2023 Chicago Open - General Discussion and Thanks

[Shorts are comfy and easy to wear]

Thanks to everyone who joined us at Northwestern to play CO yesterday. We'd love to hear your feedback on the set in general here. However, several thank yous are needed first for those who made this set happen:

• The writers and editors, who brought so much creativity, positivity, and talent to the production. It was a pleasure working with you all.

• Our TDs, Em and Young, for organizing a smooth day-of

• The playtesters for their valuable feedback

• The staff who volunteered their time

• The Northwestern club for arranging the rooms

I personally also want to shout out Henry, who was incredibly responsive to all writing and logistical concerns during production, taking care of most of them before I even knew they existed. I don't know if this set would have happened in only six months without his leadership.

Finally, a comment on the difficulty of the set. Our stated goal was to write a difficulty-controlled set that would be fairly generous as COs go in early clues and bonuses. That didn't quite happen -- while we were successful in keeping tossup answerline difficulty in check, the bonus medium and hard parts played rather harder than we would have liked, in line with pre-2021 COs. Hopefully players were still able to enjoy the set they got, even if it was less accessible than the set we first envisioned.

[Gene Harrogate]

Besides what Alex said above, I'd like to thank a few people in particular:
-Alex and Young are the ones who took the initiative to make this tournament happen in the first place, and they're the reason you got to play the 2023 Chicago Open. It was a treat to work with them both these past 6 months.
-Tim Morrison did not have an editing role, but was nevertheless a key contributor. In addition to writing some of the best questions in the set, Tim consistently gave great feedback that improved the tournament quality a good deal.
-Ani Perumalia and Jacob Egol not only made substantial contributions in their official roles, but did much of the hard work of checking spelling and grammar across the set. They deserve special thanks for that.
-Em Gunter handled many of the logistics tasks of the last two weeks, a big chunk of work that we are all grateful for.
-The many editors were a great bunch who always somehow managed to get another two packets ready every week. I would especially like to shout out the consistent contributions of Arya Karthik—a relatively new editor whose 60+ questions in this set all represent a great amount of thought and craft—as well as Kevin Thomas, Caleb Kendrick, David Bass, Alistair Gray, and Ryan Rosenberg. An additional thank you to all other editors and writers.
-Thank you Ben Chapman, Jonathan Magin, Amogh Kulkarni, Richard Niu, Evan Knox, Caroline Mao, Michal Gerasimiuk, Nathan Zhang, Anabelle Yang, Raymond Wang, Andrew Zeng, Sam Bailey, Subhamitra Banerjee Roychoudhury, and Mike Cheyne for your consistent and thoughtful feedback during playtesting.

[Asterias Wrathbunny]

I want to thank a few people as well.
- Young Fenimore Lee advocated for my editorship when I reached out to them, and I can't thank them enough for that.
- Henry Atkins showed great leadership and patience throughout the production of the set. He routinely checked in with how production was going along for weekly playtesting (which I sometimes forgot about).
- The writers of the set, especially Tim Morrison, Ani Perumalla, and Ivvone Zhou, who produced great questions. This being my first editing role, I probably asked Tim and Ani for feedback more than the other editors, and they were always helpful.

[dni]

I want to thank everyone who worked on the set, as well as all the players and staffers. I also want to thank Enes Kristo, for supporting me so much over the past several months. It is safe to say that I stumbled at least a few times throughout this process, but Enes was always there to catch me when I fell. Thanks to everyone's help, Young and I were able to make this the greatest tournament of all time.

[Jem Casey]

Thanks to all the editors, writers, and staff for a very enjoyable CO!

I'd like to post later with more specific praise/feedback, but wanted to share a couple things first. Victor (who made this nifty app for viewing the buzz data), Young, and Henry were kind enough to let me add the CO stats to my "advanced stats" site--you can view it (including sortable category, tossup, bonus overviews, an individual leaderboard, and tossup visualizations) here: https://buzzpoints.vercel.app/tournamen ... icago-open. Additionally, I created csv dumps of the raw buzz and bonus data; let me know if you spot any errors there or in the app.

Secondly, I've received approval from the editors to head-edit CO next year. While I don't have further details to share now, I'm looking forward to assembling a team and starting work on the set in the coming months.

[theMoMA]

My feelings on large swathes of this set are similar to my thoughts on the 2019 PIANO set.

I am not sure why contemporary quizbowl writing has decided to focus so squarely on common-link questions on broad answers such as countries/states/kingdoms, languages, regions, bodies of water, peoples, or industries. Some of these questions are very interesting and engaging to play, and some of them are especially nice and simple ways of executing a relatively specific topic that might otherwise have a complicated answer line. But many of them are what I would term "surveys" of a broad concept, and do not attempt to be "about" anything in particular, except a set of clues that refer to the same broad concept. There is nothing wrong with this in the abstract, and such questions certainly can be technically sound and playable, but the tossup format has so many more interesting uses than pulling together the equivalent of the most interesting four or five bits from a particular subsection of a country or region's Wikipedia page.

My preference is for a question to be "about" something more specific than, say, the broad concept of "hydroelectricity" or "Comoros." The question on Russia in the Caucasus is more along the lines of what I'm interested in seeing, but even that is relatively scattershot compared to the kind of specific questions (on specific historical incidents or people) that were conspicuously absent from this tournament. I don't think this was just a history distribution issue, either; it seemed that there were a fairly large number of survey-style questions on authors, countries, etc. in the literature as well, at the expense of tossups on specific characters or works.

When I say I'd like a question to be "about" something, I just mean that the answer line of, say, "Russia" can be used in an almost infinite number of ways. At a very scattershot level, one could lump together any handful of random true facts about Russia into a tossup, although people don't often do this. More often, the question has some kind of theme, which might be as loose as "Russian history" and might be as specific as "Russia at the Battle of Borodino." The more specific you get, the more the question is "actually" "about" something more like the Battle of Borodino than it is about "Russia" in the abstract; the question writer has simply decided, for some expedient reason, to make the answer line "Russia" rather than "Borodino." I prefer a question with the answer line "Russia," especially at higher difficulty tournaments, to be "actually" "about" something other than just "Russia." To me, that is a more rewarding question to hear and to answer, because it calls for the player to recognize something specific, or to figure out what the question is driving at, rather than to have simply encountered one of the clues that the question has haphazardly decided to survey (or to decide that it's time to buzz with Russia because it seems to be the last major empire not mentioned that was very active in the Caucasus).

Not every question has to be specifically "about" something, but a big part of what I enjoy about quizbowl disappears when a huge number of questions are surveys of broad topics. Especially at a harder event, I want plenty of opportunities to think through a wide space of possible answers and possible ways the clues could fit those answers, and knowing the answer is a country or language for a big chunk of tossups already narrows that active thinking process down a lot. CO is a special event because it allows for a wide range of answers, and I thought the humanities editors narrowed that focus a little too much and made the tournament a little less than it could have been as a result.

By my count questions on this sort of answer line accounted for over a quarter of the non-science tossups at this tournament, and were especially prevalent in the history distribution. There is nothing wrong with a question on, say, the Ottoman empire, but I'm looking at the world history, and just about every question is a survey of some broad concept across relatively (and often very) wide ranges of space and/or time: Vietnam war, horses, rafts, Comoros, Sassanids, hydroelectricity, Russia, Sun family, Suriname, Ethiopia, Kashgar, Arabic. Wahhab and Kanishka I are the only answer lines that are relatively specific. The European history is similarly slanted toward these sort of general answer lines. I think this is just too much. The occasional survey question is fine, and I'll certainly take as many interesting questions that are actually "about" something more specific (but happen to have a general answer line for playability reasons) as people are willing to write.

