In January, 2015, the contest originated in Williamstown again for the first time since Second Place Stars in January 2012. Polar Vortex put on a solid and well-received contest.
Here are some postmortems from the Trivia mailing list:
Hearty congratulations to Polar Vortex for a terrific contest! I hope I get my act together to do a post-mortem this time (I've been remiss on the last several excellent contests), but in general it certainly a well-run and engaging contest! The effort put in really showed and I thoroughly enjoyed it (save one truly terrible Horrible Song Quartet, hah!)....more specifics to come.
Trivia appears to be on a roll, a renaissance, call it what you will. The technology breakthroughs have been amazing, with excellent streaming, chat boxes, google docs, I mean it is fantastic! Still a few updated scoring bugs to work out, but generally what a difference a decade makes! And the content is first-rate. We set a record last night.....39 teams over 20 points. The old record? 31. Something like 7 of the top 10 teams are undergrads. How great is that!!!! It was perhaps the most total points ever in a contest.
One thing we used to do after every contest is every team would write a brief email saying who they are and quick impressions of the contest, if not a full post-mortem. I think the running teams deserve that! All that work and if no one says anything...anyway, it would be great if we could do that here. For the record, this edition of BOMO (our 40th Williams contest since 1973, and there were 4 Amherst contests as well a ways back) was a 2 1/2 person operation, me in Bedford, NY and daughter Kristy in Pittsburgh, and her friend Andrew popping in for a few hours (and taking care of the memes in short order). We did manage to crack through the 5,000 career points barrier sometime around 12:30 AM EST!
Thanks again Polar Vortex! Well done!
Tom (Mot) from BOMO ('79)
I'll honor Tom's request with a brief post-mortem. Let me echo something right away because it's funny that Tom brought up technical advances: about an hour into the game I told my wife how smoothly this game is run now. I used to have multiple computers (one for AOL Instant Messager, one for the contest web site, one to work on boni) along with a charged cellphone to call in. Now everything is so fluid with embedded chatrooms and Google Sheets for submittals with automatic confirmations. My only complaint is that the audio feed ran great for an hour until my son came home and started streaming Spotify while updating Facebook. So I blame Obama.
I only played half-a-game but really enjoyed the Colors which was a nice warm-up. The audio bonus was very well done. Mascots was good standard-issue trivia; remembering Chester Cheetah and Toucan Sam. I think I did my first action bonus in - I can't remember - since it only required a limerick which I submitted via Google Docs.
Questions were mostly OK: I remember Bob Ross and the epileptic Pokemon. Others like the restaurant who knocked off 10% if you said "merci" were of the obscure News-of-the-Weird type. Song matches seemed geared for expediency. A song about a Russian Winnie the Pooh - how about "Back in the USSR"? Um, OK. This was moments away from "Hello Goodbye" also by the Beatles. The Bob Ross question had "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night which was popular among Williams students' grandparents. I may have suggested "Everybody Talks" by the Neon (Happy) Trees or even Rush "The (Happy) Trees." Believe it or not, I did a search on trees and one song was called "Trees" by - get this - Twenty One Pilots, which would have been the perfect tie-in to the Air Force.
But this is mostly quibbling. I had a great time which I measured by how many times I bothered my wife telling her about a great question or a bonus, until she went to bed to escape. Congratulation to Polar Vortex and to Freaky and the Fridays. I'll see you in May.
Thanks so much to Polar Vortex for an excellent contest. We of "The Dearly Departed Mr. Bett" had a very fun time playing. That's despite the fact that we overloaded the internet connection at my house early in the contest, and had to quickly relocate to Louis's house. That destroyed any chance we would win, which kind of took the pressure off, to be honest.
I really enjoyed the music. I know it could have been harder, but as a non-music guru I much prefer it when teams err on the side of fun-to-listen-to rather than difficult-and-unpleasant. So hats off the Polar Vortex for the music.
My criterion for a good trivia question is whether I'll want to repeat it to someone later. Of the on-airs, I liked:
Honorary globetrotters, Eeyore birthday party, Hell Michigan (just down the road from Ann Arbor), Calico cats, the banning of Where's Waldo, Batman Turkey, Arizona time zones, Air Buddy, Ann Landers' controversial column, Tycho Brahe's drunk elk, As Slow As Possible, Winter Banana, reversed Celcius scale, Animal Crackers, 364 gifts of Christmas, and the official bird of Renaldo Beach.
It's true that those skewed away from pop culture and toward news of the weird. So be it.
