In May 2013, for the first time in history, Williams Trivia originated from outside the United States, an occurrence that was probably inconceivable when the contest began in 1966. Host team Noumenal Yodelling was made up of Williams Students studying at Exeter College in Oxford, and their native Oxford friends.
Also precedent setting: the contest began at 8pm Eastern Daylight time, or 2AM Greenwich Mean Time. So it was earlier than usual for the American players, but later than usual for the hosts.
There were a number of technical snafus. The Yodellers had a sound system set up to play music over their stream, and, as is the way, it ceased to function just as the contest began. The DJ's microphone kept working, so for the first part of the contest they apparently held a speaker up to the microphone to play music. It worked, except when there was feedback. Things got sorted out later.
The bigger problem was the lack of manpower. The Yodellers had only 2.5 IM people answering submissions from 25 or so teams. Hints were slow or nonexistent, and tempers sometimes a little raw.
A request was made over the stream for volunteers to help with receiving IMs, the first time in your archivist's memory that that's ever happened during a contest. And an announcement was made early on that boni would not be graded immediately; rather, the hosts would try to get final scores to us by Monday.
Super #2 was intially declared to be a scavenger hunt, taken from an event at the University of Chicago. Some teams worked extensively on it, but it was replaced by an audio bonus after an hour or so, with promises to grade both if they were submitted. No scores for the scavenger hunt have emerged, however.
At the end of the night, on-air scores were announced, and everyone went to bed. The Yodellers did work over the weekend, and made the announcement on Monday that the winners were Requiem for the Blue Civic, a team from Ann Arbor, Michigan who have played in 31 previous contests but never before won. Unfortunately, final scores were never tallied by the hosts, and some teams who submitted boni never saw their scores reported.
Des Devlin went to work to tally uncounted points, by surveying teams about how they did and grading ungraded boni. The results reported on the archive are due mainly to his heroic efforts.
The Yodellers provided answer keys for most of their boni, but the others were created by your archivist with the help of people on the Trivia mailing list. Paul McGreal provided most of the Food Bonus answers. Jared Levine contributed the bulk of the Musical Instruments Super answers. Others filled in gaps. Google provided answers to MAD-LIBS and the baseball portion of the Geography bonus.
The on-air question list on the archive was also a collaborative effort. The Yodellers sent a list of questions with no songs to your archivist. Jack Tagye and Des kept logs of songs and answers (but not questions), and these were matched up via the answers. Others confirmed which questions had been unused. There were no realms or subrealms in this contest.
A number of questions could be found in a particular document, available on the web: a 2009 Quiz Bowl tournament at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Some teams playing discovered the document during the contest.
Definitely a highlight for many of us (the two of us on my team and several of the people in the online active chat room during the contest) was "Hot Mike", given that name not because any of us have a clue as to just how "hot" he may or may not be, but because this Brit on-air announcer was easily heard singing along with the music, since his microphone (mic) was kept on (hot). His manner at the mic was absolutely hysterical, and many of us would gladly tune in to a radio show of his were he to host one.
A high point for me was hearing an Englishman pronounce “Bananarama”.
I was very entertained by the good-natured "well that's the way it is" attitude of our hosts, and they were generally a delight to IM with. Just for the record, I did make all sorts of offers to help, dutifully forwarding my "how to run a contest" essay, checking in occasionally with them throughout the spring. Every indication was that they were on track. I told them about past streaming issues and the need to test the streaming at the same location at which they would run the site, which they said they did, and the need to have at least 8 people, which they expected to have. I offered to put them in otuch with past streamer teams The only advice they really sought was for the website, and I dutifully put them in touch with Steve Homer's team. Many thanks to Drew Wagers for his help on that.
But they only had 5 people and were overwhelmed, and then the streaming was terrible, initially. That's a one-two punch.
The contest itself -- loved the music! Plenty for this 55-year old to enjoy: Beatles, Dylan, Simon & Garfunkle, CSNY, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Talking Heads, Diana Ross, Jackson 5, Allman's, Blondie...and on and on.
A very highbrow contest, to be sure, lots of classical music and English lit. One of the catch-phrases about the "old days'" contests (and I think my brother might have coined this) is that the contest quizzed you on "everything you never learned at Williams College." No longer true!
I liked several of the early on-airs including Tilda Swindon, Gilligan's Island and the Stock Exchange for Free Parking switch in Monopoly. After that came the steady barrage of not-quite-trivia questions with a heavy dose of "in what movie," "in what book" and "what character" types of questions that are not quite as interesting as something more intrinsic to the book, movie or character that might detonate those megatons of nostalgia.
The on air, open mic banter was indeed hysterical at times, especially when the two guys came in with their bemused monotones and singalongs.
I guess what I may remember most about this contest is how many "firsts" there were, virtually none of which I would guess are destined to be repeated. In general, quite a flouting of trivia traditions: it was the "first contest" to be done overseas; have an 8 PM EST start time; NOT have the first answer be the running team's name; not have realms or subrealms; no announcing of final scores; and no Tonga question! Am I missing anything else?
But I had fun, enjoyed the bonhomie of our community, and oh...of course: they did play "Five O'Clock World" by the Vogues (of course) when the contest ended, at my request. Since there was no actual 5 AM (at least in EST) for this contest, it was the best I could do. Mark...perhaps in January....?