I realize I should put some more general reflections here too. This tournament was, I thought, a major credit to everyone who worked on it. I admit that I wasn't sure how a relatively unseasoned group of editors would take CO and make it their own, but the result was impressive. The questions were appropriately difficult and there were only a handful of clunkers. There were a lot of fun ideas, and it seemed like the editors let many interesting questions from the packet submitters feature as well. As I said above, I thought there were parts of the set that had too many survey-type questions that diminished the CO feel, but that's ultimately an aesthetic preference rather than a playability issue.

[Jem Casey]

Andrew, I think your distinction is interesting but I’m somewhat confused by your diagnosis of the issue wrt to this set and your examples. Are “horses [in Sahelian state building],” “rafts [in pre-Columbian South American material culture],” “Kashgar [in the medieval Central Asian world],” “Sassanid Empire [religious policy],” and so on not rather specific topics for a question to be “about”--or at least, as specific as a Russia tossup themed around Borodino or wars in the Caucasus? In terms of giving players a chance to recognize “what the question is driving at,” these seem at least as suggestive to me as an answer like Wahhab or Kanishka.

In so far as “aboutness” is something that question writers should prioritize in their subdistributions, I would think the property has something to do with what these questions are attempting--that is, a focus on a specific, studyable topic that someone who’s serious about a given area of a discipline might read or write about. But I don’t think this aspect of “aboutness” maps especially well to the actual distinction in your examples, which seems to be between commonlinks and non-commonlinks on specific historical people (or incidents etc., if the tournament had any). For instance, the set of people who would specifically seek out multiple levels of information “about” someone like Kanishka (e.g. professional historians working in this specific niche, quizbowlers preparing for canon expansion, dilettante Wikipedia browsers) is rather tiny and artificial compared to the much more organic communities of history enthusiasts who read “about” relatively broad topics like “Central Asian empires” or “early patronage of Buddhism” (which I assume is the type of engagement this question was written to reward).

If I’ve misread your post entirely and you’re just suggesting that editors should include a larger helping of non-commonlinks in their sets, especially at a tournament like CO where there’s room to experiment with some deep cuts on “specific” topics, I do agree and could see that as a valid subdistributional critique of this year’s history. But if anything, “contemporary quizbowl writing” may be too constrained by attention to themes and "aboutness." While I like an ingeniously themed tossup as much as the next guy, there's nothing aesthetically or pragmatically wrong with just picking 6 great clues about an author or empire without any particular spin.

[theMoMA]

Many of the world history questions themselves slant more toward the specific. I just posted all of the world history answer lines (although not all of them are survey questions) because I think all but two having broad answer lines is a huge proportion that is an indicator by itself. As I tried to indicate in that paragraph, most of these are surveys of broad information to some extent, although some are broader than others.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

If I'm understanding correctly, Andrew's notion of a question "being 'about' something" (or a notion quite similar to it) has previously been discussed using the term "tightly themed".

I lean more toward Jordan's view than Andrew's, stressing that the "best" place on the slider from "loosely themed / survey-level" to "tightly themed/ firmly 'about' something" is quite topic-dependent. I don't think much of the field has much more than a cursory level of engagement with Comoros, so picking Just Six Facts about that country from a broad survey of its history and arranging them in pyramidal order is probably just fine. A tossup that wandered as widely across, say, "the ancient Romans" would feel much more haphazard and uninspired, since we know players have the knowledge and interest to do well at a more specialized/creative subset of all possible facts about ancient Rome.

It is my impression that more questions at all difficulty levels are "'about' something" / are "tightly themed" now than might have been the case, say, 10-15 years ago -- so a reversion to the lower levels of "'about'ness"/"theming" (or, in Andrew's words, to higher levels of "survey-type" questions) that were more typical earlier on in quizbowl history might have been a jarring change of style for some. I also don't think anyone did anything wrong here, especially given the relatively quick timeframe on which this very large and very difficult set was produced.

[theMoMA]

I'd push back on the idea that a tight theme is equivalent to what I'm talking about, Matt. I think what I'm talking about occurs at an earlier point in the writing process, when one sits down and considers what to write, as I said, "about." In your framework, the presupposition seems to be that we've decided to write about the Comoros, and then the only real consideration is how tight or loose the focus should be on a specific aspect of that country's history.

If I were thinking about writing on the Comoros, I wouldn't start there, however. I would sift through the history of the Comoros and decide on something I would like my tossup to be about. I would pick something from the history of the Comoros that I felt was important, interesting, and had good clues that I thought the field would appreciate and have a good chance of knowing. That might be as specific as an individual person or event in Comoran history, or it might be as general as a specific time period in the history of the country; I generally wouldn't go looser than that, at least for a difficult open tournament.

In this case, I agree that an individual person or event is probably too specific, because I would anticipate that being undesirably difficult for the field. But, and this is just my preference, I would probably latch onto something specific (the Comoros/Mayotte territorial issues are my immediate instinct) as the framework for a question, rather than something less specific than that. I generally like asking for things that are important for reasons I perceive are important, and I think this is best accomplished by picking something for the question to be "about," even if it ends up being (as the actual question essentially was) a broad survey of Comoran history across a certain time period.

I really don't like the idea of picking an answer and then finding clues that apply to it, with tighter or looser reference to some "theme"; I don't work like that, and I think questions are better when one doesn't, because what the answer line is and what the question is actually about are two separate things that need only have the slightest relationship to one another.

Once I'd decided to write on the Comoros/Mayotte territorial issues, I would think about the best way of framing the answer line so that it's not too complicated and the best way of framing the clues so that they're not too guessable. The best way to do that is probably to have the answer line "Comoros" and to work the clues around that answer with that conceit. This will result in something that looks like a "tightly themed" question, but I don't think that's what it is. I think it's really a question that is about the _Comoros/Mayotte territorial issues of the late 20th century_ but has the least-restrictive plausible answer line. That's the kind of question I would like to see at Chicago Open, whether it has a country answer line or not.

Of course, such a question would end up touching on many of the same clues that a survey-style question would, because many of the politicians, events, geographical issues, etc. that are important to Comoros's general history will also feature in the story of its territorial issues with Mayotte. But you will have tied those issues to a framework that gives them some inherent context and structure and meaning within the course of late-20th-century history, rather than treating "the history of the Comoros" as a separate and siloed topic that stands alongside various other national histories.

Finally, I do agree that the common-link questions that are written now tend to be better than those of yore, which often were truly random samplings of clues that all pointed to the same answer, but I think quizbowl used to have a lot more answers on very specific hard answer lines (people, battles, books, etc.). Some of those are too specific and too difficult and best left in the past, but I think it's historically exceptional how many questions are (difficult) surveys of very basic answer lines (such as countries, regions, and bodies of water) at recent open events. If I had my way, I would like to see some of that fall away with a return to a higher level of specificity in what questions are about, and possibly even in the answer lines themselves.

[Shorts are comfy and easy to wear]

Preferring tossups on narrower topics is completely valid and they are not inherently better or worse than ones with wider themes, but such questions are not going to fill the majority of any distro I produce. Ultimately, I write questions for myself; what gets me through the hours of research and editing for both tossups and bonuses is the joy I have in investigating cool historical ideas. Medieval Arabic geography, staged train crashes, Sahelian horses, the complex meaning and memory of the Vazimba, spitting laws, the symbolism of lion hunting in Assyria, moral panic in the 80s, food politics in 18th century France- these were some of the most challenging questions to write, but I love their concepts, they're the ones I had the most fun writing, and they're the ones I feel the most proud of. I can't do it all the time, but it's ideas like these that I try to base my writing around, even if the idea is just a novel answerline. Were any of these perfectly calibrated? Probably not, but I will continue to write more questions like them because they make me want to keep writing.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I definitely agree with Andrew that I prefer open tournaments to actually use the latitude that they're given. People who sign up for CO know what they're getting and getting a healthy serving of hard answers, or not-necessarily-hard-but-unlikely-elsewhere answers, is part of the magic of the tournament. You can play a tossup on Cuban poetry that has a Nicolas Guillén clue or two at pretty much any event, but a tossup on Guillén himself is something you'll only see at an open or collegiate nationals. A question on early modern Russian intervention in the Caucasus can get away with being on, say, Russia AND Persia (or some reasonable equivalent) and you can expect teams to answer it; if you wanted to go in a slightly different direction, you could even toss up Imam Shamil. One of my least favorite tossups of the tournament was the one on the Pyrenees, which clued a bunch of amusing but highly obscure facts and seemed doomed to turn into a buzzer race on Catalan/Spanish names.

