I’ve been hosting quiz nights for just about a year. And just when I think I’ve got a handle on what I’m doing, along comes last Tuesday night.
In short: the quiz was too hard, which means people weren’t having as much fun as I’d have liked. I know there are quiz hosts who delight in making really hard quizzes, but after a few early quizzes, I came to realize that people have more fun playing the quiz when they get a decent number of answers right. The penny dropped for me when I read it on the Trivia Hall of Fame’s Question Writing Clinic: “Mystifying people is bad. I find that people like to get between two thirds and three quarters of the questions. However, trivia writers have a bad habit of writing questions that entertain or challenge them, instead of their audiences.”
Twenty teams played the Old Pequilar’s quiz on Tuesday night. Scores ranged from 16 to 57 — which means even the winning team didn’t quite get 75% of the questions right. Second place was a point behind them — then third place got 48 points. Only half the teams got 40 or more questions right, or 50%.
My dream spread is more like a low of 20 and a high of 65, with most of the teams scoring over 40 points. Frustration isn’t fun.
We always start with Geography, which is always one of the harder rounds. This week, though, the average score was 3.3. Ouch. It was after Round 2, A Fine Romance, that I knew things weren’t going well. Average score that round was 3.8. Those ended up being the two hardest rounds, but none of the verbal question rounds had an average above 5 points, and usually I’d consider a 5-point average round acceptable but low.
I was tempted to call Tuesday a fiasco, but really, it wasn’t a complete failure. For one thing, I didn’t gloat. I apologized, starting with round 3, and was sincere about it. And when I read the first question of Round 5, Voices, I got a lucky setup. The question: From 1944 to 2001, Smokey Bear said “Only you can prevent forest fires.†Since April, 2001, Smokey says “only you can prevent†what?
Someone yelled out “Syphilis!” And I responded, without much thinking about it, “No, that’s Smokey Beaver. I’m asking about Smokey Bear.” The entire bar cracked up in a tension-relieving mass laugh. From there, people had more fun. I kept apologizing (while keeping it light), and the rounds got somewhat easier, which helped.
What happened? I misjudged the difficulty of a lot of my questions, getting wrapped up in presenting interesting info without doing enough to make the questions answerable to someone who wasn’t surfing Wikipedia. And, because the bar is really worried about finishing by 10:00 whenever they have the porch open, I included two quick-to-read rounds (A Fine Romance and The Loyal Opposition). They work great for keeping things moving, but there’s no real context to the clues, so it turns into a round of “you know it or you don’t.” And a lot of people didn’t.
Fortunately, this was an aberration — for the last several months, at least, my average scores were closer to my ideal, with high scores approaching 70. I find that there’s a couple of teams every week doomed to score 20 or fewer points, no matter what I ask, but that it’s definitely possible to raise the scores of most teams with solid question construction.
Next time — August 14, mark your calendars — it’ll be easier. Cross my fingers.