Too Early for Flapjacks were the somewhat-reluctant winners of the January, 2020 contest hosted by [citation needed]. Then in March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic overtook the United States, and most institutions, including Williams College, either shut down or went online. We decided not to hold a regular contest in May 2020, since students would be unable to gather in groups. We had an All-Star best-of contest instead, which was fun and ungraded.
At the time we hoped things would be back to normal by September, and we could have a contest then. But no, most things were locked down for the entire 2020–2021 school year. So when fall rolled around we delayed again. At Williams there was no winter study and spring classes didn't start until February, so we ground through to April.
And then we figured, enough is enough, let's do this, even if teams have to meet virtually. Most colleges, including Williams and the University of Michigan (where I teach), had been holding classes over Zoom for the entire year, so everyone was used to the platform, if not in love with it. Our mantra throughout was: we're being called upon to do something extraordinary here, and we can't expect it to be as good as being in person, but we'll do the best we can.
So we of Flapjacks thought, let's have the contest on Zoom. There was some pushback from one member of the Trivia list, whose job doesn't allow her to run Zoom for security reasons. So we decided to be on Zoom but allow participation without it, using the usual chat room interface.
In the old days, we used to call answers into the radio station on the phone, and there followed a great deal of energetic back and forth between guessers and hosts, who sometimes offered hints. I for one miss that energy, which has been lost in the chat room era. So my hope was that Zoom might bring a little of that back. I also thought it would be pretty neat for hosts and players to actually see each other, which has never been the case, except during Action Trivia performances on campus.
Tom Gardner of BOMO, who is currently president of the Williams Alumni Society, put me in touch with Ashley Cart in Alumni Relations, and she enthusiastically agreed to allow us to use their Zoom account for Trivia. Her colleague Michael Rodriguez helped me set it up and even stayed with us for the first part of the contest to make sure everything worked smoothly.
For much of the winter and spring, the Flapjacks met weekly on Zoom to work on boni and on-air questions. This contest was much more of a collaborative effort than usual. We had a shared Google folder, and each person with a bonus concept created a Google spreadsheet in the folder. Then we all added questions and ideas. It worked surprisingly well, and meetings kept us from stagnating. Honestly, it was a lot of fun working together like that, rather than everyone doing their own boni in isolation. I recommend the strategy for future hosts.
We also had a spreadsheet for on-airs, as most teams have done in recent years. I kept it pinned to my browser toolbar, so whenever I heard an interesting fact, I could go to the spreadsheet and record it.
A few notes about specific boni I worked on:
It was hard bringing the Flapjacks back together more than a year after we won the contest and almost a year into the pandemic. Our core members were Louis Moga, Jacob Moga, Brian Bett, and me. We knew we were short-handed, so I recruited Trivia veterans Maggie Heaman and Joe Francis to help. They were invaluable throughout the spring.
I was especially worried about having enough people on the night of the contest, because I expected it would take more time to visit teams on Zoom than to check their chat rooms, meaning hosts could not interface with as many teams as usual. So I asked for volunteers from the Trivia list who could do a shift of receiving on-air answers and giving hints. Robert Kent, Steve Farley, John Binh, Kara Brockmeyer, and Becky Teed all came through for us, and we really couldn't have done it without you.
In addition, a number of Flapjacks came back to the fold to help run, including Ben Shapiro, Anthony Thomas, Missy Stump, Jason Kramer, and Carol Mohr. Once again, we couldn't have done it without everyone who pitched in.
I should note that 5 of us dealt with serious medical situations on the night of the contest, immediately before, or immediately after. Two of us had to go to the ER in the middle, and one to Urgent Care on Sunday. Trivia is not without consequences for people who are no longer college students!
At 9:30PM Eastern, players started to arrive in the Zoom. I had asked everyone to register by then, so we created a breakout room for each team. As soon as we were ready we let everyone from the waiting room into the main Zoom room, and read the rules. Then I told everyone to go to their breakout rooms, and Jacob read the first question.
It didn't take long for us to settle into a routine with the on-airs. Every host was assigned a few teams. Some teams were primarily on Zoom, some primarily on chat, and some using both. But we quickly learned which was which. I believe we managed to get everyone served, and didn't neglect any teams this way.
Unfortunately the answer sheets system was not working for approximately the first 3 hours of the contest. This meant no one could submit boni, so they got backed up. I am worried that we lost some teams who were disappointed about that. Once it was finally up, the system worked well, including with the non-standard Crostic answer sheet.
That was the biggest glitch. Everyone remained calm; perhaps having face-to-face interactions between players and hosts helped remind everyone that we were all real people, doing the best we could. We didn't get through as many on-air questions as we would have liked, and we didn't have an eighth hour bonus, since the first three were extended to the end of the contest. But I didn't hear anyone complain that there wasn't enough trivia.
So I feel good about the first-ever Zoom contest. I really enjoyed talking with teams face-to-face, and I know we reunited some old teammates from years gone by. Action Trivia didn't really engage many people, but I guess that's the nature of the medium. I got the impression everyone was having a good time. If it were up to me, I'd say, let's do Zoom from now on.
So thank you all for your patience. And congratulations to Death By Chocolate for being the first (partially, for a couple more weeks) undergraduate team to win in a while. It has been an honor and a privilege to hold the Trivia baton for the last year and a half, but I for one am happy to hand it off!
To the Williams College Trivia Contest community, and especially to "Too Early for Flapjacks":
Finally getting over my Trivia hangover long enough to thank you all for a great Contest. We're no strangers to Trivia, but this was the first time playing in your competition, and we had a great time. The amount of work and effort that went into making the Contest successful was very apparent, and we are very grateful. Great questions, great music, and great competition. Congratulations to Death By Chocolate: Guiteau for their big win, and we look forward to playing again in January!