However, I'd also certainly agree with Jordan as well - I don't think the history questions were, by and large, particularly "broad" or "un-themed." To take an example beyond the aforementioned Russia question, the Ethiopia tossup has an excellent idea behind it: using the meat of the question to talk about various folks of Ethiopian origin in medieval India. Personally, this question was frustrating because I recognized that the second clue was talking about Malik Ambar, but I wasn't sure where exactly in East Africa he was from, but that's a skill issue. Apparently many these folks are often referred to as habshis*, i.e. Abyssinians, and there's even a whole Habshi dynasty in Bengal! Of course, such a term at the time could easily denote many people not necessarily from within the modern-day borders of Ethiopia, but it turns out these people are indeed all from Ethiopia, so it all lines up nicely. There were many other solid questions in this vein, such as Arabic - I reflexively said "Persian" after buzzing on a title by Qazwini, a guy I mainly know as a "Persian geographer," but I definitely should have figured that he'd probably be writing in Arabic, as did most Persian historians of the time. Heck, most of the notable Arabic-language geographers (Masudi, etc.) are Persians!

With regards to the history questions overall, I greatly appreciate Alex's unique writing style, interests, and approach to the game; it's definitely inspired me to look deeper at specific points of social history and world interaction. True to his style, there were several "industry" and "goods" questions and archaeology content that were far from rote and we got some great questions on Native American history. I'll also compliment Alex for responding to feedback on his last all-history editing effort (Illinois Open) and including somewhat "traditional" political content than before.

Similar with the world literature - I particularly appreciated that this category had several solid questions on older literature. Heck, I was deciding whether or not to study up more on Han Shan the Thursday before the tournament, chose not to, and of course regretted it. Alas.

*As I learned in my conversation with Jaskaran Singh, who powered that tossup against my team, this term is sometimes now used as a slur; however, many sites I've found seem to use it in a neutral sense, so I use it here.

[Gene Harrogate]

Thank you for sparking this very interesting discussion, Andrew. I don't want to weigh in on the theory at this point, but since I have easy access to the spreadsheet, I thought it would be helpful if I quickly provided some data for the more incidental point about the literature answerlines.

Here are the literature tossups that got played on Saturday. I've bolded answerlines that are either specific works or elements of those specific works (such as characters or places; I've included "internal" commonlinks that cut across two closely related works, such as Ilium from Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five). Of course, in some places the answerline might not most accurarely show what a tossup is "about" -- as in the case of the Cervantes tossup, which entirely clues him dunking on the author of the fake sequel to Don Quixote.

American: Doubt, Ilium, NY, Bishop, "The School", "Paul's Case", Dickinson's letters, soda, wild tongues, Plath, Intruder in the Dust, Smith, Kavalier, Elmer Rice, Watching Movies, detectives, Abbey

British: Sam Selvon, The Sea (Banville), Charles Lamb, 1910s (WW1), Tristram Shandy, georgic poems, Taste of Honey, crowns, Enoch Soames, Conrad, Rasselas, End of the Affair, Yeats, Antony, Marguerite, the sea in Old English

Euro: Shklovsky, Helen, Griboedov, Kleist, Giradoux, Sentimental Education, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Tuscany, the titular Hunter Gracchus, Dutch, Cervantes, Zone, Schulz, Ernst Junger, Griselda, dance (Rilke)

World: Nahuatl, empire, the character John Coetzee, Zainichi, messengers, Macbeth, Neruda, firing squads, Hanshan, Silk, photographers, Adunis, Cuba, Eileen Chang, Barbados, 2666

[Chimango Caracara]

If I were thinking about writing on the Comoros, I wouldn't start there, however. I would sift through the history of the Comoros and decide on something I would like my tossup to be about. I would pick something from the history of the Comoros that I felt was important, interesting, and had good clues that I thought the field would appreciate and have a good chance of knowing. That might be as specific as an individual person or event in Comoran history, or it might be as general as a specific time period in the history of the country; I generally wouldn't go looser than that, at least for a difficult open tournament.

I didn’t expect the Comoros question to be so controversial, but in fact this was more or less my exact writing process. In this case, I was not interested in the modern politics of Mayotte, but rather the archipelago’s cosmopolitan connections across the “Indian Ocean world” and the Comorians’ unusual relationships with both European powers and other areas in the Swahili sphere.

The first four lines are all “about” different facets of that framework: a Comorian explorer who worked for the Germans and observed Muslim practices in the Russian Empire, how the Comorian fad for “culturally appropriating” English customs empowered elite Comorians in their dealings with the British (although the clue didn’t have enough space to go into depth on this story, I highly recommend reading Domesticating the World for more details), Malagasy conflicts with Comorian rulers during a period of sustained naval warfare across the southern Swahili Coast, and then a summary clue about the most powerful Comorian sultanate.

While I generally prefer more chronologically focused history questions as well, I included late clues about 20th-century political and economic history because I wanted the question to be smooth and pyramidal and I expected that they would be better known by more players. As Matt said, it’s important to consider that it's a somewhat niche topic.

Although it wasn’t the most obviously exciting tossup conceit, I wanted to be cognizant of balancing difficulty in addition to a breadth of topics and geographical areas when I selected answerlines to write about. Our packet had several difficult and non-standard answerlines, so I thought a basic country answerline fit well, but considered it worth a question because a history TU on the Comoros would probably be too difficult at lower levels (although I agree with Will that I like it when there are a lot of adventurous ideas at CO).

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

I wanted to thank all the CO editors for producing, overall, a rewarding and enjoyable question set. Around six months ago I was genuinely concerned that Chicago Open wouldn't happen, so it's great to see that so many younger editors came together to produce an event of this quality.

A non-exhaustive list of questions I particularly liked would include the tossups on Kleist, the Huron, and Wang Yangming, as well as the bonuses on Mont Blanc and Hagoromo chalk. I would also like to thank Caleb Kendrick for including a literature tossup under philosophy in the Finals.

The main issue I had with the set was that it felt a bit disjointed. Bonuses seemed to vary in difficulty much more than I remember from past COs; many bonuses had two hard parts, and more than a handful of others could have been put in ACF Regionals with a little editing. The science bonuses seemed particularly unkind, based on people's anecdotal reports and a quick perusal of the stats.

The "Beliefs" categories in particular seemed out of sync with the rest of the tournament. Where most of the tournament felt like a harder, but equally "canonical" version of ACF Nationals, the Beliefs tossups felt like they belonged in a more experimental tournament like Gaddis or Scattergories. As entertaining as the myth tossup on the Outer Banks was, I think the category overall could have been toned down.

Despite those issues, I had a lot of fun playing this tournament, and I look forward to playing future events by the editors responsible.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

I would also like to thank Caleb Kendrick for including a literature tossup under philosophy in the Finals.

I know this is a joke, but I made an honest effort to be less dogmatic in how I approached this set. I feel like I've mellowed out some since the pinnacle of my philosophy mafia days, and I hope this tournament reflected that.

