Here are some notes on the contest
For the second semester in a row, the contest was hosted by an undergraduate team and originated from Williamstown. We had had a run of three contests with only small technical difficulties, but unfortunately that came to an end in May 2015. Freaky and the Fridays' plan for a test contest the week before fell through, and their confident assertion that everything would come together at the last minute proved to be unrealistic. Trivia is simply much more technically challenging to run than it used to be. There are a lot of things that can go wrong.
The streaming was the weakest link this time, and it worked fitfully for the first three hours of the contest. There was a great deal of dead air, while the Fridays tried to fix the stream. It was finally up from about 1:00 AM onward, and the last part of the contest went relatively smoothly. But because of all the down time, this contest set a record low for number of on-air questions asked.
Well, we made it! I guess we thought the days of glitch-free contests were behind us after the last three contests, but streaming reared it's ugly head ahead. It was thus a bit of a Freaky Friday indeed, although by the time we hit Saturday most of the damage was left behind. Kudos to Freaky for their perseverance and good humor in the face of a potential meltdown, and cobbling together a hilarious YouTube stream and seemingly trying every trick in the book to rouse the stream. As Des reminded us, we once had a contest where the stream never worked at all, and thus a pantomime of a contest with questions only, if I recall. As frustrating as streaming issues are for the players, it is even more so, perhaps, for the running team, that has worked so hard to put together the content. I know, the last contest we ran had streaming issues, too.
We had 19 teams score over 100 points nonetheless, which is excellent for a May contest, so Freaky clearly held the attention of a sizable crowd. A rough count of the 32 teams that scored in double figures reveals, I believe, something like 8 on-campus teams (wow!), 5 young alum teams (that is, 21st century), 14 alums of the 20th century variety (including 3 of us from the '70's, BOMO, Geezers and Bayonettes!), 4 non-Williams teams and 1 I could not quite figure out, with the apt name, [citation needed].
Two of those on-campus teams battled it out for the victory, which is awesome, and both I believe are freshman teams! Honey Bunches of Scrote are a Williams D entry, which is dear to my heart, I was a JA there in the 17th century or so. They overcame Trapped on the Fourth Floor, camped out in Pareskey, in the blackout period. Perhaps they might want to consider a return to WCFM in January -- just have on campus IT adjust the bandwidth for the volume and it should be good to go! Ha ha!
Briefly on the contest, I certainly enjoyed "Red Rubber Ball" by the Cyrkle in the early going, and the better-late-than-never "Five O'Clock World" by the Vogues at 6 AM (instead of, of course, 5 AM). I had a minor hissy-fit about that, for which I deeply apologize! Our team was 4 -- me and daughter Kristy hung out all night, Andrew was with us early, and Danny came a bit late and stayed on through, his first contest. Many thanks to our Freaky hosts, Chelsea and Elliot (the latter masquerading as "Diana"), as well as Garrett and the others who DJ'd and toted up scores and the like.
I enjoyed bantering with many of you via email through the night, including Mark Conger (Fist), David Letzler (Wookiee), Mitch Katz (Geezers), Jack (Jack -- thanks for not winning, my friend!), as well as members of both freshmen teams at the top!!!!
See you all in January!
A brief preface- we were the group that won the 96th Semi-Annual Williams Trivia Contest last May and ran the contest this past winter study. We had asked ourselves before this contest if we wanted to win, and the group consensus was mostly no, because of the workload involved and we weren't sure we could come up with new quality questions so soon after using our best material.
The slight delay to the start of the contest was good for us, since everyone else on our team was running over from the Wind Ensemble concert. We were having the error where the stream would play for 3 seconds and then die out. That said, the YouTube stream worked fine and by the time the contest moved to the streaming software the sound errors were mostly fixed.
Unfortunately, we didn't have a moderator for the first hour or two of the contest to record/confirm our answers, but it did give us a cushion so we didn't have to worry about accidentally winning. (Although winning probably would have been out of the question anyway with some outstanding performances by the freshmen + veteran teams near the top of the leaderboard all night!!!)
