Thank you so much for an amazing contest, and congrats to Taha Noa Noa. Your team is certainly storied and we can't wait to see what exciting things you have in store for Williams' 100th! (Also, we have a trophy for you! It's no bowling trophy but the fabulous Jordan Jones made it and we should figure out how to get it to you.)
We had a blast writing and hosting. It definitely pushed us to a new level and that felt really cool. I know if I don't write something now then I probably won't ever so I have catalogued my (many, many, really too many and I'm so sorry for that) thoughts on the contest we have just partaken in so see them below. Note: If this is put up on the website in any form and you are looking at this 3 months or 3 years from now, our more practical sections on "Tech," "Advertising" and "Personnel" are at the end of this note, but hopefully there is useful information spread throughout this incoherent rambling (and it genuinely does get unintelligible at parts).
We are endlessly indebted to so many people in this contest for many different reasons. For our content though most of the credit goes to Tom Gardner (former Willy D JA). He sent us along a very helpful document early in the process and it made everything run very smoothly. Something that stuck out to us was the line "remember that trivia is basically a "party" so make the music fun and lively and recognizable, by and large." So we started our process by simply putting in songs we wanted to hear. That rounded out probably about half of our questions and gave us good starting places for brainstorming questions to go with them. I think this was a good move as it ensured that we weren't trying to make too many clever, but ultimately poor, song matches, and ensured it would be a fun contest to listen to. The remainder of them came from the opposite method (e.g. Question was written and then a song found to match it) and this also worked well.
In reading back through some old contests we saw a note that said something to the effect of "I define good trivia as the kind of question that I will share the next day." As a result we went back after having written all the questions to adjust the questions and answers accordingly. (e.g. the question "The largest Silent Disco ever took place for two hours in what London landmark?" became "What record-setting event occurred in Victoria Station for 2 whole hours in 2007?")
As we sat through the contest in real time we definitely saw some dud questions that we didn't catch first time, as well as some tracks that felt like dirges, but in the end we had a lively time, and Lord knows our On-Air hosts had a blast and a half.
First a note on Boni: there is nothing I personally find more upsetting about Williams Trivia than a boni (even if it's only one) that caters only to one specific interest. In addition to being boring as hell, it also runs the risk of being exclusionary to different age groups, racial groups, or genders. Therefore we did our very best to mix things up as much as we could for all the boni.
The jumping off point of Coffee was an easy one. I'm a manager at the coffee bar (note our constant sponsorship) and nothing is more essential to a successful all nighter than adequate caffeine. The identifying drinks part was somewhat inspired by spring's "Liquor" bonus. There was some fear that there would be confusion between different regions using different names for drinks (we're looking at you Tunnel City and your "schultzy" crap) but in the end it was pretty universal. We think that flags provided a new take on an old concept and still strongly related to the bonus as knowledge (or suspicion) of what regions of the world produce coffee would allow you to narrow down the options.
The "Friends" section was convenient as Darla (our ringer teammate from Sage E last year) was chomping at the bit to write some, and it allowed a nice dip into pop culture.
When we had our brainstorming meeting after last spring's contest this was one of the concepts that excited us the most. The theme covers (lol) so many different topics beyond the predictable (such as book and album covers). Perhaps my personal favorite section of the whole contest was the manhole cover over the skyline. The flawless Jordan Jones executed the whole bonus very well.
As the boni explained, we love Williams and felt that we had been too long without a purely Williams section. But at the same time we wanted to avoid discouraging too much those non-Williams participants in our fine contest (a demographic that appears to be growing). We hope the second-place section and "The Mountains" allowed for some outside participation. In addition, hopefully the "Almost Famous Category" provided for some fun without needing a deep knowledge of Williams presidents.
We actually realized after finishing the bonus that there might not have been enough Williams specific trivia so we adjusted the category and added that last category "Talk About Trivial" to remind everyone exactly where this whole contest came from.
I am not personally a Pokemon kid, but I hope that the Middle Pokemon Trivia section provided a respite for the inner cartoonies out there. All around we hope that the middle bonus provided a good mid-contest combo boost to catch people who hadn't fallen under other hourly categories.