Also, mea culpa to Will Alston because the lead-in to the Wang Yangming question didn't do a good enough job of distinguishing him from Zhu Xi, which sucks because it was my favorite tossup that I wrote for this set :(

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

I would also like to thank Caleb Kendrick for including a literature tossup under philosophy in the Finals.

I know this is a joke, but I made an honest effort to be less dogmatic in how I approached this set. I feel like I've mellowed out some since the pinnacle of my philosophy mafia days, and I hope this tournament reflected that.

Also, mea culpa to Will Alston because the lead-in to the Wang Yangming question didn't do a good enough job of distinguishing him from Zhu Xi, which sucks because it was my favorite tossup that I wrote for this set :(

It's sort of a joke, the philosophy questions seemed very good tho.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

don't wanna assume anything but this set's chem felt extremely "not edited" (not very edited claisen tu that seemed to have issues, enolate tu, and allyl that clued claisen very early) kind of was frustrating as 3/12 !!! of the chem tus that was played were on extraordinarily related topics.

No analytic tus, 1/1 mechanochem??
(there were a few amusing answerlines for sure outside of these though)

[I like cookies]

NOTE: Spoiler Warning for Beliefs Content in CO. If you haven’t read the packets or used qbreader, then I highly suggest you check it out before proceeding through this monologue.

Firstly, I would like to give a tremendous, and most heartfelt thanks to my frontal lobe, without whom I would be as useless as a kiwi (the bird, and also the fruit I suppose). My occipital and temporal lobes also deserve some appreciation. Not my parietal though. No one cares about that waste of flesh.

In all seriousness, and some levity, I cannot emphasize enough how much this entire experience has meant to me. I’ve made friends and frenemies, connected with fellow dino lovers and cryptid enthusiasts, and have done more to damage Ganon’s sanity than I could have ever dreamed.

First things first. Huge thanks to Ashish, Munir, Jacob, Young, Ganon, and Henry who stepped in to write great questions and willingly battered a deluge of dozens of DMs from yours truly inquiring about their thoughts on edited questions, their clue sources, and a whole bunch of other minor issues. Secondly, I have to thank all the teams who chose to submit religion and mythology questions for the tournament (especially the three separate individuals who chose to write about Alexander the Great in Arabian folklore). While I wasn’t able to use all your content due to overlap or other issues, it was an absolute pleasure reading them.

Also, special thanks has to be awarded to several playtesters whose criticisms and viewpoints only served to make my questions better. Subhamitra and Amogh deserve special mention for their invaluable thoughts and criticisms and huge thanks has to go to Ani for catching a few mistakes that I hadn’t realized I’d made. Also, special thanks to Tim for catching all my typing errors. Ashish’s sanity thanks you for your service.

Annabelle Yang deserves a huge thank-you from me as well. She’s been somewhat of a mentor to me ever since I started writing beliefs questions in quizbowl, and her feedback and support has meant the world to me. I can’t thank her enough for everything that she's helped me accomplish.

For this set, I’ve approached writing and editing the Beliefs content in a way similar to the way I edited for ARCADIA 2. My goal was simple. Lift up underrepresented portions of the Beliefs canon that I felt had been neglected, having come up before as one-off clues or bonus parts, and give them their day in the spotlight. I did this with the khanda TU, an extremely sacred object in Sikhism that is arguably more of a sacred “k” than the five K’s. I did this with Bes, an extremely important Egyptian god of childbirth who is arguably the most widespread Egyptian deity in ancient times, his appeal to the common-folk lending him worship from Rome to the middle of Persia. I did this with Henry Atkin’s excellent TU on Diocletian which focused on the Great Persecution and the sheer hatred that his actions generated in the Christian community in terms of folklore.

Even for more well-trodden topics like the wendigo or Hephaestus and Athena, I aimed to include clues that I felt had been neglected by the greater canon. For the former, I was shocked to see little to no reference to the concept of curing a wendigo by drinking boiled fat or their etymological association with owls as I’d encountered those ideas naturally through things like PBS videos, podcasts, and general reading. For the latter, the religious worship of Hephaestus has always been somewhat intriguing to me and being able to connect it with his close relationship to Athena seemed like an interesting way to write about it.

With my bonuses, I aimed to target important concepts and ideas that similarly have been neglected in my opinion. Ideas like “blood-brotherhood” and the “Vetala tales,” both of which were unfortunately bonus 20s, and Munir’s great bonus on “Korean creation narratives,” were prototypical examples of this idea.

However, despite all this, it does seem that my questions played a lot harder than I intended in most TUs and some bonuses which is my bad entirely. For instance, the focus on the early half of the Yudhisthira question on dharma should’ve probably been lessened a bit more, though, I suppose that is the price of hindsight. With my bonuses, I tried to make it so that my easy parts were not “curved yellow fruit” trivial, though that seems to have backfired somewhat with my parts on Scorpius and black - both of which had less than desirable conversions. Middle part conversion was also lower than I’d hoped as well. I’ll need to spend a bit more time thinking to see where I went wrong with some of those clues.

Looking back on all of this, I can see why many of these ideas generated a feeling of extracanonicity or being a bit too unique and strange. You don’t typically expect “this region” in a mythology question to turn out to be the Outer Banks or this “stuff” as a pronoun to turn out to be moonbeams. I admit that I probably let a bit too much “kevin content (as the Triangle people like to call it)” into the set with more personally interesting ideas such as Puss n’ Boots (I blame the Last Wish movie for being so good) and the Outer Banks (I blame my NC obsession), which I apologize for, though at the time I thought that I had sufficiently balanced these ideas out with more canon topics like pearls, animal sacrifice, Samhain, Kabbalah, the Mesopotamian underworld, Pasiphae, and Indonesia. Such is the price of hindsight I suppose. We should all probably be glad that my attempts at writing a Central Asian myth TU on wolves and crows were all for naught lol.

At the end of the day, I do hope that, despite any frustration generated from the question difficulty, y’all enjoyed the Beliefs content. I hope I got some smiles off Young’s Bigfoot abduction question and a few chuckles off that rabies question in the finals that coincided with the alleged semi-rabid dog incident.

Now, to end things off on a high note, here’s some praise for some of the great submitted questions I received.

Lawrence et al. submitted some amazing content including a top-tier Mithras TU that I wish that I could’ve included and the fascinating latria and dulia bonus.

I wish I could’ve used Foster et al.’s Bhagavata Purana question as a TU, but had to settle for transforming it into a bonus due to packetization. Once again, just pure top-tier content that I adored.

Bobrow et al., submitted a fascinating doppelganger TU which made me search up the Myths and Legends episode on that same topic immediately after seeing it. I wasn’t able to include it in the set, but it was truly a marvelous idea worthy of the label kevin content, or I suppose, Bobrow et al. content.

Brownstein et al., were humans after my own heart. I could never have thought up anything a tenth as devious as a bonus on Torres Strait Islander mythology. Also, the Hawaii Other Religion question was an incredible addition that was a pleasure to include.

Mirkin et al.,’s jumping the broom TU was an astonishing read. I can only hope that my bonus transformation did it justice. Olympias was also an idea that I adored.

Bollinger et al.’s Tara TU was insanely good. If it weren’t for the fact that we’d already had two Tibetan Buddhism-related questions and way too many name answerlines, I’d have included it in a heartbeat.

Loved Du et al.’s allium in Hinduism bonus and Kasinski et al.’s baptism bonus.

Once again, thanks to the three people who wrote Alexander the Great in Arabian/African folklore TU’s. Would’ve definitely used one if it weren’t for Alex having used him in a history question already. I’m not saying that you should blame him, but ……. Jk, jk.