The delays in the early part of the contest gave us time to work on the boni, but we struggled through the first few hourly boni (more on that in Part 2). We didn't make much progress on the super boni either because our biology major (Adin) and comp sci major (Austin) were MIA. We didn't know what was taking them so long, but then we heard them on stream and realized they were helping Freaky & the Fridays with tech stuff for the first couple hours. (Maybe everyone else knew they were helping and I was just out of the loop)
We only had 5-6 people at a time throughout the night, which limited how effective we could be in multitasking. That said, Phoebe guessed Sill - Ewoks for the third Ultra clue, getting us quite a few points, and Phoebe and Daniel also put together an incredible duet of "You're the One that I Want" for Action Bonus 2.
We had fun with the later boni, where we tried to remember high school literature classes and drew a terrifying picture of a cow island that can never be unseen. We also had a couple people working on the on-air questions and enjoying the music (especially Shut up and Dance...).
But our productivity immediately ceased when we saw the attached clip for Action Boni 6. We looked at each other and said, "Do you want to just forget about the other things and make an awesome music video?" So that's what we did for the last hour and a half of the contest. The final product was definitely worth it, as it consists of four great dancers (and me) covering about 90 seconds of the three-minute compilation video.
It seems like it was a tight race at the end, but we were too busy dancing to check the scores before the false sense of suspense was turned on. I had a short burst of fear during the reading of the final results because it took longer than expected to hear our names (Did we answer too many boni? Did other teams go to bed when we weren't paying attention?) but we were excited to hear that we finished in the top 10. We're a little sad with getting 199 (one point away from breaking 200), but this is balanced by our confusion about how Austin's drawing of the Mona Lisa got 6 points for Action 7.
The breakfast seemed to be a success, largely because Freaky and the Fridays were much better hosts than we were. I still love the idea of a breakfast for the teams to debrief about the boni/questions, which seemed to be a significant part of earlier contests when the winner was announced in Baxter.
We had a great time with this contest, and look forward to seeing what the "Scrotes" from Willy D come up with next winter! We're especially interested in seeing what action boni they think of, given their phenomenal submissions last winter and high scores this spring for each action.
Although we liked the ideas for the first few hourly boni, we were woefully ignorant about liquor and struggled on the monarch questions. The Stefon questions were very well received, and I liked looking at all the ceilings. We liked the glasses from Hour Bonus 2 much more than the glasses from Hour Bonus 1. We were glad to see the Taylor Swift category, and could imagine some teams really liking that one, though it seems like the college-aged teams dominated the scoring here. I could have probably listed quite a few T-Swift songs but was scared off by having to put them on the right album (though it sounds there was leeway in grading there). In the later half, we spent the most time on the presidential, Mean Girls, instrument, and stadium trivia. Also, the literary openings all felt way too familiar, yet we couldn't quite remember where we heard them, which made them excellent trivia.
This contest, I felt like there weren't many boni that we spent a lot of time pondering. Instead, we largely looked through the questions and if we didn't know them, just moved on. I'm not sure if this was because of the boni themselves, our lack of urgency to get every point possible, our small numbers (so we couldn't designate people to spend time on the boni), or a combination of the above. I really liked the fact that each boni had a wide range of topics, since in the past it felt like some boni focused too much on a single topic (Cars/Arrested Development/Sports Logos). However, I was talking with Ben about the contest, and we couldn't remember the name or theme of most boni (besides Taylor Swift and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Even 24 hours later, they're all starting to blend together.
I'm torn about the way that Freaky and the Fridays structured the answer sheets. In past contests, all the questions were on an attached sheet and the Google Doc was mostly blank (I believe- correct me if I'm wrong). On the one hand, this year it was so much easier answering questions without having to jump between pages. However, the first hour bonus was really confusing since it took us a few minutes to find the rest of the questions. I suppose there's not really a clear answer, though maybe having both a pdf with questions and repeating questions in the google doc when possible would be the best compromise.
