This contest was run out of Providence, Rhode Island by a team from Brown University. Players noted the many references to Rhode Island in the on-air questions.
The contest was very well organized, and technical issues were minimal. The Whoppers had plenty of scorers, so scoring was fast and smooth.
All in all, long-time Trivia players were impressed and grateful to the Whoppers for respecting and upholding the Williams Trivia traditions.
Hello everybody! Now that many weeks have passed and trivia has faded from everyone's minds, it's finally time for me to get my act together and send out the post-mortem. Thank you all so much for participating in our contest. I hope that everyone here had a fun time playing. Congratulations to Team IYWABWKOBWYB for the win! You guys are beasts. I have high hopes for your contest next year.
We didn't devote as much time to the on-airs as we should've. It began as a conscious choice--we built our contest with the philosophy that our boni should trend more towards classic trivia and that the on-airs should be more obscure/entertaining. That was the plan at least, but it ultimately caused us to work much harder on the boni than the on-airs. There were a few on-airs and song matches that I liked, but I thought the across-the-board quality wasn't particularly high.
I think the boni were the strength of our contest. We tried to spread out our topic areas to be suitable to players of many ages and specializations, which I think we achieved with some success. We leaned heavily into boni with audio and picture trivia, maybe because the research for those formats is easier than the research for more traditional text-based questions.
We thought that it would be wise to begin our boni with jingles, a classic trivia realm. Creating this bonus was a lot of fun; I activated my parents and grandparents to furnish me with jingles from their childhoods to try and keep the questions diverse and unpredictable. Unsurprisingly, many teams scored well on this bonus, probably because it was audio trivia. The field collectively missed only two of the 52 questions.
The Whoppers never played [citation needed]'s January 2020 contest, but it became a frequent inspiration for us as we built our own product. We particularly respected their "This or That" hour bonus. Although our rendition didn't quite capture the magic of the original, there were still some decent categories in there. It wasn't too tough either; at least one team got every question right except for the Marie Antoinette/Gwenyth Paltrow section. A few This or That categories which failed to make the final draft include "Nickname for Babe Ruth or winner of the Belmont Stakes" and "IPA or cannabis strain."
A comment from one of my coworkers about place names in Providence inspired this bonus. The Whoppers aren't Williams people, but we thought that it would be inappropriate to run a contest without having any Williams-themed questions. So, after consulting a few maps and asking some friends which roads were the most important ones in Williamstown, we began to build our Hour 3. This bonus was unique because it was the only one where we started with the answers and created the questions, not the other way around. Unsurprisingly, the Williams teams did quite well on this one; knowing the streets surely helped lock in a few answers that may have otherwise been tough. Only one question went universally incorrect in this bonus.
One of my teammates contributed most of this bonus's labor while visiting home for Passover. He knew a fair bit about classic sitcoms to begin with, but having his older relatives present helped to broaden out the questions. I was quite happy with the Hour 4 final product and even showed it to my parents (who both performed shockingly well themselves). One question went universally unanswered on this bonus.
I thought this hour had a clever and novel bonus idea, but ideally we should have built out the relationship map to be a fair bit larger, offering more context and clues to the trivia contestants. We decided to include several different relationship webs within our final product, but maybe it would have been better to keep things limited to Hollywood. Despite this bonus's toughness, at least one team found the answer to 34 of the 40 questions. Most of the missed ones were authors.
I don't have much to say about this one as I had almost no involvement in its creation. I tried the familial relationships section before the contest and found it to be remarkably difficult. Seemingly I wasn't alone! At least one team correctly answered every question in Hour 6 except for that familial relationships section. I wonder if this bonus's topic area was too academic for Williams Trivia.
We thought that it would be appropriate to include one topical bonus near the end of the contest. After thinking, we realized that A.I. would be perfect. This bonus began its life as a Super before slimming down to its contest size. Experimenting with Craiyon and chatGPT to produce viable trivia proved highly entertaining. With chatGPT especially, the prompts went through many iterations before we got the sort of responses we sought. Of the 50 questions, the field collectively missed only four, all in the art section, and frequently by tiny margins (there were several painfully close incorrect guesses).
Not our best (which is also why we put it at the end of the contest). It was too niche in some places and too general in others, not to mention that the "cartoons" bonus idea has been done a million times. A single Whopper created this bonus; we should've gotten more eyes on it to increase the breadth a little bit. Oh well. At least one team correctly answered 69 of the 84 questions. The Ben 10, Total Drama Island, and Wakko's America sections proved to be the most difficult.
In my opinion, the super boni were the highlight of our contest. I'm very proud of both of them, although I think Super 1 had the better design. This bonus took a lot of work, both because the trivia was hard to find and also because the requisite image editing was slow and tedious. We even used a physical book (about maps) to source some of the trivia for this bonus! The whole team contributed maps from every corner, producing the wide-breadth result. I was nervous that this bonus might be too hard, if only because I knew so little of the trivia going in. But I shouldn't have doubted everybody's trivia chops. The field annihilated this bonus, with at least one team correctly guessing all but two questions.
This bonus was another group effort. The central idea came just days after we won the January contest, originally as an hour bonus and later morphing into its current form. Due to the time-consuming nature of audio boni, this bonus was also among the last to be completed (not even an hour before we read the first on-air, naturally).
This was one of those boni where many teams revealed immense knowledge in specific areas but where no team completed the trivia infinity gauntlet to achieve a truly high score. That's what we were going for, so I'm glad that it played out as anticipated. Even though "Iconic Calls" was a wide-ranging and challenging bonus, the field's diverse knowledge meant that only six of the 125 questions went universally unanswered, primarily in the "identify the commentator" section. The nature of the (mostly) non-musical audio trivia pushed this bonus to a very lengthy 24 minute run-time, which I wonder if people appreciated. Was this audio bonus too long? Were there too many audio boni in this contest? Let me know.
The Ultra was the great disappointment of this contest; a total failure on the part of the Whoppers (although shout-out to West Sequestered for figuring it out a full six hours before anybody else). If Williams Trivia were football, I think commentators would say that we got "too cute" with this ultra. We're a Brown University team (although many of us are recent grads), and we were looking for places to stoke the Brown-Williams rivalry throughout our contest. Clearly however, Brown students are likelier to know who is and isn't an Ivy Leaguer than Williams students. That was predictable, so apologies to everyone that we didn't predict it. As part of my pre-contest research, I was a little relieved to discover that a group of Northwestern grads won once before, so we weren't doing anything completely unprecedented.
Amidst the pre-contest time crunch, we farmed out Action creation to a group of non-Whopper friends. They didn't disappoint! We got at least a couple responses for each action throughout the night, many of which were extremely entertaining. I'd like to shout-out Team IYWABWKOBWYB for submitting really hilarious and accurate responses to all seven actions.
Anyway, many of the Whoppers found the experience of creating and running the contest to be rewarding (and exhausting)! Thank you again to everyone for playing and congrats to Team IYWABWKOBWYB for winning! We'll see you all in 2024!
Hear hear! A contest for the ages. We especially enjoyed the Fictional Geography, the This or That round, and the AI art (how topical).
Being from the other side of the world, we did have one team member who didn’t know what an Ivy League university was (though they had heard the term). And we’re all slightly more deaf thanks to the volume discrepancy of Patrick and the jingles 😅
But all in all, a quiz worthy of the Williams trivia standard, to which Whopper*4 and all who supported them deserve megatons of gratitude.