[Jem Casey]

(just for my own amusement, a last word on the above discussion--actual set content comments below)

I'm still not sure I see how Andrew's conception of "aboutness" cashes out differently than what Matt J called being "tightly themed." The writing process that Andrew advocates certainly seems similar to what the set's history tossups evince / what Nick describes pursuing. Is the difference just that a hypothetical Comoros tossup clued from the Mayotte territorial issues could be rewritten to be on a more specific answer while keeping all the same clues, while a Comoros tossup clued from its connections in the Swahili world could not? If so, I'll admit that's not something I would ever notice while playing a set and wouldn't be able to track accurately at game-speed if I tried; nor does it seem all that related to the issue of "arbitrariness" that Andrew tied his critique to by linking his classic PIANO post. And as others have said more eloquently, the wisdom of this approach depends a lot on the tiers of knowledge that you think the field will have about the topic you're trying to tossupify--I'm not really interested in the 6th or 7th most famous thing about the Comoros/Mayotte issue and would be floored if anyone buzzed on a clue about it.

------

One of the amazing things about quizbowl is that, even when writing the year's hardest questions for the year's most talented field, you can pick 8 lines of legitimately notable clues and still produce a challenging question with an appropriate buzz curve--there's just that much famous stuff out there. I liked this CO a lot, but thought large sections of the tossup could have gotten into such "famous stuff" faster. In many categories, Will's advice from last year to trim an early clue and "paint more of a picture" in the later clues could have been implemented liberally without making things too easy. Of course, there were plenty of exceptions to this trend--in the first packet for instance, the tossups on the Vietnam War and Kazan show that you give a lot more than difficult monographs in the first couple sentences without producing (afaik) frustrating buzzer races or games of chicken. But the pattern nonetheless stands out when reviewing the set, even in questions whose topics and executions I otherwise love.

Here's an example taken from the set's delightful slate of European Lit tossups: Tuscany. I'm very envious of this idea and the clues Itamar picked seem great; but 60% of the way through the tossup, the most famous thing we've gotten is a specific line by Cecco Angiolieri. I hope I'm not over-indexing on the buzz data here, but this clue seems clearly fine for a second sentence spot, which would leave room in the middle for, e.g., more De Vulgari Eloquentia buzzpoints and maybe a couple extra opportunities for more straightforward Dante laterals later on.

Caleb and the other contributors did a great job in this respect with the philosophy; I don't really see any clues across the category that I'd pin as unfairly niche for their spot in the tossup. I also appreciated the well-calibrated and entertaining hard parts like push-pin, Scott Shapiro, the principal principle, and truthmakers.

I'd also like to give some props to Arya Karthik, who produced some seriously impressive work in their writing debut at this level. Like Matt, I enjoyed the Kleist tossup and their other Euro Lit contributions, but also wanted to praise the tossup on "The School" for more nearly approximating the experience of being in a writing workshop than any other tossup I've played recently.

[ThisIsMyUsername]

Thanks to the editors for this tournament. I want to particularly commend Caleb for what I thought was a very fine set of Philosophy questions.

This post is about the Literature questions. On an individual level, I feel like most of the tossups in these categories were well-executed. (Like Andrew, I do wish there were fewer common-links and more tossups on individual works; but, of course, this is a matter of personal taste.) The one piece of constructive criticism I want to offer is with regard to the way in which subdistributions were handled across packets.

There are proponents of geography-based literature distributions and there are proponents of genre-based literature distributions. However, in an ideal world, the actual products of the two schools of thought would look rather similar, because each would treat the other’s distribution as their own subdistribution (i.e. the geographically distributed packet would nonetheless maintain genre diversity, and vice versa). Geography-based literature distributers do not de jure guarantee (e.g.) 1/1 poetry per packet the way genre-based distributers do; but in practice, most of them provide this. What matters most, however, is not the quantities of questions in these genres, but rather how they are distributed across packets. If there are (e.g.) only 12 poetry tossups and 15 packets, it is high priority to make sure no packet has multiple poetry tossups.

Of course, this can put one in a bind when editing packet-submission tournaments in which submitted packets are combined. What do you do if, for example, the best American Lit and Euro Lit submitted tossups are both drama? Do you keep the two best, even if it overloads one genre? Or do you sadly cut one of the best questions to maintain genre diversity? I value genre diversity enough that I tend to do the latter, but I can understand people who do the former, albeit as sparingly as possible.

I feel that this tournament did not handle this issue well. Genres were conspicuously clumped. For example, of the 14 packets played by all teams, 5 of them had exactly one poetry tossup. All of the others had either two poetry tossups or no poetry tossups. However, from looking through the credited authors of the questions in the packets, it appears that these cannot be accounted for by the binds of packet submission. Packet 4 contains two submitted literature tossups, both on prose fiction. Rather than filling the remaining two slots with poetry, drama, or criticism, it appears that the editors added two more prose fiction tossups. Packets 6 and 9 already had submitted poetry tossups, but the editors added another one to each of them. Both of Packet 10’s poetry tossup are by the editors. The only two short fiction tossups in the editors’ packets—those packets played by all; I have not examined the finals packets—are in Packet 14. Most of the tournament’s essays/criticism tossups appear in Packets 10–14, one in each packet.

While this is not the end of the world by any means, this is something that I encourage the editors to consider in their future when assigning tossups to packets or even when initially choosing answerlines for replacement questions.

[Gene Harrogate]

Thanks to the editors for this tournament. I want to particularly commend Caleb for what I thought was a very fine set of Philosophy questions.

This post is about the Literature questions. On an individual level, I feel like most of the tossups in these categories were well-executed. (Like Andrew, I do wish there were fewer common-links and more tossups on individual works; but, of course, this is a matter of personal taste.) The one piece of constructive criticism I want to offer is with regard to the way in which subdistributions were handled across packets.

There are proponents of geography-based literature distributions and there are proponents of genre-based literature distributions. However, in an ideal world, the actual products of the two schools of thought would look rather similar, because each would treat the other’s distribution as their own subdistribution (i.e. the geographically distributed packet would nonetheless maintain genre diversity, and vice versa). Geography-based literature distributers do not de jure guarantee (e.g.) 1/1 poetry per packet the way genre-based distributers do; but in practice, most of them provide this. What matters most, however, is not the quantities of questions in these genres, but rather how they are distributed across packets. If there are (e.g.) only 12 poetry tossups and 15 packets, it is high priority to make sure no packet has multiple poetry tossups.

Of course, this can put one in a bind when editing packet-submission tournaments in which submitted packets are combined. What do you do if, for example, the best American Lit and Euro Lit submitted tossups are both drama? Do you keep the two best, even if it overloads one genre? Or do you sadly cut one of the best questions to maintain genre diversity? I value genre diversity enough that I tend to do the latter, but I can understand people who do the former, albeit as sparingly as possible.

I feel that this tournament did not handle this issue well. Genres were conspicuously clumped. For example, of the 14 packets played by all teams, 5 of them had exactly one poetry tossup. All of the others had either two poetry tossups or no poetry tossups. However, from looking through the credited authors of the questions in the packets, it appears that these cannot be accounted for by the binds of packet submission. Packet 4 contains two submitted literature tossups, both on prose fiction. Rather than filling the remaining two slots with poetry, drama, or criticism, it appears that the editors added two more prose fiction tossups. Packets 6 and 9 already had submitted poetry tossups, but the editors added another one to each of them. Both of Packet 10’s poetry tossup are by the editors. The only two short fiction tossups in the editors’ packets—those packets played by all; I have not examined the finals packets—are in Packet 14. Most of the tournament’s essays/criticism tossups appear in Packets 10–14, one in each packet.

While this is not the end of the world by any means, this is something that I encourage the editors to consider in their future when assigning tossups to packets or even when initially choosing answerlines for replacement questions.

