Ken Jennings interviewed Carlo Panno, who (in the ’80s) wrote questions for Jeopardy! Part 1 is fairly Jeopardy!-specific — what the process is like, the life cycle of a category. Part 2 pulls back the camera, adding more perspective on general question-writing issues.
Jennings asks Panno how he gauged the difficulty of questions, since (in theory) the clues on Jeopardy! get more difficult the more money they’re worth. “It’s from the gut, mostly,” replies Panno. “You use your instincts and your knowledge of your knowledge.”
It’s good to know even the guys in the big leagues have a hard time with that — it’s still difficult for me to predict how difficult players will find a round. Even the kind of players matters — I used popular and relatively easy rounds from the Old Pequliar at a recent private event, but since the private event players were generally less trivia-savvy, they found them all very difficult. Lesson learned. I hope.
What makes a great question, Jennings asks. “The leaner and more elegant, the better I liked them,” responds Panno. Solid gold advice for anyone writing, well, anything, but it’s excellent trivia writing advice.
And Panno is another voice in the chorus reminding quiz writers not to lose sight of what makes trivia quizzes fun:
I felt pretty good about getting all three contestants to get it wrong on my NBC DIDN’T CALL IT “SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE†FOR TWO YEARS BECAUSE OF A 18-WEEK “SNL†ON ABC STARRING HIM but it was called to my attention that everybody getting it wrong is a bad thing.
Bold emphasis mine. As I learned from experience, it’s a lot easier to write questions that stump everyone than to write questions that most players can get right. And players definitely prefer the latter.
This is actually a great article – I never thought of i t that way. I find it myself boaring, if the questions are to easy, and I don’t get a fair challenge in the quiz. I think it’s okay once in a while to think: “arrggh… I should have had that one right – next!”
But I accept the fact, that we’re not all the same, and will consider that in my future quiz-creations.
Thanks,
Claus
It’s definitely hard to find that balance between too easy and too hard — they’re both frustrating for players, I find.
And you definitely have to know your audience — as I’ve found from experience, a quiz that a regular pub quiz crowd finds fun can be too challenging for people who don’t do trivia regularly. But if I knew I were writing for Jeopardy contestants, I wouldn’t hesitate to elevate the difficulty level.
I aim for a correct answer rate of 70-80% for most qusetions although placement is important too. In otherwords I will ask easier pub quiz questions at the start of an evening, which helps establish player confidence.
Dr Paul: Totally agree. Excellent point.
I don’t always pull it off, but my goal is always to make the early rounds easier than the later rounds. (And within each round to make the early questions easier than the later ones.)
I was Googling my name and found your comments.
Thanks for the kind words. I had a lot of fun writing that for Ken, and I’m glad you liked it. Agreeing with me makes it even better.
–c
Carlo Panno was never paid as a writer on “Jeopardy”. He was hired as and remained a researcher during his entire period at Jeopardy. He WOULD infrequently write a category as all researchers were allowed to do, but to call him a writer for Jeopardy is just wrong. The show had five writers and five researchers at the time. He was one of the researchers.
Bob is correct when he says I was primarily a researcher, a fact I acknowledged in the interview.
But EVERYBODY was credited as “Research Staff” in those days. They didn’t start using “The W-word” until after I left in 1990.
And my Emmy nomination certificates say “Special Class–Writing.” So there.