Among the boni I thought Codes was a very good idea, and not too long. And the salute to Robin Williams was very timely. Board games is a classic topic, and I liked how Polar Vortex used various games as excuses to ask about other things, especially the Shakespeare plots. Trivia is not for purists.
The 101 bonus revives an old debate about whether Trivia should include academics. In the old days, we used to say that Trivia was about "everything you never learned at Williams College", and having the contest on the night of the last day of classes was intended to offer a break from studying. I kind a like that perspective, but the Diagrams bonus from Blue Civic certainly crossed the line into academics at times, so I'll admit my complicity in the acedemization of Trivia.
The DJing was excellent. 88 questions is not so hot, but we enjoyed hearing Polar Vortex read the incorrect ultra guesses. That's an old tradition that could stand to be revived.
The decision to have such a harsh penalty for using the internet on boni was a surprise to us, but not an unwelcome one. (The rules for Hour Boni were max 15 for no internet, max 5 for internet, and double that for supers.) It appears that it had a large effect, because few teams did use the internet, in sharp contrast to other recent contests. And turnout was high, so kudos to Polar Vortex for having high expectations of us.
Congrats also to Freaky and the Fridays. Looking forward to an all Jodie Foster/Lindsay Lohan contest!
Yeah, I wanted to add, too, that this was a really fun contest. Most importantly, it's really impressive to a) do a first-time run and not have debilitating technical problems, and b) to get such a huge amount of teams. I hope that at the post-contest breakfast (another good reintroduction of an old idea!) you managed to consoldiate your pull on those teams--it would be good for them not just to be one-and-done, like many entries who play Trivia are. (Hopefully some got on the list, too?)
So, my own thoughts--
The Ultra, I thought, was quite good. It's hard to to an ultra that's neither impossible 'til the end nor immediately obvious. (I've run five times, and I've been in the latter category twice, and the former once.) This seemed to hit things well, so that was good.
There were no clunker bonuses all night, either. There have been contests where the wrong bonus at the midpoint can send folks to bed, but there weren't any that didn't amuse someone. Granted, Viral Videos has been done a bunch (but, then, who doesn't love "Fucking magnets, how do they work?), and Codes was pretty short and seemed to take off a fair amount from our Spies bonus, but the Trivia-plus-Figure-Things-Out bonuses (like Colors and Balls) were really fun for us: I'm pretty proud of figuring out most of the sports balls from regulation size and the color books. (The baseball section was quite hard, I'll say--though I oughtn't have second-guessed myself on Phil Niekro.) I though the Robin Williams bonus was a really good idea, too (I had forgotten he was in Fern Gully!), especially, again, in requiring some thinking rather than know-it-or-not in the quote matching and Kevin Baconing. Musicals and Mascots have also been done a bunch, but these seemed to be more challenging than most past ones, so that kept us working. I also assume that most teams had that one person who was really excited about the Wheedon bonus--has there really never been one of those before? (I know we had a bunch of Buffy in Vampires, but I don't think there's been a full Wheedon before.)
The Supers, similarly, had ground that's been gone over, but this did the subjects significantly differently. I left most of the thinking to my teammates on the 101 bonus--it was really too late to focus enough to put together the necessary equations after ten years--but it was fun trying. (I'm glad I rememberd enough number theory to get the Hotel question right, at least.) The Board Games generally asked differently kinds of questions than in the past--the only board-game specific ones were on starting directions and Monopoly board, which are both new, and the other stuff was pretty creative (and clearly involved appreciated time investment in the graphics for Sorry and CandyLand): I felt bad that we didn't see that, of course, the crazy one about Ron Burgundy and Wicked was also Kanye.
There were definitely on-airs that made us very happy--Bob Ross, animal crackers, the correct pronunciation of .gif, Mighty Morphine Power Rangers, The Monster at the End of This Book, Krampus, the alternating vowel-consonant thing, and Professor Binns. Others seemed a bit boring (Updike winning two Pulitzers, Kobayashi not signing with the Hot Dog Contest, I-95 not being finished, King giving his speech in Detroit), obscure (why spend your one Star Wars question on Han having some cords on his legs in the '97 re-release when there's so much more fun Star Wars stuff?), had the dreaded "don't ask for a number" problem (the 12 Oreo roses, 364 gifts), or are Trivia chestnuts (Paris Syndrome, Pokemon epilepsy, the coining of "nerd"). But those were a clear minority: there was no stretch where we lost focus because of a lack of interest in the questions.
