Digging for Gold: A Look at an Old Packet

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Cheynem
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Digging for Gold: A Look at an Old Packet

Post by Cheynem »

Hi. I enjoy old quizbowl packets, both in an ironic and unironic way, so I wanted to write about my experiences looking at an old packet. I hope to actually start some dialogue about the nature of writing, both now and in the past, as well as enjoy myself. So here goes.

If you want to follow along, it's the "Chicago A" packet from ACF Regionals 1993 (located in the ACF Regionals 1992 section of the Stanford Archive, http://quizbowl.stanford.edu/archive/AC ... _chi_A.txt).
There are 23 tossups, I'll work through them first, with observations when I feel like it, then do bonuses.

The first tossup is on Alfred Binet. It is followed by ones on the Kronos Quartet and indicators. These are written with the same sort of writing style we tend to associate from the old days--effectively narrowing down the answer in the first few lines (the Binet one is "This is a French dude who studies psychology and education") and list based. The Kronos Quartet one also has the feel of being written very simply, as I'm pretty sure you could write the whole thing from a concert program.

We next get tossups on Lichtenstein and Jerome, both of which start off with that classic old quizbowl chestnut, "Born in..." Does anyone want to shed some light about how this became one of the most remembered tropes of old quizbowl writing? I'm guessing that there's a bit of wanting to talk about the subject's background and thus feeling the need to start with the birthday, plus I guess in the pre Wiki days, checking the birthday would require a bit more work.

Next is a tossup on Jane Addams. It's not super well written, but the structure of it is interesting, as it seems to be like a reverse way of asking about a 1925 social scientist conference. I enjoy moderate doses of questions that try to do this (i.e., write about one incident in a person's life, if that incident is interesting enough to have a lot of good clues, while using the person, not the incident, as the answer line). One of the things I sort of find interesting about old questions is the way they approach their structure and answer lines. I'm not saying we need to go back to the wild wild west days, but there's a creativity here that is interesting.

We next get a series of tossups that goes: Rosalind Franklin, Aldo Moro, Sigmund Freud, Alan Ayckbourn, and Charles Evan Hughes. The most interesting thing I find about this is the far ranging nature of the answer lines, which I think is actually pretty cool--Moro is tough enough to get asked about at Chicago Open, while Hughes pops up at regular difficulty, and Freud, of course, is Freud. Subject tournaments frequently mix "easy" and "hard" answers with varying degrees of success, so I wonder if perhaps a normal tournament might attempt to mix degrees of answers. Obviously, there are some reasons why would this be hard (what portions of the distro become hard and become easy, etc.). Older packets worked their way around it by either ignoring any semblance of a distribution or by including a ton of shorter tossups.

We then get a tossup asking what ATP stands for written to apparently incite "daring" buzzes of what the answer could possibly be. This is the clearest way that quizbowl has changed for the better. Such hoses or "game" tossups are almost universally reviled.

The next tossup is on _Epistolary_ by listing epistolarly novels. This strikes me as while written terribly antiquated, an idea that could possibly find some merit. Literature tossups that try to do more than "author"/
work"/"character" always interest me, and as kooky as they can be, older packets do try to do different things with them.

After a few more bio tossups on e.e. Cummings and Voltaire (three lit tossups in a row!), we then get a tossup on the Volvo. Like a lot of old questions, it is written disarmingly chatty, with the author practically narrating his/her thought processes. This is another way that quizbowl has changed, assuredly for the better, as we don't have these sort of rambling, what's on my mind now type questions. The packet then begins to come to an end with tossups on King Zog, My Lai, Dunsinane, and Le Chatelier (three history tossups in a row!). The overtime tossups are on Ft. William Henry, Lolita, and a speedcheck on Einstein to close the game.

Let's discuss some of the bonuses. My feelings on old quizbowl bonuses can generally be described this way: Bad approach, interesting idea, too much of the idea. That is to say--YES, a lot of the ways old quizbowl set up bonuses (30/20/10, binary list matching, "name all 6") are not very interesting and kind of dull. However, a lot of the topics asked about in these old bonuses are pretty cool, frankly, many of which should be explored for some of the uncharted areas of the distribution (like Your Choice). Of course, old packets tend to be stuffed to the gills with these such bonuses which is also not a good idea.