Well done on the ultra bonus!!! You picked an excellent theme, and had some great clues as well (Sill Ewoks was fantastic!). The only complaints seemed to be how many points were awarded for getting it on the first round. I suppose we're partially to blame for this, since we set up the Fibonacci scoring system (34,21,13,8,5,3,2,1) in the winter. It had been much lower in the past, but given the math/stat majors on our team it seemed right, plus we wanted to reward teams who predicted Sharks & Jets from Journal of Economic Theory and cookie cutters. I'm glad Jack is da Bomb was one of the people to get this contest's bonus early- hopefully that takes the sting away from being so close with ours (I still apologize for your distress)
These were really well thought out prompts for the action boni. There were a great mix of intensive productions (duet, dancing) and simple tasks any team could do (haiku). Daniel and Phoebe did a fantastic job with the duet, and we made a really terrifying cow-shaped island (I think we modified it to save the souls of our graders) for the fourth bonus. We didn't end up doing the cocktail- for the longest time I thought we had to make it and was sad we didn't have any ingredients. Apparently Freaky and the Fridays had more things planned for this one, although I'll let them share the backstory.
Then there was the Shut Up and Dance boni. I said a lot about it earlier, but I'll just add that we had a blast dancing through Bronfman and no dancers were harmed in the making of our video. I'm looking forward to seeing submissions from the other teams!
All things considered, I enjoyed the on-air questions. There were definitely some very clever questions thrown in there and some great song matches. The highlights that are coming to mind are the question about Rockefeller, the Boston University Bridge, the use of the song "Underground" for the question about Theseus, the sports song, and your usage of 4'33''. This list will grow dramatically once the questions are released, since there were a lot of great questions. In general, your song selection made for an enjoyable contest to listen to (ignoring Austin's disdain towards the slow songs around 4 am). Also, great job at fitting in the Tonga question and 5 o'clock World by the end of the contest- that's probably saved you a lot of grief from the nostalgic alumni teams.
It seemed like some of the questions were intended to be directly from classes at Williams, and while I loved the math-related ones I found the biology and economics questions to be a little dry. I realize we made an entire super bonus around classwork at Williams in our contest, but I can now see how it might be less fun unless they're questions in a subject you're familiar with. But maybe that's a good thing, because then any econ or bio majors get a spark of enjoyment the same way I did when answering about Russell's Paradox.
I'd be interested to hear about what some older teams thought about the songs, because I suspect most of the college teams really enjoyed them! I did fear that Head Shoulders Knees and Toes was the start of a horrible song quartet- I admit I was relieved to learn we didn't have to know the artist for that one. I also wanted to commend your use of an obscure Imagine Dragons song (Battle Cry), yet I was disappointed that you happened to chose my least favorite song of theirs.
Ah, technology. I'm sure Freaky and the Fridays (or Austin/Adin) could tell us more about what happened, but it was an unfortunate start to a well-populated contest. A huge shoutout to coming up with a YouTube stream so quickly- other than the poor audio for the songs, the YouTube stream worked pretty well. I still don't know why our stream was cutting out after 3 seconds for the first section of the contest, but it seemed like that was fixed once Freaky and the Fridays switched to the live stream. The core team running the contest was pretty small, which I imagine made it that much tougher to troubleshoot while coordinating the streams, listserv, chat rooms, and work on fixing the problem.
From our perspective, it seemed like Freaky and the Fridays had a large team of hosts and graders, which made things run much smoother than our contest. In our contest, we ran low on hosts from 1-2 am since hosts had to leave but teams were waiting until the break to sign off. Also, it took us almost 2 hours to finish grading, while this contest only needed about 40 extra minutes for grading. Great job with hosting- we appeared to be the only team without a host for long periods of time (at the very least, I didn't see any other calls for a host in the help section). Our hosts were great, and we apologize at the end for going away for several questions only to name a song every now and then during the end of the contest.
