It's too bad that the tradition of people giving extended commentary on Trivia contests has waned. If you're the running team, I think, you don't necessarily get the experience of how other teams experience the contest without it, and given what an undertaking each contest is, I've always thought it was nice for players to talk at some length about how they felt about the contest just played. Yes, we don't really want to go back to the days when you'd wake up the day after the contest and have a hundred emails griping about little things, but I think we've gone somewhat far in the other direction.
So, my contribution to that--
As we all expected, this group was the right team to run the 100th contest, and the contest really was excellent all around. The delayed Intro audio was great, but I was probably gladdest to hear from Frank Ferry--I've always wondered what happened to him, and whether he kept up with what was going on with Trivia, etc.
Regarding the content--
Basically, what I want from Trivia is to come away with several songs that make me somewhat delirious in the middle of the night and that I want to look up the next day. The hand-fart "Come On Eileen," the "Die Hard" tribute, Mr. T singing to his mama, the Muhammad Ali tooth decay commercial--these are the things that make Trivia great.
And, as always, the matching was really, really clever and on-point. I really cracked up on "Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore." "The Impression that I Get" for Grauman's, "I'm Going Down" for the airports, "I Get Around" for James Bond having sex--all good stuff. (For the record--I wrote a "Drops of Jupiter"/Zeus golden shower question for the May 2010 contest, and my team voted it down, which greatly saddened me.)
And while this crew tends to skew to older music more than when younger teams run--I mean, no one else is playing Ohio Express and Lou Christie and the Reflections when they run--there was enough Janelle Monae and Pitbull and The Weeknd that that wasn't really a problem.
Lots of good stuff. The fun part of Trivia is often when you have to think for a little bit, then laugh when you get it. Personal favorites on that front: Billy the Big Mouth Bass, Lewis partners, things named Thing, Katy Perry's boobs. (I guessed David St. Hubbins, out of nowhere, for Nigel Tufnel, and got there soon after--was amused.) And I was interested in some of the stuff I missed, like the chess pawns and gay softball World Series. So that was all pretty good.
Again, as is the case sometimes with this group, there were stretches when it felt like a contest that could've run in '93--multiple questions on early Simpsons, Spinal Tap, Monty Python, print comics, etc. But usually, there'd be a question on Twitter or Ron Swanson soon enough after that it wasn't really a problem. There were also a few too-cute-to-quite-work ones, as with Smaug (our mod let us get away with God) and Mr. Burns's team, but they weren't that bad.
Not a bad one, so far as I can see. The TV Opening Credits was really clever--can't think of anything like this one, and we were definitely wracking over it up to the last minute, and then felt bad at missing Monty Python and a few others. Has Eyes been done before? It seems familiar, but I can't place it--also quite clever and good for head-scratching. I also really liked the concept of Movie Songs, even though there were a few odd choices (you pick "Satisfaction" out of all the memorable music in Apocalypse Now?), and spent a fair amount of time trying to remember "Little Miss Sunshine" and being happy the "Backstreet's Back" scene made it in. Chain of Trivia was solid, and we had fun running the table on it.
The Minecraft bonus clearly took a lot of time and effort, and was a really cool idea. The stuff that worked worked really well--the Mark Hopkins one, and the narrative ones like Hansel and Gretel, etc.--looked great. There were a few, though, that didn't come through clearly or unambiguously. The Nutcracker one still doesn't make sense to me now--and baby Groot's not nearly that big!
The "Goodnight Moon" audio was a really delightful composition. The Beatles one was fine, though it lacked the same panache. Mega-Map was ok, but it was really hard to read a bunch of them, and didn't seem to have the same cohesion of the rest--though that's largely because they were so generally good.
The chase scenes Super was a lot of fun, and the overlay of the audio was, again, cute and well-thought out. (Back-to-back contests with great uses of "Friday"!) It looks like we got top score on the second Super, which I guess speaks to half-remembered days of too many ill-used hours during my undergrad years reading the archives of old Trivia contests. (And, technically, I guess we probably wrote more of those questions, originally, than most teams playing.)
I'll let others speak to them, since we didn't do that many, but I'm enjoying watching Horton and company's submissions online.