I agree with this and thought it was conspicuous while reading Saturday. The issue of nicely distributing genres was actually something we paid a good deal of attention to when creating packets during the playtesting process. Unfortunately, the final product was much more inelegant due to some last minute question swapping, which I didn't notice in the rush to get the tournament out the door on Thursday.

[DavidB256]

It was an enormous honor to be entrusted with editing 8.75% (9/9 biology, 8/8 math, 15/14 physics, not including tiebreakers) of quizbowl’s hardest set, even if I did obtain the position through a single procrastinatory forums post. I am moderately proud of my work, and definitely learned a lot from it, but I understand from community discussion and compiled statistics that I failed the community in many ways. I am truly embarrassed about the egregious conversion rates of many of my bonuses, especially after making the same mistake while editing this year's NSC. I plan to take at least several months off of all quizbowl writing so that I can refresh my sources of "real knowledge" and engage in more exegetical packet study in order to improve my sense of difficulty. I also understand that I relied too heavily on contemporary primary literature in my clues, which often came across as obscure fluff. As I wrote in the NSC discussion forum, my ability to work on this set was plagued by my chronic overcommitment that caused me to, in some ways, not realize my potential as a writer and editor.

This set had six science editors, which was obviously too much. Coordination on biology with Itamar was hardly existent, and osci packetization was a bit of a mess with three editors sharing slices of 8/8, 8/8, and 2/2. I won't belabor this point because it was largely an artefact of the rushed production of this set. This set had no women editors, and, by my rough estimate from scrolling through names on Discord, only three women on the writing team. A system in which editors must publicly self-nominate impedes women's participation, and I hope that Jordan Brownstein employs a better hiring process when assembling his editing team for next year's iteration of the set.

Jeremy Cummings rightfully pointed out that the math in this set was too analysis-heavy. I initially subdistributed the 8/8 math among 3 analysis, 1 probability, 2 topology, 3 abstract algebra, 1 "low-level" (e.g. set theory or category theory), 1 geometry, 1 number theory, 1 any/other, and 3 statistics. The "low-level" question was the Borel tossup, which I would not have permitted if I had significantly more time to work on the set. It was born out of what I believe was an innocent misinterpretation of my words by Tim, who took "set theory" to mean "some clues on descriptive set theory and then more analysis." The any/other question was more analysis, the tossup on the Weierstrass approximation theorem, and the number theory, the bonus on the n over log n / Ivan Vinogradov / Riemann hypothesis, was also analytic. I was warned about the braids tossup multiple times during playtesting. Sorry for these mistakes. I hope that they did not significantly dilute the playing experience of what I would otherwise consider to be a successful and hearty math distribution.

Working on this set has further radicalized me against science tossups on specific people. By little fault of their authors, and slightly more fault of their editor, I am unhappy with the tossups on Fermi and Thomas, Wigner, and Schwinger. Such questions often struggle with pyramidality and thematic cohesion, and they typically reward artificial surfing of eponymous concepts over the deep engagement with specific topics that we prefer to favor in quizbowl. An exception is the Borel tossup, which provides a fun glance into his more obscure work in descriptive set theory. Another example that is good for the same reason is 2021 Illinois Open's tossup on Cauchy themed around his contributions to continuum mechanics.

My rough impression is that I was more liberal than my co-editors with the inclusion of submitted questions. After reading Erik Mukherjee's comments about the tossups on amino acid starvation, rogue waves, and RNA splicing, I understand that I did not do the most thorough job of editing some of the submitted questions, and I apologize to the writers for not putting in the effort necessary to make their content shine. I was consistently impressed with the ingenuity of submitted questions and was able to include every question that I really wanted, with the exception of Ali Hamzeh's beautiful math bonus. Du et al.'s math bonus was awesome, but a touch too whimsical to include in an academic set. Submitted packets came in at a distended pace, with one packet not having any science questions until several weeks after its initial submission and another never including any science questions at all.

After spending months on NSC writing meticulous answerlines that accepted all clued uses of the primary answer, I allotted less time to answerline elaboration while working on this set. I understand that this led to some frustrating, undeserved experiences on my bonus part on codon degeneracy, the tossup on extra dimensions, and the tossup on RNA splicing.

Thankses, in no particular order: To Jordan Brownstein and Victor Pavao for crafting advanced stats viewers that helped me to better understand how my questions played. To Itamar, Jon Settle, and Ryan Rosenberg for providing stern oversight when I needed it. To Arya Karthik and Tim for writing high volumes of awesome content in my categories. It would be a true loss to the quizbowl community if Arya does not continue contributing to high-difficulty sets. I probably Googled "qbwiki tim morison [sic]" ten times throughout production because I can never remember how to spell this man's surname. To Ganon, who, as is usual in quizbowl, was. Ganon has been a strong, wholesome source of motivation for me over the last few months, and he actually greenlit my idea for a fine arts tossup that I never got around to writing. To Henry Atkins for being incredibly diligent in maintaining productivity around deadlines. To Young Fenimore Lee and Alex Fregeau for also being fabulous coordinators. To Caleb Kendrick, for entertaining multiple drafts of my single non-science contribution to the set with uniquely helpful advice.

[MMSANCHEZ]

This set could have benefitted from more questions in the style of 2022 ACF Regionals tossup on Free Radicals.

[vydu]

I think David is being a bit harsh on himself re: physics, considering that it's one of the hardest categories to edit at the hardest tournament, and he had to do it with less time than normal. I had a great time playing this set's physics - there was a lot of stuff I was really excited to hear come up, and a lot of stuff I'm excited to learn more about. My one broad critique would be subdistributional -- it seemed like the physics was skewed heavily towards quantum/QFT and theory-heavy contemporary research topics, and I would have liked to see more core mechanics, E&M, statistical physics content (though it seems like some of this ended up as bonus 19/20s, so we didn't play them). But this is CO, and I think it's a perfectly defensible distributional choice to focus less on those things.

More generally, thanks to all the writers, editors, and staff/organizers for putting on this tournament - I had a great time at my first CO.

[touchpack]

I wanted to thank all the CO editors for producing, overall, a rewarding and enjoyable question set. Around six months ago I was genuinely concerned that Chicago Open wouldn't happen, so it's great to see that so many younger editors came together to produce an event of this quality.

This is also my main takeaway from this set's science, which absolutely exceeded my expectations. There were definitely questions that I had issues with, but most of the questions were somewhere between "reasonably well executed" and "excellent". I think the biggest systemic problem I had with the science were weird difficulty swings, mostly bonuses overshooting. The Turing, Knudsen, depth (I loved this bonus part but uh, I was the only one who converted it and it was marked easy lol), inlining, and mechanochemistry bonus parts are the ones that in my brief review of the set stood out to me as the biggest overshooters, but this is definitely not an exhaustive list of bonus parts that could/should have been toned down a bit. That said, bonus difficulty is tough to calibrate, especially for newer editors at high difficulties, and contra Eric, I didn't actually have a major problem with the hard parts being too hard. The issue with using conversion data for hard parts is sometimes the players who would have converted them just didn't get to hear the bonus (for example, I would have converted two-way and the SMA/descending aorta). There were definitely individual hard parts I didn't like (like the Marcus theory one, where I answered "(delta G plus lambda)^2 / 4*lambda," which is the standard expression taught in the vast, vast majority of sources I can find on Marcus theory. I don't really understand why anyone would ever care about the theoretical activation barrier for a reaction with no change in Gibbs free energy, since in real life reactions do in fact tend to be either endergonic or exergonic), but "hard part at Chicago Open" is very difficult to calibrate and I think the science did a passable job.

