rebounded.
The two scales have varied over the years. When I re-wrote much of the software before the January 2014 Requiem for the Blue Civic contest, I put in a setting that allows each host team to declare the max scores for both hours and supers and both internet and internet-free. The software then scales raw scores to final scores appropriately.
Being a person from an older generation who had lived through the skirmishes of the '90s, I didn't want to make the difference too stark, for fear of alienating younger players. So for the Blue Civic contest we made the max hour bonus scores 15 for no internet and 9 for internet. ANUSTART made it 15/10 in the next contest. But the next time was Polar Vortex's turn, and they were undergraduates, and decided to change the ratio to 15/5, making using the internet a big penalty. I think the rest of us, looking at that (and the highly successful contest they ran, with 7 of the top 10 teams being undergrads), concluded that the winds had shifted and many young people were now embracing the joy of going internet-free. The ratio has stayed 15/5 ever since.
So my opinion is that we are still in a good place, internet-wise. I think everyone can have what they want.
*The January 2005 Worker and Parasite contest was well-written and well-planned, and some of us even drove 12 hours to be in Williamstown to present it. WCFM was in temporary digs in the basement of Prospect House at the time, and there was only room for two people in the studio. So the rest of us were holed up on the second floor of Goodrich Hall. It was about -10 degrees Fahrenheit that night, and the door to our room opened onto an unheated stairwell. I discovered that my computer couldn't connect to Williams's network, so we borrowed a laptop to use for scoring, and unfortunately set it up right near the door. We were afraid to move it because the owner said the battery might die at any moment. So every time someone brought a bonus submission through the door, a blast of freezing air hit me. That went on for 8 hours.
But that wasn't the disastrous part. 45 minutes into the contest, WCFM's internet stream simply died. We had no resources to call on (it was after midnight), and no idea what to do - we were woefully small as it was. On-campus teams could hear us, but off-campus teams heard only silence.
We kept going. Off-campus teams called in and asked us to read the question to them. After a while we started giving them 2 points for a correct trivia answer, since they couldn't hear the songs. More teams than you would expect stuck it out all night.
We were all traumatized, as well as physically numb, by morning. It took us until the next weekend to get everything scored; I was in San Diego for a conference and I sat in the Dr. Seuss library grading boni that I had taken with me, while corresponding with Des by email about how to score them. It was all very surreal and anticlimactic.
Thanks for the write-up of your endeavour, [citation needed] - the behind the scenes stuff is always interesting.
I would also like to say, that with the emergence of the Groundhog Day Superbowl commercial this week, our answer for the #1 Movie of the decade in Futurevision is one step closer to being realised.
See you all in May!
Tim