As I've noted before, it's hard to get an ultra that really hits that sweet spot where a few teams get it early, some middle, and everyone by the end. I've always tended to have them be too gettable too soon; this was, obviously, too hard. Ah well. It happens.
In any case--this is really a great example for future teams of what makes an excellent contest. I hope you all enjoy 101 as much as I enjoyed 100.
[Disclaimer: these are the musings of me alone, and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts of Polar Vortex as a whole]
I've always meant to write post-mortems of the contests I've played, but never seemed to find the time. However, now that I have two finals to finish up in 23 hours seems like the perfect opportunity.
This contest definitely seemed to be in a different category than the past few have (that's not a bad thing). I've never much been one for the on-airs (others can confirm that I simply guess Tonga for nearly every question), am pretty terrible at song identification (can only recognize the obvious ones that everyone else already knows), and thus spend more of my time on the boni, where there's at least a slim chance I might be of modest use. So unfortunately, I can't speak to the quality of the questions or song selection/pairings.
In previous contests, I often found that the action boni were the most entertaining, and enjoyed turning towards them when I got bored/lost the focus to answer questions as the night went on. That was very much not the case in this contest for two reasons.
1. On the positive side, I had more fun answering the hour boni than I have in previous contests. I am generally not a fan of the either-you-know-it-or-you-don't type questions and much prefer things that might take some time to remember or figure out. TV Opening Credits, Minecraft, and the Chain of Trivia definitely fit that description. It was easy to become engrossed in these boni only to look up at the clock and realize that we had 3 minutes to get our answer sheet turned in. AND that happened multiple times. The Minecraft bonus was a particularly neat idea, and was probably my favorite one of the night. This meant that we did not have the "We've answered all we can for this hour" time we usually used to work on the action boni.
2. I was not particularly enticed by the action boni prompts this time around. Compared with the prompts from the past few contests, more than usual seemed tied to particular required knowledge (Mad Men to the Max, Rock Paper Scissors,) or were very particular in scope as to what was to be acted out, meaning there seemed to be less room for the creative shenanigans I remember us putting together for action boni in past contests. (I also can't help but notice that Actions 5 and 7 had many fewer submissions than usual.)
In retrospect, it's probably a good thing we didn't do more action boni, as we were not playing to win (I think?).
As for the other boni, there was quite a bit of song identification crammed early on, between Super 1, Goodnight Moon, and Beatles Titles. I would have liked to see a bigger gap between the two audio hour boni, and it was during the Beatles Titles hour that I ended up crashing for the night (which is a shame, because I think I would have enjoyed the later hour boni had I stayed awake to see them). I did like the idea of recognizing the past 99 contests in Super 2, but I saw Super 2 mainly as a collection of many more on-air style questions (see feelings expressed above). The supers this time around were much less varied than supers in past contests have been, and thus did not hold my attention very long.
The Ultra Bonus was... difficult. As Des hypothesized, I think Cards Against Humanity is too eclectic a collection to have a cohesive set of clues pointing to it exclusively.
Apologies if this has been too critical. I recognize that my interests in trivia questions are probably not average, and I realize that putting together a great contest is no easy feat. I really enjoyed what I did play of this contest, so thank you to Taha Noa Noa for putting it all together. It was definitely a contest worthy of the `100th` title, and despite breaking the streak we started of on-campus teams running the contest, this was no doubt the right team for the job.
Turnout did take a hit this contest, it seems. I realize this is partially hypocritical to say as a member of an on-campus team for this contest, but it would probably be worthwhile to have on-campus teams promote trivia to entries, put up posters, etc. in the future when off-campus teams host.
Also, we should maybe discuss some way to prevent the scoring debacle that happened at the end of this contest from occurring again? Luckily both we and the Wombats were in a place where we could host the next contest if necessary, but I believe we both were in a position where we would have stopped earning points sooner had it looked like we were in the lead/at risk of winning going into hour 8.
7/06/24: was looking for an old email regarding our kids' school projects about the Iditarod and came across this, which I'd apparently not posted back in 2016 :( First link works; not sure why the videos are no longer available :(
Posting now, for the archive.