Re: David, I definitely think "failed the community" is much too strong a phrase--this was a good and fun set! But I do think your self-reflection has absolutely identified areas where you can improve in the future. I was honestly surprised to see that my questions got in 100% unedited, including no added accepts/prompts/rejects to the answerline for the secretion tossup. It's definitely my fault for being lazy to get my questions in by the deadline, but editors should be very cognizant of how missing prompts can affect players enjoyment of what are otherwise flawless questions (see, the bonus part on codon degeneracy not accepting the answer that many other players gave, wobble).

Also, shoutout to Itamar for writing incredibly fun and incredibly real medicine questions. I think my favorites were the tossup on "3" that clued entirely the liver (!!), and the hard parts on SMA/aorta and the Beers criteria.

[everdiso]

I think we should file a class-action lawsuit against whoever was setting the thermostat for the Technical Building that weekend.

[everdiso]

My comments will be limited to the roughly 5/5 of questions that I actually play at this level, meaning history, geography/modern world, and some social science.

I very much liked this set. I was one of the weaker players in the field, but I still felt like the difficulty in my subjects was very fair. It was hard for me, enough that getting any questions felt like a real accomplishment, but easy enough that questions were still very much gettable. Bonus easy parts were almost always legitimate trivia questions rather than silly riddles or very easy "jokes". Maybe bonuses hard parts were a little too difficult - I can't immediately recall any that I converted.

I enjoyed the mix between wide-ranging and more tightly-focused history questions. I also liked how much geography and modern world content this set had. I think there's a ton of room for interesting questions on those topics that reward deep engagement beyond just surfing headlines, and I'd like to see more tournaments write as much there as this one did. I think more of these questions should've been about politics or business, however.

I thought the individual questions were good as well. Transparent tossups seemed pretty rare to me. Lots of questions were very interesting and made me want to read about new things, which I'll expand on in the other thread.

I don't think anyone's mentioned this yet, but I thought this tournament did a very good job of controlling question length, especially in bonuses. I never felt like questions were dragging on too long, which is very rare for hard tournaments. Despite that, questions felt fully fleshed-out and cliffs were rare. Consequently, I think the tournament moved at a very good pace, besides the snafu with one prelim group being much faster than the other (though that was probably caused by that group being stronger).

On that topic: it was frustrating playing in the clearly stronger prelim group, which definitely made it harder for us to get into a higher bracket.

Finally, as we all know, this tournament almost didn't happen and had to be put together in a bit of a rush, relatively speaking. From what I've heard, Young Fenimore Lee played a big role in putting a team together and ensuring we had a Chicago Open, so I'd like to thank them for that. And the editing team certainly came through under that extra time pressure. I'm glad to see that next year's team is already being formed.

[aseem.keyal]

Thanks to the editors, writers, directors, and staffers for a very enjoyable CO! Having been in a similar situation about six years ago, I especially appreciate the willingness of a team of newer editors to take the plunge and produce such a difficult event on a compressed timeframe.

Things I really liked:
1) The selection of literature topics. This was most evident to me in the European Literature, but all the Literature categories reflected this. More so than other sets I've played recently, I felt that the taste and enthusiasm of the editors and writers shined through in the questions. A non-exhaustive list of topics that were particularly exciting includes: Archipelago Books, Enoch Soames, Viktor Shklovsky, Zone, Ernst Jünger, and Eileen Chang
2) The frequent cluing of important recent books, such as How to Hide an Empire, Palo Alto, and Poverty, by America
3) Inclusion of conservative thought (neoconservatism bonus, Adrian Vermeule, and Harry Jaffa). This can often be short-changed in quiz bowl, so it was cool to see it pop up throughout the set
4) The Philosophy, which seemed excellent in topic selection and execution. There was a good mix of questions on important concepts, fun ideas (Salamanca, Hölderlin, Heraclitus quote), and well-written upper canon topics

Things I had a mixed opinion on:
1) The effort to have non-trivial easy parts. I think this is a very important aspect of high-difficulty events that can be easily overlooked. However, according to the advanced stats, the number of bonuses heard by 8-10 teams and with a conversion rate lower than 75 percent is pretty substantial. Ocassionally, these were offset by easier than expected medium parts, but overall I think the calibration could've been a little tighter
2) The less than standard amount of religious practice and Abrahamic religion in the Beliefs category. I'm not the most knowledgeable in this area, but the subdistribution in this category felt off to me. The material was definitely interesting and worth asking about, but I feel like there could've been more balance while still keeping the things that made the category feel so fun
3) The Visual Fine Arts tossups also felt a little unbalanced in topic selection. I think the set would've benefited from more tossups along the lines of the ones on Ottoman sultans, The Jewish Bride, and Spain. To be fair, there was many more of these questions in the bonuses. Overall though, I thought the Visual Fine Arts was very enjoyable, and liked the more out-there answers (Douglas, Crivelli, Soutine, etc)


I want to stress that even in the areas that I felt had a holistic issue, on the level of individual questions, the execution was usually done very well. Overall, I really enjoyed this iteration of Chicago Open and am very grateful to the writers and editors!

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

I hope everyone enjoyed the tournament. Thanks to Alex for being the "chosen one" and kicking off this project. Thanks to Henry for coming in and really helping everything shape out the way it did. Great work Em and Young on the tournament itself.

My involvement in this set was relatively brief to the huge efforts of the others, so I wanted to keep my reflection similarly short. Alex, Henry - thanks for the chance to work on the VFA. Thank you Kevin, Mike Bentley, Itamar, Henry, Young, Tim, Sheena, and the many great submissions for the cool questions. I also wanted to specifically thank Ani for writing 6 questions, all exploring some really hands-on aspects of art. Thank you to the playtesters and proofreaders for your comments that helped iron out my questions.

My main goal for VFA was to make the set look like a traditional art museum. This meant explicitly more World Art (3/3 carved out officially) and a broader exploration of different mediums beyond painting and sculpture. These broader topics included Ani's delightful bonus on Meissen pottery, Sheena's great tossup on embroidery in medieval Europe, Ashish's bonus on katsina art, and my bonus on tapa cloth in Oceania. I wanted to try and have more canonical answerlines though, like the Jewish Bride tossup, Anguissola bonus, and Colombia tossup.

This tournament was really challenging to edit. It was difficult to choose clues in a way that I thought would work to really distinguish between, say, second and third line knowledge. In the data, most of my questions didn't have a good pyramid. Walking the line between "Chicago Open challenge" and "too hard of an answerline" was also difficult to judge. Because of these reasons, I think I failed. I'm sorry if this set's VFA was frustrating. I hope the novelty of the writers' great ideas made up for it. I don't plan on editing CO in the future.

I'd be happy to give feedback on submissions - just reach out to me.

3) The Visual Fine Arts tossups also felt a little unbalanced in topic selection. I think the set would've benefited from more tossups along the lines of the ones on Ottoman sultans, The Jewish Bride, and Spain. To be fair, there was many more of these questions in the bonuses. Overall though, I thought the Visual Fine Arts was very enjoyable, and liked the more out-there answers (Douglas, Crivelli, Soutine, etc)

Thanks for the feedback, Aseem. Could you elaborate more on this? What was unbalanced you think - difficulty, content, answerline type, etc? What worked about the tossups you listed versus the ones you didn't?

[aseem.keyal]

3) The Visual Fine Arts tossups also felt a little unbalanced in topic selection. I think the set would've benefited from more tossups along the lines of the ones on Ottoman sultans, The Jewish Bride, and Spain. To be fair, there was many more of these questions in the bonuses. Overall though, I thought the Visual Fine Arts was very enjoyable, and liked the more out-there answers (Douglas, Crivelli, Soutine, etc)

Thanks for the feedback, Aseem. Could you elaborate more on this? What was unbalanced you think - difficulty, content, answerline type, etc? What worked about the tossups you listed versus the ones you didn't?