It was great to play in my first contest where an on-campus team was running, and Freaky and the Fridays did a commendable job. They really found a rhythm in the second half of the contest, had many excellent questions, and clearly put a lot of work into pulling everything together. From our experience, things go a lot better with a lot of people on hand to write/organize/run the contest, so I'm hopeful that Willy D can get a large contingent together as they prepare for the 99th contest.
The same goes for competing- having more people definitely helps! It really helps when you can designate people for different boni and still have multiple people working on the on-airs. Also, every additional pair of ears adds to the chances that someone will remember who's singing the song that's being played.
Again, others can speak more about the technical difficulties, but it seems like the solution is to make sure that there's a successful test run completed sometime before the contest. The two contests in 2014 had hour-long tests if I remember correctly, so by Friday night all the bugs had been worked out. That's the scariest part of the contest for me- while the questions might be written and all the hosts and teams are ready, technology issues can throw everything else off.
Another suggestion I would have is to really try to limit the amount of dead air on the stream. Even cutting to a back-up playlist when possible is so much better than leaving the stream blank in my opinion. It gives us something to listen to while waiting for the contest to resume and it's also easier to hear when the stream is restarting.
Lastly, if there's anyone from an on-campus team that wants an unopened 12-pack of Coca-Cola for finals, let me know! (Sorry to those off-campus, but it'd probably get too shaken up in the mail anyway).
I appreciate you guys taking the time to read this long-winded, parenthetical-filled, rambling postmortem! I hope my thoughts made some sense, and I'm really looking forward to hearing from Freaky and the Fridays and the other teams and reading their postmortems, which are hopefully more eloquent than mine.
It's been a blast, and I'm looking forward to January 15 (the likely day for next year's contest)! Thanks so much to Freaky and the Fridays for an excellent contest, and good luck to Honey Bunches of Scrote in their quest to organize the 99th Semi-Annual Williams Trivia Contest!!!!!
I just wanted to add a few further thoughts to what John wrote earlier about the contest, particularly for the next team. We're having three straight first-time runners, so I want to make sure that they get as much feedback as possible to be both encouraged by the good stuff and to sort out what didn't work and what to learn from it.
First, for Honey Bunches of Scrote in particular--I want to reiterate John's comments on the tech. I've run Trivia a bunch of times, and the tech always has more problems than you anticipate. Keep this in mind--be on top of everything as much as you can be.
That said--whatever the last few contests have done for advertising, keep doing that. Turnout has been impressive, and this is the first time in ages that three on-campus teams have run.
An Important Reminder: Laurie mentioned that we should probably remind people of this page: http://wso.williams.edu/wiki/index.php/Williams_Trivia. Scrotes--take a look at it for question-writing advice.
Some of the on-airs were very good, and some less so, so I want to make sure we reiterate what makes for an interesting on-air.
The good on-airs, I felt, were things like the Centralia, PA and chestnut orgy questions, because the answers are legitimately interesting and weird things that some people are aware of; the Breakfast Club and Game of Thrones questions, because they are notable tidbits from beloved pop culture; the micromorts and bat bombs question, because bat bombs and micromorts are inherently funny; and the Hamm/Bacon question, because while it may not be great trivia, its the kind of thing is hilarious at (and only at) 4:00 AM.
The less good on-airs included any one where the answer is a number or a member of a limited set (e.g., US States), because you can just guess until you're right; the conjugation question, because there were multiple possible answers and it's simply asking for fairly drab 101-level quiz answers; and the Prouille and Ascoli Piceno questions, because the subject matter simply isn't all that notable, so far as I can see.
Some on-airs should've have been rewritten to make the interesting trivia the answer: for instance, you should've asked "What precious island resource did Peru, Chile, and Spain fight a war over in the mid-19th century?" (A: bat guano). There were several others like these.
