mighty fine trivia by James Callan

Tag: quiz culture

Two observations about playing pub trivia

1) 19 times out of 20, if you hear a question and an answer pops into your brain, unbidden, un-thought-out, that’s the correct answer. Go with your gut.

2) The one time during a quiz that you reconsider that answer and come up with a more logical one to put in its place will not be the one time in 20 that your gut was wrong. You’ll change a right answer to a wrong one.

A lesson from Jeopardy!

As I mentioned on Seattlest, I passed the in-person Jeopardy! audition in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. Now I officially have about a 1 in 6 chance of appearing on the show in the next couple of years. I’m coming out ahead regardless — I won a Jeopardy! home game when bwouns from the Ken Jennings Message Board misremembered what year the show came back on the air.

One thing the Jeopardy! people said that stuck with me: The people on the show want you to win money. They’re not there as your adversary — your fellow contestants are your adversaries.

When I started writing quizzes, I had to learn that. In my first few quizzes, I deliberately included questions that I knew would be difficult, possibly even stumpers. At least one per round, sometimes two.

Why? I had in the back of my head that I was competing with the players. Somehow it was points for me if I stumped them.

It took reading some other people’s advice on writing questions — particularly Jennings in Brainiac, and the guys at the Trivia Hall of Fame.

Turns out it’s a lot more fun to host when you try to write questions that a lot of people can answer. I definitely still try to challenge players — a great question rewards lateral thinking. But stumping them isn’t that hard to do, and it’s not much fun when you’re on a team with a half-empty answer sheet.

I’m not there to beat the players. I’m there to give teams a good playing field where they can compete with each other.

“What do you think of X as an actor for the movie round?”

A friend of mine who’s hosting at the Old Pequilar next week corralled me before last week’s quiz. “What do you think of Person X for the movie round?” she asked.

Brief explanation: the movie round at the OP always involves nine questions with movie titles as the answer. Question 10 is always “Who appeared in all of these movies?” So constructing a round involves picking out an actor or actress and working backwards from there.

I won’t share Person X’s name, in case my friend uses them next week. But her question made me consider what my movie round rules of thumb are.

“Hmm,” I said. “I think it’s a good idea, but I don’t know if people will know the name.” And that’s the key: to be fair, the movie round’s common denominator needs to be someone who players not only recognize, but can name.

I call it the David Warner rule. Another friend of mine wanted to write the quiz one week. He wrote a movie round using David Warner for question 10. I probably would’ve let it go, but the two people I shared the host slot with vetoed it. “I’ve subscribed to Entertainment Weekly for five years and I’ve never head of David Warner,” said one of them. He knew all the movies in question, and (when prompted) recognized Warner’s face, but had no idea what the guy’s name was.

My friend rewrote the round using Luis Guzman, who probably pushed the envelope a little bit, but enough teams got the question that it proved OK.

These days, when I want to make the movie round tricky but still playable, I look for people who are pretty famous but not necessarily for their film roles. Three examples: August 7, January 29, and April 10. That last one probably pushed the envelope again; if I used that person again, I might make the other nine questions even easier.

Of course, the challenge is part of the fun of the movie round. The David Warners of the world may be too obscure — and the Amrish Puris of the world are right out, at least in an average US bar — but I don’t think it’s much fun to have the answer be Brad Pitt or George Clooney, either. When you can guess the answer within two movies, even if you don’t regularly see 100+ movies a year, you could use a little more challenge.

Here’s what I do: When I’ve got an actor in mind, I ask my wife if she’s heard of them. If so, yay. If not, I usually scrap the idea.

Random closing thought: I really wanted to do a round with John Waters in the Q10 slot, but he hasn’t appeared in enough movies to make it work well. Take more acting gigs in other people’s films, John!

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