I agree with both comments on the songs: they were fun and kept things moving, which is Criterion #1, but a) there was a limited range of sources (multiple songs from the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Weird Al), and b) the matches weren't always that great. There were good ones--I liked "Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron," Roll to Me," "Time is On My Side." But sometimes they gave away the answer too easily--I would've felt better about getting the Billy Joel question if you didn't actually play "We Didn't Start the Fire," for instance. Other times they were just vaguely about the subject of the question-- "Let It Go" for our Williams alum writing for Frozen, "I'll Sue Ya" for a question about a lawsuit, "Video Killed..." for a song about videos. That said, it was nice to hear Bob & Doug McKenzie and to be reminded of that time in my youth when my nine-year-old sister played "C'est La Vie" way too much. Certainly, there was some excellent terrible music,like the "Ellen DeGeneres" song and L'il Bow Wow's cover of "Basketball" for Like Mike. And all, frankly, could be redeemed by the very last song, "Birdplane," which will go into the annals of my Trivia experiences as a delightfully absurd six AM experience. ("Yeah, this is Five for Fighting's Superman....Oh, no, fine, it's some stupid cover version of Superman...No? Of course it is...oh....no, it's about....birdplanes?")
Anyway, I had fun all eight hours, which is really the key.
Looking forward to Trivia 98--our second straight run by Williams undergrads. When was the last time that happened--were Space Otters undergrads (between both Oxford and JC Superstars), or do we have to go back to Belgium (sort of)-Awesome Sauce--Suite Suite (sort of)?
Another member of AmB+erst checking in and further supporting Dave Letzler's comments. I generally agree with what he said, but have a few things I'd like to add:
-- Very smooth contest! The technological difficulties appeared minimal from San Diego, California. Which is pretty impressive given that I've played in and run the contest several times and run into all sorts of difficulties even locally. All the tech guys supporting you, and the website/software guys who helped with the automation, should be very proud.
-- Good work getting a lot of teams to play. It's always fun to see 20+ teams playing this thing, especially when many are on campus.
-- Sharks and jets ultra was really cool. I also liked the specific focus on a part of West Side Story as opposed to the entire musical itself. Some of the explanations (Journal of Economic Theory as JET, for example) probably wouldn't even have been obvious to someone who'd read the journal. Nevertheless, there were just enough hints by the third/fourth hour to make this feasible.
-- I had a blast with the 101 bonus and thought it was really well done. As someone who took many of those 101 classes, it was interesting to see how much I'd forgotten and needed a textbook to help me remember. As someone with a div II/III background, it was somewhat reassuring to see a lot of those questions represented. However, there were some areas notably missing: history, philosophy, lit (English or otherwise), and so forth. A more representative bonus might have hit those areas.
-- Board games was fun, especially the "recreate the monopoly board from memory" part. Damn, that's something that you know you know...until you're actually asked to sit down and write it all out! Then you realize you only remember about ten properties for sure. Nice prompt.
-- Codes was a weird bonus. On the one hand, if you don't want teams to use google, back-substituting a vigenère cyher and/or ASCII is a fifteen minute pain. On the other hand, if you do use google, it's simply a matter of plug-and-chug. Interesting idea, but I don't know how well it fits with the contest rules.
The below is a ramble on writing and running the contest, because we're supposed to write one if we want maybe I think? Hopefully it will be a little useful to at least Freaky and the Fridays/other teams running the contest in the future.
I liked our brainstorming/collaboration process a lot. At first, we started a Google doc and threw tons of ideas at it, then went back and voted on our favorites and narrowed down the list until we'd decided what our boni would be. I'm espcially pleased we didn't settle on an Ultra that not everyone was excited about--we were pretty evenly split between sharks and another idea, with each side not that enthused about the other, until someone suggested sharks and Jets, and suddenly boom, that was it.
The writing of the boni was less organized than I would have liked. We took a similarly collaborative, Google-drive-based, everyone-add-stuff-as-you-feel-like-it approach, but it resulted in no one really being accountable and very little work getting done in those early stages. It did all get done eventually--and even though it felt really rushed, I expect we were still less down-to-the-wire than some past teams--but everything would have been a lot more relaxed if we could have spread the work out instead of sprinting toward the end.
I'm not the tech team so I can't really speak to this, but it seems we should have tested stuff more thoroughly--answer sheet submission, etc.--before go-time. Louis Moga and Mark Conger are truly trivia heros for their last-minute tech rescues. Louis in particular was helping sort out chat room issues till at least midnight.