--Arielle '92
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Some commentary... about the Minecraft bonus, from the person who both built and scored it.
In some cases, teams came up with surprising (for me) interpretations that seemed right on the money if you weren't the person who'd created the bonus, and I tried to be generous there. In other cases, there were some vaguely connected guesses which I didn't feel were accurate enough or missed something major; I tended to give those no credit. All the grading was done at once, and I tried to give each team the same credit for the same answer.
Happily, several teams got that the people/cows build was Mark Hopkins and a student on a log.
One team guessed the Gates in Central Park (a Christo installation) for the orange hill, and Christo (in general) was correct for that. Someone else guessed the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto. When I looked it up, I saw it had orange gates that could have been read this way, although that was clearly a building rather than a hill. I gave part credit.
The purple drawings were not, as more than one team guessed, the Nazca Lines. Those were by Harold, with his purple crayon - the giant baby/toddler in the build. Not sure if certain teams were joking that a giant baby drew the Nazca Lines.
The blue car was not Harry Potter's friends', and it was not from Back to the Future. Both very wrong. Neither of those was in a desert. The HP car would also, I believe, have had one or two more people in it. It was indeed from the end of Thelma and Louise.
The dogs were not supposed to be Santa's reindeer. Cute guess, but no credit for that. On the other hand, some people went above and beyond for this - we were looking for "Iditarod" - by specifying Balto. They got kudos there. I did not give the team credit who simply wrote "dog sled" - that was too general.
One of the harder ones - mostly because the story isn't as well known, at least not these days, as Cinderella and Rapunzel and the like - was the garden with the house and the people by the log. That was for the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red. They're girls who help a very ungrateful dwarf; one of his problems is that his beard gets caught in a log. Sadly, nobody at all got that one or even came close. I thought a few teams might know it.
The one that I thought was an all-or-nothing, the big shirtless guy with the hat, turned out to be more complicated to grade.
A few teams put answers that were not at all correct by the answer key, yet were partly right from looking at the build, as I discovered with some Googling. I gave the teams (at least three!) who wrote "Slash" (from Guns & Roses) part credit. The mask could easily be read as Slash's sunglasses, and he sure looks like that build. Had heard of him but didn't know what he looked like, so the build wasn't intentionally based on him. Partial credit also went to the team who guessed the video (which I hadn't seen before) for "Gay Bar" by the group Electric Six. The Minecraft shirtless guy looks an awful lot like the guys in that video, although they have beards and this guy does not; he has a mask and they do not.
The answer we were going for here? Exactly ONE TEAM, Woman Card, got it. Their team included a '94 alum, and I was '92, so I'm guessing he was on campus during one of the last few contests in which this guy showed up as a Trivia meme: the Llap Goch Man, from Monty Python. In the late '80s or so, he kept popping up in Williams Trivia contests. Nice going there, Woman Card.
The big guy with the donut was from the Simpsons, although the Big Boy guessers got partial credit since Big Boy is so similar (and I'm pretty sure Donut Lad was based completely on Big Boy).
The folks who guessed Cloud Atlas for Atlas holding up the world got partial credit after I found a screenshot from Cloud Atlas that looked incredibly similar to the build. I hadn't seen that movie and didn't remember the trailers, so any resemblance was not intentional. People who guessed the Earth for this one got partial credit.
Same with the team who guessed Bridge to Terabithia for Monet's garden at Giverny/his waterlilies: when I looked up the movie, the garden and bridge looked very, very similar to the one in the bonus, so I gave partial credit to them. I'd read the book eons ago but hadn't seen the movie and didn't remember the trailers.
Where did the ideas come from? Close to half were mine; close to half were suggested by Des; a few were suggested by others (such as my kids/husband). I'd have to go back through old messages for exact numbers. I built them.
If you'd like to review the official Trivia contest video plus some earlier ones (which got redone or were cut down en route to the final video), they are here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvDJftwGChZiegyGnHkGUKW2N5sG67yp_
Thanks for playing in the 100th contest!
Arielle '92
(normally of team Bender but played with Taha Noa Noa in the fall so I could help this spring - back to Bender after this, most likely)