In short--the test of a good on-air is this: will the answer, upon revelation, produce the response of either a) "Awesome! I'm impressed I knew that," or b) "Cool! That's fascinating and/or hilarious"? If so, it's a good on-air; if not, it's not.
Let me single out some good matches: the Minnie Ripperton/Maya Rudolph, because there's a real-world tie from the song to the answer; Phillip Phillips for King Phillip's War, because there's a nice lexical tie from a moderately well-known song to the answer; the "4'33," independent of the question, because it's clever; and Gene Simmons singing "When You Wish," because it's a terrible cover. (A Horrible Song Quartet would've been nice.)
There were a lot of matches, though, that seemed fairly weak. You don't just want the song title to say the answer, unless it's an especially strong or funny fit: for instance, asking that Ted Kennedy read "Ulysses," and having the song be "Ulysses," isn't ideal. (If you need that question, do something like "Fantastic Voyage.") There were also a lot of really tenuous matches, like "Chandelier" for the torpedo booze. (I guess that when you drink that kind of alcohol, you want to swing from a chandelier?) And I'll say that, while this wasn't quite the four-songs-by-Lemon-Demon situation of some years ago, there probably didn't need to be so much Sondheim. If you want a dozen Sondheim things, make a Sondheim bonus. People would've liked that.
Writing a good ultra is very difficult--I know I've done a bunch of suboptimal ones. I think this was a so-so one. On the one hand, people like Monty Python, and some of the links were clever. But, especially if you've giving out so many points, you need to make sure you start with the hardest clues and move to the easy ones. (For that matter--multiple clues per would be nice.) We were late on the first clue because grandmas on motorcycles just seemed so directly to be a moderately famous Python sketch. The seventh clue, meanwhile, does not address any of the most famous Python sketches (following up the sixth, which is easily the most famous). So, it was a solid idea, but more clues and a better scaffolding would've helped.
As Laurie noted to me, few of the bonuses had a really strong overall theme or concept. Most tended to be a broad idea that included miscellanous questions from all over. Some of these had interesting questions, so it wasn't a problem--I felt like Hour 1's booze trivia (I particularly liked digging up Bloom's burgundy from my Ulysses, and I'm sure people were happy about the Romulan ale) was good, and I liked remembering all the Stefon quotes for Hour 2. I'm sure other folks were really excited about Taylor Swift for Hour 4, and I enjoyed sorting out the sports calls and figuring out both the opening lines and the trial transcripts on Super 2 (though this bonus seemed to have had some really hard sections). Everyone, for that matter, probably enjoyed remembering what no one can do like Gaston. But the tree diagrams seemed insanely hard, I'm not sure there was much on Hour 3 to get excited about, and I probably would've preferred a bonus on the actual TMNT than questions on mutants and turtles, or a whole bonus finding creative way to ask about movie villains than the loose collection of stuff you had on "bad guys."
In any case--I stayed up all night, which means I was having plenty of fun, so that's good. Thanks to Freaky, and best luck to the Scrotes--ask for help as you need it!
Just a quick note here from Honey Bunches of Scrote because things have been quiet on our front. We had a great time playing this year and were thoroughly shocked we won (we almost all were asleep by the time results were announced, and no offense to anyone involved but we weren't even listening - in part because the grading occurred so quickly). That said, we were all excited and riled up at the prospect of winning as the night came to a close (a stark difference from the Winter contest where we were pleased with our six-place finish because of the daunting task that hosting appears to present.) Some highlights from this contest were the action boni, some quality on-airs with songs, but most importantly it was cool to see the continuation of a bit of a rivalry with Trapped on the Fourth Floor who we had tied with in the winter contest (back when we were Murder She Scrote) and were in very intense competition with for this one. Since we're both two on-campus, freshman teams it gives us all hope for the future of Williams Trivia's presence on Williams Campus.
We haven't been particularly responsive on this forum for the same reason that it's been such an issue posting up Freaky and The Friday's questions as finals and the end of the year have made everything crazy. Don't think that means we aren't super excited. We have begun brainstorming and reviewing old material at wso.williams.edu/orgs/trivia and have been contacted by various alums of hosting gigs past with suggestions, comments, and concerns.