This boni ended up being different than what we expected, but we feel like it ended up serving a similar purpose to the Joss Whedonverse of last contest. Many people bowed to the power of the Internet and succeeded in doing well by their search engine of choice. It was a great bonus for the Jim Henson lover within us, but if you didn't fall into that camp then perhaps the bonus didn't provide enough opportunity for you. On the topic of Joss Whedon, my one rule was "I will participate in this contest if and only if there are no questions about Joss Whedon." and we got through the whole process without a single one until we finished this bonus. Joss Whedon burned us too many times between our first two questions, but alas there he was. Question Number 25 sticking out like a sore thumb. Joss goddamn unavoidable Whedon.
"Everything ladyfolklike" - Bee Sachsse; "Not fun to grade" - Jordan Jones. All in all this one turned out better than we had expected in some ways, and worse off in others. The geometry provided some non-traditional math, and people really seemed to enjoy the physicists. That said, the format of the table made it a pain in the ass to grade and really slowed down our wonderful boni graders. In addition, this combined with some sections of Scrotal Connectivity were broken apart from an earlier bonus that was basically 80 questions of solid Div 3 material. So we tried to dilute it, but in the end it still might have been too much academics for a trivia contest where it's "everything you never learned at Williams college" although these questions focused more on the trivial parts of academia.
The Oscar Bonus started out well intentioned but it's the one that I worked on that personally disappointed me the most. I think it was a great one for a film junkie, but otherwise you were kind of SOL for the first (and largest section.) As a result, many people just used the Internet for it and phoned in the boni (one which the set up made it very easy for which to do that.) That said, it definitely had its upsides. For one, it provided a nice break so it could easily be completed by the time the last action was released which allowed for some nice pillow fort building for the last action. Also, the Donald Trump/Lucille Bluth section was lots of fun as almost no one got 100% on that, even though the section wasn't quite original. The Oscar Bonus I think was intended to be expanded upon but it sort of fell by the wayside. The section about famous Oscars perhaps could be done more interestingly in the style of personal ads or classifieds, which is something we have seen done in past contests.
This one was actually a Super Boni at first that we trimmed down and adjusted to fit the Hour format better. This was one of the things we were passionate about when we first started planning and it ended up going pretty well. We originally had a section of Famous Last Words but then we realized that was in the Spring contest (we're Sophomores now, the memory isn't as good as it once was) but the Last Lines of books and movies felt good, and kind of a fun way to play off of Freaky Friday's (or Polar Vortex's) section of First Words of books. Maxwell Smart is always a safe bet and the "Close But No Cigar" section seemed to provide people with good opportunities while also providing plenty of entertaining guesses of what the group could be.
Star Wars seemed like a logical mega category to use for a Super. It's very topical and has so much hidden within it that could be pulled out and used. The whole section on identifying Star Wars species elicited some very frank responses from older players about what they really felt about the prequels (we don't even want to know what they think about the sequels). But we felt good about the fact that there seemed to be a reverse correlation: people who did better on the identifying species category generally did worse on the astrology signs, and vice versa. We hope that signifies some level of equality across the questions.
The song section was interesting. For one, we learned that people do not really read the instructions/descriptions at the beginning. Take heed Taha Noa Noa, although you're all seasoned vets so you can heed your own warnings. We got about 89.5 questions about where the link to the composer audio was even though it was in the description on the question sheet. Beyond that though there was generally very low scoring in that section, although some teams left us pleasantly surprised. It'll be really interesting to see what others thought about it.
This was a fun one to make and by far our most collaborative effort. For one, we got to dredge up the great/horrible rejected team names, and nothing cheers up the soul like a scrote pun. As was mentioned under the Hour 6 Bonus, parts of it were very academic, but in general it steered towards the trivial. A presidents' bonus had recently been done, but we hope that our different take (and different name) would help to set us apart. Otherwise it was just a great opportunity to get some of the minds on our team to channel their very personalized question style all into one great big Honey Bunch of Scrote (read: set of questions).
I personally am still not sure how I feel about the Ultra. I love the topic for sure and I stand by the images that we chose to lead to the topic, but it was perhaps not too hard? Many people got it very early on. In addition, our official choice was "Dr. Seuss Books" and it took us until about Hour 6 to decide that Dr. Seuss would be sufficient so we had to go back and retroactively credit people for the bonus for people who said "Dr. Seuss" or "Theodore Geisel". Apologies if that caused you any sort of emotional stress. In the end, it's possible we didn't spend enough time brainstorming the Ultra as a class, but at the same time I liked it.