Thank you again!
Wow, what a huge effort, Mark! Thanks to you and your team for all the hard work to keep the tradition alive. My teammates at Geezers on Stun flaked this year (we’ve been playing together in various configurations since early ‘80s at Wiiliams, first as Giga, then Phasers on Stun, and now Geezers) so I just played a few rounds for posterity. The on-air questions were really clever and interesting, and tied into the song choices well. I was bummed not to be able to do the hour boni but… shit happens. I wish my teammates had joined because some have lost their enthusiasm after recent contests but I will definitely tell them how good your contest was, and rally them for the next one. Glad to see it’s still alive on the Williams campus, too; some of my favorite nights as an undergrad were trivia nights.
Thanks again!
Bruce Leddy, class of ‘83
ps one of our pandemic pastimes among a group of Williams friends has been Zoom playing an online Scottish daily trivia contest called Gooses Quizzes. It’s on Twitch and pretty well run. Mostly just a great excuse to hang out and banter with old friends, which is what trivia was always about.
Mark -
Appreciate your & the rest of your team's massive pandemic-era efforts. Sorry to hear you had medical issues on top of everything else you were dealing with! Yikes. Hope all are OK now.
We couldn't use Zoom overall for multiple reasons (not just some of our jobs), but it ended up not mattering. The regular chat rooms were fine for us - we're a small team and text each other out-of-game as needed.
As far as our participation this round: had hoped to play the whole thing originally but the timing ended up not working out. Some of us had to be somewhere early the next day, one was going to be cutting sod Saturday and Sunday and needed rest for that, one had a college final (other time zone), and the rest of us were falling-over-exhausted even before the contest started due to other things going on in our lives (moving houses, trying to do taxes, and more). The few questions and the boni that we were able to pull up were interesting and would have been a lot of fun to work on, but when the answer sheets kept being unavailable and then we lost the stream for a while, we just ran out of what little steam we'd mustered early on and went to bed (those who were still up after the first couple of hours). Very sorry to have missed so many fun topics, but we were just too tired to keep up this round. Glad the answer sheets eventually worked and that the contest went well for most people.
Here's to the next one - hopefully we'll all be well rested by then and won't have pressing commitments that Saturday to keep us from staying up to enjoy the contest.
My apologies--I usually try to chime in on this shortly after the contest, but I've been a bit occupied. But certainly I don't want to let a really good contest go unpraised. This was a difficult time to hold a Trivia contest, and it went off splendidly.
Most importantly, new tech stuff happened without crashing, and the mishaps with the old tech weren't all that bad! That's always a major achievement, so congratulations on that front. We tended toward IRC instead of Zoom, but I think there's certainly potential for more Zoom in the future, and I'm curious to see other teams explore that.
There were some really creative ideas in the boni formats. The Playoff Bracket one was a pretty neat structural idea. Even though I suspect that large chunks might've been off-limits to teams who don't follow a particular sport, if you did, it was a cool one to puzzle through. We barely made progress on the football and WNBA, for instance, but I really liked thinking through the baseball and soccer ones. Similarly, the adaptations bonus was clearly well thought-out: good work picking the early Iron Man that looked kind of like Shaq's Steel (I'd forgotten about the Shaq Steel move!), working the Captain Marvel misdirection, etc. (Only issue is that the online format can be kind of a pain for matching questions--we've done that too, but it is one format that worked better in the old days of paper packets.) The Meet Cute was also a solid, flexible idea that hasn't been used before, as were all those masks. I didn't do the Double Crostic one, as Laurie basically took that and did the whole thing single-handedly, but she had loads of fun with the format. As for the Clam Jam Band...well, I still don't know if I get what that was about? But it was the right kind of surreal for 5 AM. Even the more straightforward ones (especially the "fake" songs) were very solid.
Out of curiosity--was there an Hour 8 that got punted? If it exists, it might be nice to have on the site.
On-airs were also quite solid, and very smoothly delivered. I'm not sure that there were any song matches or particularly weird songs that will linger in my memory for years to come, but we appreciated all that Yoda content (how did I never know about the monkey Yoda???), the singalong, the kid's show with LSD, and the return of Mortal Wombat's favorite factoid about the shape of wombat poop. It's possible that the pop-culture questions veered a little toward the running team's era (there were almost certainly more questions on stuff like The Simpsons, Friends, Star Wars, Hitchhiker's, and Monty Python than any movies/TV/books/etc. from 2000 onward), but at least it was older pop culture that everyone still generally likes.
I can't speak to the Actions, as we didn't have time for them, but it looks like people had fun with them. Zoom might be a good way to get back the old live-performance energy for those from the pre-Internet era. If there was a weak point, for me, it was that the Ultra seemed...very oblique until the end. We certainly didn't get it, and even on hearing the explanation we weren't sure how we could've gotten from things like a map of France to the answer. But some folks apparently got there in the final hours, so maybe it was a little less impossible than I thought.
Thanks again to Mark and Flapjacks, and good luck for the fall to Death By Chocolate!
Dave, The Mysterious Raccoonpossumrat of Citi Field
Dave - Thanks for the postmortem and we appreciate the feedback.
We had a plan for an 8th hour bonus, but were unable to pull it off because of the technical difficulties with bonus sheets at the beginning of the contest. We had a backup plan too, but that went out the window when Maggie had to go to the ER. So, we figured everyone would survive with 7 hour boni.
I am still hoping to hear more from folks about whether they think the future of Trivia should include Zoom. It will be up to Ben & Death By Chocolate how to run it next time, of course, but I think they'd appreciate knowing whether people think Zoom was a good addition, or merely a pandemic-era stop-gap measure.