For example, in this packet, there are bonuses on the book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi about Henry Hill, which inspired Goodfellas. This is a reasonably important book which combined with some questions on the mob (a sadly underexplored realm of American history) would be really fascinating as a bonus. There's a bonus on phobias, which while bordering on trivia, could probably stand to come up more often than they do now. There's an odd, fascinating bonus on what certain repeated images in Japanese poetry symbolize, which if restructured, could probably be a great bonus. Also, to a limited extent, I suppose some list bonuses could be used, frankly. I remember last year someone being baffled when a list bonus was used in a HSAPQ packet, but as long as it's well structured and written (and not used all the time!), I don't see anything wrong with it.

Old bonuses also tend to have a ton of current events. Like Matt Weiner, I am a fan of current events as I think they promote an awareness and an understanding of the issues and history of today. Old packets again tend to get overboard with asking about them (and are obsessed with U.S. politicians), but this is one aspect of, say, NAQT's distro that I've never really minded.

So those are my observations of this old packet. If anyone wishes to respond to some of my points, feel free, or if you want to explore another old packet, do so.
Mike Cheyne
Formerly U of Minnesota

"You killed HSAPQ"--Matt Bollinger
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ValenciaQBowl
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Re: Digging for Gold: A Look at an Old Packet

Post by ValenciaQBowl »

Perhaps one reason folks in my playing days used "Born in" intros/clues is due to the prevalent use of encyclopedias and other general resources in those pre-internet days (same with the old favorite strategy of "Son of a fletcher-maker" clues). The first thing one sees in such entries is the years of the subject's life. And, let's face it--to me the biggest difference between then and now is the fact that online fora like this one has allowed for much more communication about and analysis of old packets. We didn't have lots of arguments about what constituted good questions, and most of us still played CBI (though by '93, ACF had taken root), so what did we know?

One other thing is that many fewer people played more than four years back then. Some folks played longer, but most players I knew finished school and finished with the game. That leaves a lot fewer years to hone one's writing skills and philosophy.

Interesting idea to look at these, though. I look forward to the next installment.
Chris Borglum
Valencia College Grand Poobah
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grapesmoker
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Re: Digging for Gold: A Look at an Old Packet

Post by grapesmoker »

In the old days, a thousand flowers bloomed with regard to question writing. That kinds of makes sense, since this was before most people had a really good handle on what constituted good questions and before the existence of online fora utilized by the whole community (although, for hilarity, peruse the old newsgroup archives of quizbowl discussions). Now that a lot of these things have been tried and found wanting, we've eliminated the parts that don't work and reinforced the parts that do. Looking at these questions is a little like perusing the evolutionary tree that got us to where we are now.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
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Re: Digging for Gold: A Look at an Old Packet

Post by Stained Diviner »

Quizbowl did not have much of an identity back then, and some of the issues that are now considered resolved had not yet been resolved. A question on Lichtenstein was considered academic because it was about an artist, no matter what clues were used, so there was no reason to think that giving his birth year and location was in any way bad, since it was an opening clue that most teams could not answer. Also, it was pretty much assumed that some questions would go dead in every round, so people didn't complain about difficulty fluctuations. Some clues were more about trying to be cute/entertaining than being helpful, and there was no agreement that clues which required you to guess where the question was going were better than clues that tested how much you knew, at least on occasion. Because there was so little feedback, there was little reason for writers to think that whatever they found in the nearest encyclopedia article was not good enough for quizbowl.

There was no expectation that the questions would later be posted on the internet and studied, though teams would often take paper copies home from tournaments for later practices. When that tournament was held, there were about 100 pages on the World Wide Web. Other parts of the internet existed, but lots of people never visited them.

Quality control was also low. No matter how bad a set of questions was, there were commercially available questions in wide usage that were much worse. I guess that, at the high school level, that basic fact still hasn't changed.
David Reinstein
Head Writer and Editor for Scobol Solo, Masonics, and IESA; TD for Scobol Solo and Reinstein Varsity; IHSSBCA Board Member; IHSSBCA Chair (2004-2014); PACE President (2016-2018)
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dbeshear
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Re: Digging for Gold: A Look at an Old Packet

Post by dbeshear »

Ugh, a blast from the PAST. I remember practicing on that packet and wondering WTF is this? And later we wrote a packet or two later that were at what we thought was that level of obscurity before we realized that the point of question writing was not to irritate people but provide a legitimate test of knowledge. No one wants to play on a packet where the final score is 70-55 and the game turned on someone's obscure knowledge of one question.

The avoidance of what über-tough ACF questions we called "Stump the Chump" and the "Find Your Butt" questions of CBI helped build NAQT.
Dan Beshear
University of Central Oklahoma '13
Co-founder University of Oklahoma Academic Team, 1993
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