We got some really cool action trivia that we were really excited about and submissions were great too. One thing I would advise against is the sheer amount of videos we had. We had 7 actions and I believe that 5 were videos. This is all good and well and a lot of the videos were hilarious, but some of them were 3:30 minutes long and we had to watch 20 of them or something (I definitely think we had more actions submitted then are usually done.) We should have done more short things such as the Map trivia from last Spring or the Limerick from the Winter contest rather than open-ended things. It just would have made things more smooth for grading etc.
This was a very frustrating experience for us but it (maybe) didn't need to be. People kept asking us where they were meant to upload their team picture and now my inbox is full of them. We understand the confusion and bewilderment (having done and said exactly the same things a year ago), and know it still makes sense to pester Chat room hosts about that kind of stuff. That said it's an undue stress, but we understand the desire for archiving purposes (expose your face on the face of the internet). I think it might make sense to abolish it or to at least include a place with the prompt that allows you to paste a link.
I don't have much to say here except that 4 core members of our team were abroad for Winter Study and so we were very worried about staffing the contest. That said we got a huge showing from the entry and a couple of people who never played with us (hayooo Fatima and Christine). The key was to ask literally everyone you know. Ask people who you don't think would ever in a million years be interested because chances are they might want to test it out. We had probably seven moderators, each of which controlled between 4-6 chat rooms the whole night while our 2 boni graders buckled down (assisted by myself coming over from "tech") and the 1 on-air host who shuffled around. So that adds up to eleven or twelve people. That was a good number. It would have been nice to have 2-3 more people but we had a big contest with 25 teams playing until the bitter end and it's definitely manageable to do that with only a dozen or so people as long as everyone familiarizes themselves with the program first.
We are forever indebted now and will forever be indebted (suppose that goes hand-in-hand?) to Louis Moga and Mark Conger on the tech side of things. Those of you who have not run a contest or not run it recently probably don't realize the sheer amount of effort that has been put into those systems and they run pretty damn smoothly. However when they don't run smoothly, these two guys swooped into the rescue including for a couple spots on trivia night.
Our stream was pretty spotless. We had a couple of people with streaming problems but those seemed to be personal problems and resolved themselves quickly. We owe a lot of that to our good friend Alexander at Primcast. We had many a late night customer service chat and he got me to buy 485 GB of data which we only ended up using 32.85 GB (93%) so hopefully we can get that to roll over to be used for the Spring Contest. My one regret goes to the player out there without a computer who tried to listen on his iPad, which refused to play the player. I think future host teams can probably look into ensuring the streaming works for other devices.
We got a large turnout and we credit that in part to our advertising moves. We tried to reinstitute a trivia awareness week (Jordan even made a cool Paresky poster) but in the end it was just a bunch of kiddos tabling and going around to entries. That said we still reached a lot of people. As we kept telling people "you're not gonna remember getting blackout in Winter Study, but you will remember staying up all night with friends and answering trivia questions". While we couldn't partner up with Williams After Dark, we did partner with and receive funding from the Office of Student Life and from College Council, which helped us to get the word out. We had a lot of other ideas; we just didn't get around to them.
Anywho, that's all for now. One more hearty congratulations to Taha Noa Noa. Bring the Tonga back to Williams Trivia, And a just as hearty thank you to everyone on my team and beyond who helped us pull this together. See you all in May (or again soon when I think of something and follow up with it). That was a lot. Thanks for reading and we look forward to hearing your opinions!
I'll say more about this contest down the road a bit, particularly when Scrote make the on airs available, but wow! What a smoothly run contest and so much fun! Are we in some kind of emerging Golden Age of Trivia? So many good contests of late, such a continued upgraded technical game going back 4 or 5 contests, and now we had 41 teams with more than 20 points (by my incomplete records, that is a NEW RECORD, the average is more like 22.) Plenty of on-campus teams...I haven't counted, but sure seems like on campus activity is quite high. Somebody should put their marketing skills on some resume.
The DJ's were great, DJDaffy was our chat room partner deluxe, you guys seemed to be on top of the glitches and minimized them (at least form our perspective). And the music...ah! Some truly great stuff! A party indeed.