Playing DJ/radio-host is a lot of fun! I recommend that everyone running a contest take a shift if they're interested, it's really cool. We had two people on-air at a time--obviously--both because it's more fun (and less lonely) that way, and because one person could run back and forth to the room with the graders while the other watched the stream. As someone pointed out in their post-mortem, we should probably have played more songs and asked more questions--but I had too much fun bantering on-air to be all that sorry about it. Oh well. It's a bit stressful, as a stream-person, to also be looking after chat rooms, but I found grading while streaming to be no big deal, and should have started doing that right at 11, to be honest.
I was really glad to be physically with everyone while running the contest. (I'm an alum with a flexy work schedule so I came up to campus last weekend.) It made everything much smoother, and made communication easier and higher-bandwidth. I highly recommend physical co-location to future contest-runners.
We could always use more chat mods and graders--more chat mods esp. earlier, while more teams are playing, and more graderes later, when teams are dropping out but boni are piling up. Mixing grading and moderating seems like a bad idea--keep 'em separate. Tap as many friends and relations and underlings as you can for mod/grading help, you'll thank yourself later. (Also, people in other timezones are esp. good--West Coasters can stay up late, Europeans can help with the 3-7AM grading rush, people in Asia are just awake... So bug your far-away friends!)
The fastest way I found of grading was, in the answer sheet, noting points scored per answer in the leftmost cell of that row, and summing the column. Fast, and maybe more importantly, easy to go back and double-check your scoring. I think most of us were doing this by the end, but we should have standardized it from the beginning.
Also, chatrooms be damned, we should have started grading earlier. (Maybe this is easy for me to say as not the person coordinating chatrooms or moding for 3 teams at once, though...) Just one dedicated grader starting after the first hour was in would have made a huge difference by the end. Also, grading boni is quite entertaining. If I get off my ass and go through the answer sheets, I hope to post some of the best(/worst) answers we got.
Shockingly, we had written almost the exact right number of on-airs! Still, my personal fave didn't make it on. So if you have on-airs that you'll cry if they don't get read, be sure to put them early.
This I wish we'd been able to do:
Things I'm really happy we did:
Overall, the contest was actually a blast to run--though a feat I'm glad not to attempt again any time soon. I have yet to pour over the boni and see in detail what seemed to work well and what didn't--I'll leave that to folks who played to tell me, I think. I hope you all had as much playing as we did putting this contest together!!
Over and out,
Maia ('14) for Polar Vortex
That's me! Thank you for sending along the post-mortem, and to whoever put(s) together the archive. I just read through everyone's comments on today's contest and largely agree. I've only played 3 (or 4?) times and the rest of my team were fairly new to trivia, but the technology was certainly the best of experienced, and it was probably the most fun trivia I've played.
The history of Freaky and the Fridays is pretty short. My freshman and sophomore year I played with my entry, mostly just one entrymate, Molly Pickel. This win is dedicated to Molly. We went as variations on this name: Leaky and the Faucets, Creaky and the Floorboards, Squeaky and the Doorknobs. I'm not sure if we have done Cheeky and the Monkeys yet, and Meekly and the Inheritors of the Earth is clearly yet to come. We did okay once, maybe Spring 2012, with the best on-campus score.
Last year I went abroad to Oxford (WEPO), and didn't play at all even though it would've been much easier. I think I just forgot. Molly played with her entry, as she was a JA. This year, a WEPO classmate (Laura Berman) wanted to start a team. Molly was sick so I just took the name. We were mostly WEPO, Laura, me, James Marvel-Coen and Garrett Welson. Two other WEPOians stopped by for periods, and or fifth core member was Pamela Mishkin, class of 2016. Most of them should be on this listserv at some point.
Trying to think what comments I have. I already told Maia that we loved the boni scoring. We only used the Internet on Codes, I think, and it was much better that way than previous games. Whedonverse was great fun and I surprised myself with how difficult it was. I guess my hardcore Whedonite phase was a good 4 or 5 years ago now, and I never saw all of Dollhouse. The Shakespeare questions were a phenomenal way to ask about something very Google-able in an un-Google-able way. We had fun with those. We liked 101 classes, also, although I can see the debate there. I think most of it was "elementary" (not easy) enough to be trivia, though. Art history was fun+hard.
Would echo that there was a bit too much of the Beatles, but we thought the song choices were great. Reliant K for the Plymouth Reliant Chrysler K-Car was just perfect. And yeah, Birdplane was a hilarious choice.
We'll definitely try to work with Williams After Dark in the Spring. I have many questions for all yall experts but I won't dump them all in this email. Looking forward to chatting with yall and playing trivia for many years to come.
