2021 Dede Allen: Thanks and General Discussion

[magin]

I want to thank Jules Bosse for being a terrific co-writer for Dede Allen. I didn’t know Jules before he reached out to me and offered to help with the set; he not only wrote half of the tournament, but he came up with great ideas for questions and suggestions for clues, was incredibly responsive, and was a blast to work with.

I also want to thank our intrepid group of playtesters: Austin Brownlow, Aakash Patel, Nadia Dakdouki, Leo Ashton, Dave Letzler, Ganon Evans, Mike Bentley, and Nathan Weiser. They helped us fix issues where clues were ordered incorrectly or had problems with sound quality, and did a bang-up job.

We hope you enjoyed playing this set as much as we enjoyed writing it!

The per-round distribution was:

15% Directors
10% Places (questions where the answer is a geographic location)
20% Movies
20% Actors
35% Common Links

We tried our best to use clues from many different genres, time periods, and countries (personally, I made an effort to clue movies from earlier than the 1980s, since I grew up on 80s and 90s movies). We also wanted most players to know the vast majority of questions by the giveaway (with a few harder questions to spice things up).

In this thread, we’re interested in feedback about the overall tournament experience--how did it feel to play? Was it a positive experience? Were there any issues you encountered while playing? If so, how could we improve the tournament?

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

[Gene Harrogate]

I liked this tournament quite a bit, thanks Jonathan and Jules! It was one of the more enjoyable side events I can remember.

I thought the answerline selection for this tournament was excellent. The emphasis on commonlinks was a good idea---the variety was enjoyable as a listening experience and I imagine they played the best at the end. Some of my favorite in this vein were bears, body swapping, Russia, hunter, and bars. The buzz distributions on qblitz look good, so kudos for building well-constructed questions.

The author questions were great, and the dialogue questions (who is the actor being addressed) were a neat idea. I think the letter tossups played fine, though I admit some of the movie groupings felt a bit disparate.

Some of the questions had, perhaps, unnecessarily hard giveaways. I'm thinking here of the Blazing Saddles, Scorsese, and Sweden tossups, which had much lower conversion rates than one would expect for those answerlines. I prefer the sort of giveaway like "we rob banks" on Bonnie and Clyde.

I appreciate that this tournament clued across the highbrow-lowbrow spectrum, and from a wide temporal range. There was something for everyone and I would recommend this tournament to anyone who likes movies of any sort.

Early on I felt that the tossups leaned too much on the side of breadth over depth. By this I mean that if someone knew something about Barry Lyndon but not Love Story, they would have to recognize a more difficult clue from Barry Lyndon to convert the tossup at all. Compare this to a normal quizbowl tossup on Dostoevsky cluing from The Gambler and a couple more famous things: if you've read the Gambler, it's still possible to miss one or two clues from it and convert the tossup at the end, no matter your knowledge of the more famous stuff (at some point you're getting a hard clue, maybe an easy to medium clue, a plot description and a title drop). I think though that as the tournament went on I noticed more and more tossups give multiple clues from the same movie.

I may be misremembering, but I don't believe there was a single clue from a silent-era movie. That felt like a big hole, and I hope future audio tournaments make more of an effort to clue from silent film.

[magin]

I liked this tournament quite a bit, thanks Jonathan and Jules! It was one of the more enjoyable side events I can remember.

I thought the answerline selection for this tournament was excellent. The emphasis on commonlinks was a good idea---the variety was enjoyable as a listening experience and I imagine they played the best at the end. Some of my favorite in this vein were bears, body swapping, Russia, hunter, and bars. The buzz distributions on qblitz look good, so kudos for building well-constructed questions.

The author questions were great, and the dialogue questions (who is the actor being addressed) were a neat idea. I think the letter tossups played fine, though I admit some of the movie groupings felt a bit disparate.

Some of the questions had, perhaps, unnecessarily hard giveaways. I'm thinking here of the Blazing Saddles, Scorsese, and Sweden tossups, which had much lower conversion rates than one would expect for those answerlines. I prefer the sort of giveaway like "we rob banks" on Bonnie and Clyde.

I appreciate that this tournament clued across the highbrow-lowbrow spectrum, and from a wide temporal range. There was something for everyone and I would recommend this tournament to anyone who likes movies of any sort.

Early on I felt that the tossups leaned too much on the side of breadth over depth. By this I mean that if someone knew something about Barry Lyndon but not Love Story, they would have to recognize a more difficult clue from Barry Lyndon to convert the tossup at all. Compare this to a normal quizbowl tossup on Dostoevsky cluing from The Gambler and a couple more famous things: if you've read the Gambler, it's still possible to miss one or two clues from it and convert the tossup at the end, no matter your knowledge of the more famous stuff (at some point you're getting a hard clue, maybe an easy to medium clue, a plot description and a title drop). I think though that as the tournament went on I noticed more and more tossups give multiple clues from the same movie.

I may be misremembering, but I don't believe there was a single clue from a silent-era movie. That felt like a big hole, and I hope future audio tournaments make more of an effort to clue from silent film.

Thanks for the great feedback, Henry. Glad you liked the answer lines and author tossups (though I'm sure you're all glad I turned my tossup on James Jones into the World War 2 tossup). I agree that the letter tossups could have a grab bag feel--some of them, like the tossups on S and G, were themed around movies from the late 1940s and 1950s, but a number of them became less themed as we had to move clues around.

The Scorsese tossup was also a themed tossup on his movies about bands, which is why it probably played harder than it would otherwise. For Blazing Saddles and Sweden, that's on us for not finding easier giveaways. We thought they were easier than they ended up.

Also, we did include a clue from The Gold Rush in the gold tossup, so that's at least one clue from a silent movie. We probably could have included more, though.

[Gene Harrogate]

I may be misremembering, but I don't believe there was a single clue from a silent-era movie. That felt like a big hole, and I hope future audio tournaments make more of an effort to clue from silent film.

For posterity, this was me trying to be funny.