Thanks for the nod, but after I sent you the generic "how to put on a trivia contest" two-pager it was all you. Plus, you had me when you pulled off 10 questions in the first hour (even with reading the rules, a welcome but often overlooked must) and bettered that clip as the night went on. And you sealed the deal with "Five O'Clock World"!!!!
Kudos to the gang from Willy D!!!!!
And Des and the Tonga 100....thanks for stepping up. You deserve to run #100 and we look forward to May!!!!
How successful was Honey Bunches of Scrote's contest? TWENTY-FIVE TEAMS handed in the 8th Hour Bonus.
Sixteen on-campus underground teams scored over 100 points. SIXTEEN. As did fifteen other off-campus teams.
The 30th-place team's score would have been a 23rd-place finish last year, in 14th place three years ago, and in 6th place six years ago.
With the score they had, the team in 6th place (Polar Vortex Episode VII) would have won 20 of the last 25 contests, and caused three overtime games.
This is a good time for Williams Trivia.
Deconstruction Junction, what's your function?
Seventeen different teams got (or shared) the highest score on some element of the Honey Scrote contest.
Nine of them got the top score on one or more Hour/Super Bonuses:
Ten different teams got the top score on one or more Action Trivia:
Three different teams got the top score on the Ultra Bonus: ULTRAVIOLET CATASTROPHE, Jack is da Bomb and Holy Cow.
The one-man machine Jack is da Bomb got the most on-air points (197), followed by Taha Noa Noa (193). Sixteen teams scored 160+, which means 80% or more of the available points. Another thirteen teams after those sixteen were in double digits.
Ironically, the top squad not to get a top score on a particular element of the contest was the team And In First Place. (But they had a few second place scores, and did well enough, steadily enough, to end up in 10th place.)
Also, there was a 53-way tie for the best score in the "Paparazzi" category, including nine 1-point teams. A real dogfight there.
The score breakdown illustrates how the top ten contest scores ended up where they did:
| Place | On-Air | Boni | Action | Ultra | Team |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 193 | 138 | 37 | 13 | TAHA |
| 2 | 182 | 118 | 31 | 8 | TRAPPED |
| 3 | 184 | 114 | 30 | 0 | CANNIBALS |
| 4 | 181 | 117 | 6 | 21 | ULTRAVIOLET |
| 5 | 186 | 86 | 27 | 21 | HOLY COW |
| 6 | 167 | 112 | 32 | 8 | VORTEX |
| 7 | 165 | 107 | 26 | 8 | AREA 52 |
| 8 | 197 | 87 | 0 | 21 | JACK DA BOMB |
| 9 | 168 | 101 | 21 | 8 | INVASIVE YEASTS |
| 10 | 168 | 117 | 6 | 3 | FIRST PLACE |
Keep in mind that Cannibals and ULTRAVIOLET were just 3 points apart, Holy Cow and Vortex had just 1 point of separation, and Area and Jack were also a single point apart. Different paths lead to the same destination.
The highest score ever in William Trivia history (382 points) was registered in this contest, and so was the 10th-highest, the 11th-highest, and ties for the 12th-, 17th-, and 19th-highest. There's never been an eighth-place team with 300 points before.
Clumping happens. Of the top twenty scores ever, twelve of them come from just three contests: this one, the December 1986 overtime contest that gave us "Tonga," and the December 1996 contest that also went to overtime but whose tiebreaker questions didn't have as lasting a legacy.
In all three instances, the high scores were a function of multiple things. First, a well-run contest that didn't freeze up or drag. More material means more points. Second, lots of big teams. But I'm not sure there was ever a contest with the sheer breadth of solid, serious, amply-staffed teams as this one. And that also gets back to a well-run contest, since the turnout was a direct result of on-campus recruitment. Third, simple opportunity. The 1986 and 1996 teams didn't have 30-point bonuses or a 25-point Ultra to shoot for. Back in the day, a perfect score on bonuses, Actions and the Ultra would have netted about 140 points. Now, it's around 250.
In our case (Taha Noa Noa), there was another factor. I've been playing as half of a two-person team with Dom Grillo since 2007. Despite the fact that we accidentally won the Spring 2008 contest, causing all sorts of problems and touchy feelings, Dom continues to start off the night by saying "So we're going to WIN, right?" Wrong!
