Phil Castagna wrote:After reading this discussion thread, I have a question for Jerry, Chris, Matt...(I don't mean to say you all think in lockstep on everything, this is more of a general query to anyone)
Aside from the centrally-written vs. team written and playing on a clock, and if NAQT took all of your suggestions to heart (regarding lengthening tossups, removing wordplay or acrostic type-questions, and tweaking the distribution to lower trash/current events/geography content) what would be the difference between ACF and NAQT (assuming these modifications are made).
I don't mean this post as an attack, I'm just trying to further my understanding.
Thanks,
Phil
Sure. I'll shape the bulk of my post by throwing out ideas on what I would do if given carte blanche to reshape the format with only the guidelines that I not utterly compromise it.
1. Allow tossup length to be extended by 1-2 lines. Not knowing the character limit makes it harder for me to make an accurate suggestion, but I will throw that out as a general range (NAQT uses a different font and size than ACF, so it's not like a 6 line NAQT tossup is the same as a 6 line ACF one in 10 point Times New Roman). It would be nice if bonuses had some more wiggle room, but I'd let that pass in favor of tossups, since those questions are where issues of pyramidality and middle clues become prominent. Accordingly, I would allow for an extra minute in each half to accomodate this extension: I see it as enough to make room for more clues without distorting the speed and pace of the games.
2. Adjust the distribution so that fine arts (both music and visual art), social science, and philosophy questions each have an equal or greater ratio to geography, general knowledge, trash, and sports questions. I think that this change is necessary to remain true to the "Academic" in NAQT, as the first list of subjects encompasses a vast amount of the existing college-level academic curriculum, and it does a disservice to people who major in or study those fields to be given less priority than someone who skims newspapers or memorizes maps regularly. General knowledge is the only category I would like to abolish outright: I think its lends itself to the bulk of controversial "NAcutie" questions like: is, crocodile tears, palindromes, etc., and that any interesting topics that may come up in GK could probably be rewritten in the vein of any other academic or pop culture/CE category. As for the remaining "lesser" subjects, I would be most prone to reducing the content of current events, geography, sports, and trash in order from most to least in terms of what would be pared down to make room for more academic content (based on my opinion of what comes up disproportionately high in terms of its significance).
3. Reshape the distribution to exist as a per round question quota rather than an overall percentage of the set quota. I think this method will allow more consistency across packets, and will prevent teams from having specialists arbitrarily shut out of or favored in rounds due to random luck of having none/more of the questions in the minor categories appear in a particular round's packet.
4. Enforce a higher degree of strictness in terms of how subjects count for their various categories. I'm in the dark on how your average NAQT question gets counted for whatever distribution subject, but I feel like questions should stay loyal to their subject categories. I don't like the idea of a children's book bonus counting for academic literature, a furniture tossup counting as visual arts, or a "hey check out this article I read in last month's Nature journal" tossup counting as biology. Similarly, I don't think trash or sports questions should double as current events (e.g. no tossups on flavor of the week bands or sports figures who just made ESPN headlines a few nights ago). A popular in-joke among NAQT critics is that you could look at one tossup and be able to guess that it counted for any of 3-5 different categories based on the ambiguities of the clues and answers (e.g. say a Benjamin Franklin biography tossup could fall into lit, history, science, or GK or a Samuel Morse biography tossup into history, science, art, or GK). I think a good goal for NAQT questions would be that they be written so that an experienced writer could pinpoint the category in which every question falls. My bet is that a lot of players wouldn't be as vocal over the (still-flawed) distribution status quo if it weren't the case that a lot of the GK/trash/current events elements seemed to spill over into the territory of academic subject matter.
In order of priority (from greatest to least great), I would place those goals as follows: 4, 2, 3, 1. I think it's fair to say that these changes would allow NAQT to remain a timed, fast-paced format with a healthy dose of "off the beaten path" questions on pop culture, current events, etc. and allow substantial improvement to the academic component that people find flawed. In my opinion alone, NAQT's unique identity seems to focus on the brisk pace, powers, the timed aspect, and the presence of the aformentioned "novelty" questions. My proposed changes would be designed to promote the additional goals of ensuring that rewarding the team with the most academic knowledge be a primary concern of games.
The central dilemma, however, is that, with NAQT's status as a large proprietary organization, it's hard to know what the consensus is on what constitutes NAQT's identity. If it so happens, for example, that the powers that be believe that pyramidality is overrated, or that luck and buzzer speed should trump knowledge in determining the outcome of games, or that nobody worthwhile cares that much about philosophy/arts/social science, then I would argue that NAQT does not just diverge from ACF, but from the current accepted norms of the circuit as a whole and the problems are indeed deep-rooted ones. If, however, our goals are in fact the same (i.e. pyramidal academic questions designed to reward knowledge before all), and there's just been trouble in keeping up with the pace of the circuit's evolution, then I don't why there need be such difficulty in tweaking the format to fit circuit standards without having to express concerns that vocal partisans are trying to twist NAQT into a clone of ACF.
I hope that at least makes clear what I've been ranting about all this time, and at least I don't think that the above changes I'd ideally like to see are unreasonable or implausible to implement without taking away NAQT's identity.
"They sometimes get fooled by the direction a question is going to take, and that's intentional," said Reid. "The players on these teams are so good that 90 percent of the time they could interrupt the question and give the correct answer if the questions didn't take those kinds of turns. That wouldn't be fun to watch, so every now and then as I design these suckers, I say to myself, 'Watch this!' and wait 'til we're on camera. I got a lot of dirty looks this last tournament."