-Chris
It's been almost two weeks since we ran this winter's trivia contest, and I'm finally getting around to writing down my thoughts on the contest. Maia wrote a great post-mortem covering our experiences running the contest, but I really wanted to discuss the boni and questions that we came up with. In the same vein as last contest's emails, I'll break them up into different sections. As a disclaimer, although my thoughts seem in line with the observations of other members of Polar Vortex, they may not reflect the views of the team as a whole. Also, I tried really hard to only use the pluralization of bonus when necessary in this email, to stop my teammates from making fun of me :-P
The Fifty Shades of Grey bonus seemed to be one of the most popular of the night based on the teams I talked with. I think the main reason for this was that literally everyone could look through it and contribute, as it didn't require any esoteric knowledge. Further, it seemed like something that teams could go back to and work on for the entire time, rather than either knowing it or not and moving on. We felt like this would be a good opening bonus since it was pretty straightforward, and I think that it accomplished that goal.
Mascots was another bonus that we thought might be accessible (well, mostly the second half). I mainly worked on the college mascots, which I hoped would be a challenge for both sports fans and yet still have some mascots that those not into college sports would recognize. My favorite were the trailblazers from MCLA, since I wondered how many people would recognize the mascot of the school 20 minutes away from Williams (I certainly didn't!!!) Joe did a great job on the product mascots, which I think were recognizable yet ones that people might not know the official names of. The one downside is that I feel like people either knew these ones or they didn't, so I'm not sure how long this bonus took. Hopefully this gave time for people to work on the actions and super bonus.
I was really impressed by the work done on the musicals and operas bonus. The clips used were just recognizable enough that I felt like I should know them, but still seemed challenging for even those on our team that knew musicals fairly well. I was afraid that the musicals and operas wouldn't be popular among trivia teams, but most teams I talked to had at least someone interested. Plus, like I said above, I think the tunes were recognizable enough to encourage those not knowledgable about musicals to at least give it a listen.
When we were coming up with ideas for hour boni and someone suggested Robin Williams, we all knew that would be one of the options we'd go with. It was a topic that hadn't been done (to our knowledge), seemed to lend itself to trivia quite well, and there would never be a more relevant time than the winter 2015 contest to feature him in a boni. This was one of the lower scoring boni, which in retrospect wasn't all that surprising because of its difficulty. I liked how it turned out, but I would be very interested to hear how teams thought it played. To me, it seems like one that would be difficult, yet fun to try, especially with the matching section. The degrees of separation seemed a lot tougher, but we were hoping that some fans of entertainment would find it amusing.
The viral videos bonus certainly played towards the younger generations of trivia participants, but we hoped that the mix of videos would be ones that people were familiar with (or at least vaguely remembered). Casey did an extraordinary job at creating the montage!!! I was a huge fan of the included clips, beginning with some solid life advice from Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker. Of all the boni, this one seemed to have the biggest gap between the teams that did well and the teams that scored lower.
Our codes bonus was almost certainly inspired by last year's spy themed super bonus. We (especially Austin) enjoyed cracking the secret spy puzzle and decided to make a whole hour bonus full of codes. The real debate before the contest was how hard to make the codes, and whether people would be interested in working on them.
As it turns out, many teams struggled and found this to be one of the harder boni, and the scores reflected this (although many teams cracked them all with the help of the internet). Just when we were about to concede that the boni was impossibly difficult, Austin noticed that on the top of Sociopath's answer sheet, where asked if they used the internet, they answered, "No. This is almost literally my job. (PhD in Computer Security/Cryptography)." And sure enough, they got all 15 points.
For the Whedonverse bonus, we hoped that each team would have at least one person who was excited about it. Although there was a Buffy bonus not too long ago (if I remember correctly), we thought this would be different enough to warrant its own category. I can't speak too much on this bonus since I know nothing about the shows and didn't really contribute, but we thought this would be a good one to use near the end of the night.
You know those things that seem like a good idea at the time, and then you look back and are like "Well, that didn't go as planned?" That was what we thought when we finished "Balls, Balls, Balls". When I came up with the idea, I was thinking it would be a great way to get a lot of different topics into one bonus, so that everyone could work on it. Then, we started writing it and realized it was a lot less connected than we thought. This was originally going to be our second Super Bonus, but we put it as an hour boni and upgraded 101 Questions (which was one of our better decisions). While one of our weaker boni in my opinion, we moved it to Hour 8 so that it would be a notable end to the contest. I can only imagine team's reactions when they opened the last boni of the night only to see an unlabeled diagram of male reproductive organs and a series of really bad puns waiting for them!