However, 3 or 4 years ago, I started telling Dom that we could play to win the 99th contest, so as to run the 100th. We'd both been part of the teams that ran the 50th and 75th games, and so this notion appealed to our tiny odometer minds. When this premise was mentioned to 2 or 3 of our longtime teammates, it got a positive response. And there it sat for the next couple of years.
Then-- you can't quite say "suddenly"-- the calendar caught up to our half-baked plan. About two weeks before the Honey Scrote contest, we started sending out feelers to our old comrades from our days in Currier, Perry, Geo, Bronfman and elsewhere. Before too long, we had enough of a roster to turn impulse into reality.
And what a treat it turned out to be. Two of our buddies came here to play in the room with Dom and myself. And we had an awesome chat room mob scene (Michigan representin', in full effect! Colorado in the hizzouse! Belchertown, bitches! V to the I to the rginia! California west coast, and you know it's the best coast!). It was massive heaps of fun.
I'd never even had the experience of seeing other people's long-distance answers emerge onto a bonus' answer key, while we were trying to add our own. I was childishly entertained by it. There was even a skirmish at one point, as middle Pokemon answers kept getting changed, and then changed back. Dom finally had to type "we have a 15-year-old here, holding a Pokedex book" to assert our claim.
Like Pokemon, Trivia also evolves. And the changes giveth and taketh away. We get dynamic new imagery and video and access to songs, but you can Google the shit out of everything. You can play with ease from home, but you lose the necessity of the journey and the ritual. In the mid-1980s, there was great excitement when somebody phoned the WCFM line from Washington or Oregon so that the DJ could read them a question and they could answer it to register 1 point. Now people play Williams Trivia from other continents. I like seeing the different stuff emerge.
Finally, it was a delight to play a contest with so much creativity and obvious forethought. A simple thing like unified cover page design for the bonuses shows how much planning went into this. You may think you were wasting your time-- well, you were-- but these little things are noticed!
And by the way, whoever came up with the "Conga"/Tonga song match is a moronic genius! I hail you.
I suspect we'll be playing more contests hosted by this team, and I'll be happy to do so. Congratulations to Scrote, we had a ball.
Congrats to the Scrotes on what was, as has already been mentioned, a phenomenally well-attended contest. Just to underline this--we weren't playing pedal-to-the-metal, and we were down to only one or two people for the last bit of the contest, but frequently we've had to worry that we might still end up winning by accident in that situation: it's usually still good for fifth place or so. That we were barely in the top ten, and were mostly topped by undergrad teams, is a really good sign--going off Des's post, our score of 295 would have been good enough to win most recent contests. (We got the new folks signed up to the list, I hope?)
And the content was, for the most part, very solid. Some thoughts, for consideration on future occasions when you run and to revive the post-contest-discussion tradition the way on-campus participation has been--
As Tom noted, the music was very pleasant to listen to throughout the contest: lots of gettable stuff, good mix of genres, solidly upbeat etc. I could quibble about a few things, but most of these could be met with counter-quibbles. For instance, there seemed to be a lot of repeated musicians (e.g., Blue Oyster Cult, Sam Cooke) but if you'd going to play four songs by one group, it might as well be the Beatles (as opposed to, say, Lemon Demon), and I won't complain about two Billy Joel songs when one of them is "Zanzibar." Similarly, the first couple songs in the Horrible Song Quartet ("Peaches" and "She Blinded Me With Science") weren't that horrible, and the Shatner "Lucy" is a bit of a Horrible-Song staple, but hitting Rebecca Black on the fourth (which was just long ago enough that I'd forgotten about it) really gave me all sorts of joy. I will say that I'm not sure there were lots of creative matches--"Conga"-Tonga was fine as Des said (as was, similarly, "MMMBop"-doo-wop), and "Crocodile Rock and "It Takes Two" were good (as was "Let It Go," thought I think that's been played in about four contests running now), but a lot of it was, like the "Hercules" one for Sappho: I mean, if you're dealing with the most famous lesbian poet, surely there are plenty of bad jokes you can go with for a match? But generally, the music was quite good.