I can't speak for the entire team as we haven't had a chance to meet in earnest about this contest, but from individuals conversations I've had it sounds like we look forward to various exciting prospects for the 99th semi-annual contest including: trying to up the amount of student involvement in the contest on campus; trying to bring back department teams; bringing back some vintage action boni; hosting a victory breakfast with food from Goodrich Coffee Bar; and most importantly, trying to avoid questions about Joss Whedon like the plague. We look forward to continuing to hear peoples' input on this chain, but I just wanted to write this to let you all know that your comments are not falling on deaf ears.
Thank you again to Polar Vortex for coming through entries and convincing us to participate in the winter, thank you to Freaky and the Fridays for an excellent and engaging contest, thank you to all of our close competitors, and thank you to all of you for your input. Keep it coming!
Another member of Honey Bunches of Scrote here! As my teammate Robbie has said we have been quite quiet so I thought I would share some of my thoughts as well. We had a great time playing this year, which deserves a much belated thanks to Polar Vortex for getting us hooked, and to reiterate what Robbie has said we were incredibly shocked to win. All evening we jokingly discussed the possibility, but never actually thought it could happen. As the morning drew near we were constantly watching the score as we battled it out with Trapped on the Fourth Floor and Jack is the Bomb. Once the game ended some of the team went for a wandering walk across campus to celebrate the fact that we made it though the contest somewhat unscathed, and upon returning we all collapsed into our beds missing the announcement completely. We were only alerted to our victory when one of our entry mates posted it in our entry group chat. We were and are incredibly excited about winning and having the opportunity to host.
Now for some thoughts on the game:
Unfortunately the majority of the scrotes and I cannot give much feedback on the on air question and songs as the initial streaming difficulties proved daunting to us so, as one should always handle their problems, we ignored it. Thankfully our MVP and remote trivia player Julia over came these issues and essentially answered ALL of the on air questions and identified songs by herself from a tiny corner of a hotel room in Boston. We are eternally grateful to her and maybe someday we will learn how she ever went about accomplishing it.
Given that we had given up on the on air trivia, for the most part we spent all our time on the hour and super boni. The game started off rough with our resident alcohol expert missing, but we powered though employing our JA's expertise. With the glassware we did encounter some difficulties with the matching the right glass to the right question number because of the number's location on the question sheet.Hour two has well received with the Kramer or Kanye questions being a stand out. The glasses were really quite challenging, but definitely fell into the category of something you know,but can't quite remember. We also had issues with the numbering. Hour three was great, it definitely used the widest range of team members, there was a question for everyone. Hour four with Taylor Swift was definitely a high point, filled with lots of singing and laughter.Hour five again had a great diversity of topic which we appreciated. In hour six we really appreciated the teenage mutant ninja turtles theme, although we don't know who on our team initially guessed it. Hour seven passed with Gaston and the presidential trivia being a stand out. For hour eight we had to wake up our sports expert who had gone to bed after waiting all night for something in his sphere. He definitely enjoyed the questions, but I think he enjoyed going back to bed more.
The first super boni was super challenging. The tree trivia was good, but labeling all those trees will haunt us for trivia contests to come. The second boni was better received. The last words and first lines were very challenging, but also very enjoyable.
The dreaded ultra boni struck fear into our hearts as it should, but after saying various combinations of ewoks and windowsills aloud for twenty minutes we got it.
Action trivia is by far our favorite part of the trivia contest. It provides a necessary break from trivia and always results in hilarity. Our favorite ones from this contest were the tweeting, for which we transported our hosts back to the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, the Broadway duet, you're the one that I want was stuck in hour heads the rest of the night, and the whole team enjoyed joining in for the shut up and dance montage.
Though not without its problems, overall it was an enjoyable game. Thanks so much Freaky and the Fridays, and we look forward to hosting this winter.