There were a number of on-airs that really got the right mix of meaningful-thing/interesting-answer: I liked the ones on Grauman's Chinese, the Washington Natinals, and the highest-elevation airports--plus, my sister-in-law was psyched that being obsessed with One Direction informed her about the accessory navicular. But a bunch of them seemed not to be obviously interesting (e.g., "St. Erkenwald" being modeled on Gregory), not important (did anyone actually know the name of the guy who played Rufio in Hook?), obvious (rickrolling) or trivia chestnuts (e.g., the Bob Hope obituary). In some cases, the idea was interesting, but the interesting thing was not the answer (e.g., the question should've been something like "Why did Eddie Murphy refuse to appear on SNL for twenty years?" not, effectively, "Who hosted Hollywood Minute on SNL?") This is the most difficult thing to get right in a Trivia contest, and it improves with experience. But all that aside, the questions were solid for a first-time run.
(By the way--"Paradise Lost" was published in the 1660s, so 17th century, not 18th.)
Over the past two contests, the "several unrelated sections loosely connected by a common word or phrase" format has taken some prominence. I realize that this is attractive because it means people might not think "Oh, I don't know anything about Topic X, so I'll sit this bonus out." Personally, I like a stronger theme uniting all of the sections. Curious what the rest of you folks think.
For instance, I totally would've liked a full Super on Star Wars, and I think you definitely could've gotten away with that just after Force Awakens came out. (Write some question on the non-Star-Wars careers of the actors etc. if you're worried you've gotten too narrow.) The most fun parts of that bonus were definitely the ones that were most-Star-Wars-related, namely the species-ID and the ads; the star quotes and the various wars seemed a little dry. I do love a good film-music audio bonus, and there was a lot to like in yours, though I thought you went a little overboard on similar-sounding Marvel franchises: I didn't, for instance, feel as bad about not recognizing that that particular dramatic string riff was Avengers, the way I did for failing to place Up. (By the way, several of your composers are wrong on the answer key--Gone With the Wind is definitely Max Steiner, Exorcist is definitely Mike Oldfield, and Lord of the Rings is definitely Howard Shore.) But, seriously, you could've done an all-Star-Wars audio of 15 or so clips with leitmotifs (e.g., Yoda's theme, the Throne Room Music--or alternately, various novelty things like Billy Murray singing the main theme), and I think enough of us nerds were playing to really enjoy it.
I didn't feel strongly, though, about the mish-mash of subjects in Scrotal Connectivity: personally, I'm fine with placing poetry and equations, but nothing felt that memorable. Also--how do you not pick Fala as FDR's presidential pet?
Similarly, on the hours, I like the Jim Henson best--the Muppet Show hosts were harder than they could've been, but we really liked getting all the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth species, and the payoff from finding "I'm Gonna Always Love You" on my iTunes and finding out the lyric is "performing neurosurgery on your brain" was pretty solid. Hour 6 was intense, but not insane--you could spend some time thinking through the matches if you had a rough idea of the people/concepts in question. Other than that, the questions were often fine, but the bonii didn't feel like they had much identity. I liked Hour 2, since the book/album covers took up most of it and the sewer covers were at least unusual. Hour 4 keep us entertained with the Pokemon evolution and the LotR--though the latter was a bit easy (which is why Laurie gave excessively detailed answers to each one, to keep things interesting). Other than that--I'm not a coffee person, so I'll let someone else speak to Hour 1. You're right that we were overdue for a Williams bonus, but there were a ton of questions, and it might've been best to limit Hour 3 to the Williams stuff, in my view. Hours 7 and 8 were a little scattershot, though the last lines bit made 8 a little stronger.
By the way--I've observed that there's been a decline in proper audio bonuses over the past few years. Any reason for that?
Rob, if you were worried the Ultra was too easy--don't. It's hard to calibrate the Ultra so it gets a steady trickle of right answers over the contest, and it looks like you got something like that, so it worked fine. Without having seen other teams getting it early, I would've even ventured it tended hard--were there seriously teams that saw yeast and Gulliver's Travels and thought, "Oh, that's the Butter Battle Book?" Green Eggs and Ham was hard enough for us (Laurie, again) to get on clue 6. When Fox in Socks is your penultimate clue, that seems tough. But again, we did get it before the end, so it seemed to work fine.
Because we were undermanned, I didn't get to look at a lot of the Actions, so I won't comment there.
Anyway--all in all, I had a bunch of fun, and I'm excited you got so many people to play. Thanks to all the folks who helped put it together. And now, we await the 100th...