To me, those three questions felt closest to a regular-difficulty idea with the difficulty scaled up. Also, to amend my post, an edited-down version of the Ballet Russes tossup might also work at regular difficulty if a different answer line was used, so that I should include that as well. The rest of the answer lines felt like Nationals or CO ideas (including the David tossup and the tossup on Washington Crossing the Delaware that clued many interpretations). To quote the tournament announcement:

50% appropriate for ACF Regionals; 35% appropriate for ACF Nationals; 15% extracanonical/CO only.

If difficulty is defined strictly in terms of the answer lines and conversion, then I think the Visual Fine Arts definitely met this goal. If we define difficulty as how hard/extracanonical the conceit of a tossup is, then I feel that more than 50 percent fell into either the Nationals or CO levels. Also, to clarify, I don't feel those three worked better than the others necessarily (some of the harder ideas had better buzz distributions than those). But I feel that there should have been more ideas like them because I believe they're more representative of what players come across both in and out of quiz bowl, which means there's more possibility for an ideal buzz distribution.

[etotheipi]

I edited the British and European literature for this set. Thank you to everyone who's given me feedback, positive or negative. This will be a bit of a long message.

First, I'll apologize for my most glaring error—the packetization. Obviously, there are the things John pointed out, which would have been solved by better coordination on my part—but there is also the fact that somehow, despite making a note not to, I still put the Conrad tossup themed around his Malay novels and the Dutch tossup themed around Multatuli in the same half of the same packet. I really hope that didn't affect anyone's ability to buzz on the latter.

My goal in writing these categories was to furnish a set of questions that (a) were good, (b) were on interesting works of literature (defined mostly by the three questions: do I like it? do I find it "aesthetically meritorious"? and is it historically important?), (c) slanted more toward old, literary, canonical, experimental (in a broad sense), and difficult (again in a broad sense) fiction than a typical set of this difficulty, and (d) wherever possible, emphasized literature as a coherent field of research, rather than just a collection of cool artworks that exist in isolation.

But first, submissions. I did not use very many of them—only thirteen of the forty-four questions in submission packets were not by one of the editors or writers. There were a few reasons for this: I didn't get the largest number of usable submissions (partially due to absurd amounts of overlap—after I had written a tossup on Heinrich von Kleist, I received: a bonus on "The Marquise of O—"; a tossup on "Michael Kohlhaas"; and a tossup on Kleist himself), the accelerated production schedule meant that I had a lot of questions written by the time the first few submissions came in, and—most notably—I believe I was too strict with subdistributions for this set. I had instituted quotas for time period, genre, and answerline difficulty within both British and European literature, which hopefully improved my categories' quality, but also meant that I rejected a number of well-written submissions that I could have probably kept. I'm sorry for this.

That all being said, I was able to use almost all of the questions that sparked joy for me. If I used your question in the set, even in a modified form, that means I really did enjoy both the question itself and, in all but I think two cases (A Taste of Honey, "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher"), the work(s) it clued; thank you very much for writing it. Thanks also go to Mitch McCullar, Jason Cheng, Shahar Schwartz, and JinAh Kim for very fun tossups on "Michael Kohlhaas" and "Demon," and similarly fun bonuses on the phrase "What, you egg!" and on Max Beerbohm's parodies, respectively, and to Ethan Strombeck, whose tossup on Romania (Cărtărescu <3) sadly had to be relegated to tiebreakers.

Toward (a), I first need to thank Henry Atkins. I was horrifically underprepared for this editorial position—I've worked on exactly two proper sets before: a high-school novice set and SMH—and Henry's advice is all that stood between you and some, uh, not particularly well-executed questions. Throughout basically every stage of the writing and editing process he made extremely helpful comments on practically everything I put out, noting conceits that wouldn't work, bonus parts that would play too hard, my horrible habit of severely overestimating an open audience's knowledge of "high school stock," not-so-great editorial decisions (like almost not using the Herlock Sholmes bonus), so forth. I am incredibly grateful to him for all of this.

I would also like to thank Tim Morrison, who also gave feedback on nearly every question I wrote—if not all of them—and offered up fixes to many of them that seriously improved playability. Among the playtesters, I'd like to especially thank Jonathan Magin for taking the time to give similarly valuable feedback on, again, nearly every question I wrote. Editing quizbowl questions is rather similar to writing fiction in that the single largest bottleneck to one's growth is finding people who know what they are talking about to go through your work and nitpick everything they can, and I am grateful that the three people I have named were entirely willing to do this for me.

Finally, thank you to everyone who contributed questions to my categories: Henry, Tim, Ani Perumalla, Itamar Naveh-Benjamin, and Caleb Kendrick. Thanks also to Ani and Jacob Egol for some much-needed clearing up of my prose.

I'm not unhappy with how most of my tossups played. I was pleased to see a number of them destroyed—off the top of my head, there were excellent buzzes on Kleist, Schulz, dance, Rasselas, and Sentimental Education, all of which were rather gratifying to learn of. Most of them seemed to have a decently good gradient of buzzes, with the exceptions of "Marguerite" (which was the hardest britlit tossup, and therefore somewhat expected) and "Zone" (which, and I still haven't figured out why, seems to have been buzzed on in all nine rooms at either the line straddling power or the line immediately after). Also, apologies to Itamar for making his tossup on Tuscany a line harder (the intention was to add an early clue on De Vulgari Eloquentia) and therefore, as has been pointed out in this thread, worse. Bonuses played significantly worse, though it's hard to tell for sure given the low sample size—suffice it to say I have learned some surprising things about what people know and don't know.

Here I will insert some thoughts on my experience as a first-time literature editor, in the hopes that they may be of use to someone.

- There's this common conception that literature is one of the easiest categories to write. This is wrong, or at least wrong when question quality is taken into consideration. It is rather easy to read a novel and put together a pyramidal list of clues on it. It is significantly harder to make these clues tightly themed, evocative, and buzzable, and to make sure clues are actually important and do not rely heavily on lists of titles, characters, or quotes (or even on "here's a random thing that happened in this novel!"). In other words, it's very easy to write a mediocre literature question, and in my opinion more difficult to write a good literature question than, say, a good science question. I don't make any claims that I succeeded in making all or even most of my questions "good"; however, I do feel like much of quizbowl doesn't take writing literature questions "seriously enough," in a sense. If you're considering picking up your first literature editing project, keep this in mind.

- Keep in mind also that it's a lot more work than you think it will be. In addition to the initial investment of time it took me to write each question (however long it took to read the literary work, plus an hour or two), I ended up having to bottom-up rewrite many questions at least once, and having to make tweaks to nearly all of them multiple times (in response to internal playtesting, in response to external playtesting, during my final look over the set).

- Making a good faith effort to read everything you clue (and everything clued in questions you edit) is really, really helpful. I obviously did not come anywhere close to succeeding at this—I'm only a hundred or so pages into Clarissa, and didn't even try to tackle Don Quixote or Gil Blas—but I still think the attempt I made really helped in question quality. A good example is the Flann O'Brien bonus; I was able to produce a significantly better edit to the hard part after I'd read the book than before, when I'd just skimmed it and read a few articles about it.

- Finally, I put a lot of effort into staying ahead of deadlines and making sure I wouldn't have a lot of work in the couple of weeks before the tournament—and ended up having plenty to do in those weeks anyway. I forgot to factor in how much better I would get at writing questions over the set production process, and that naturally I would want to significantly revise a lot of my earlier attempts. This is another good thing to remember if you happen to be in a position like mine.

I'd also like to include a few comments on the ideology behind my editing decisions. I am happy to comment on any of these at length if they are contentious.

- Before I actually began editing this set, I made the comment that I would allow no questions in my categories about works I didn't want to myself read. With the exception of some of the modern British literature, and some questions on bad authors who are still historically interesting (Ernst Jünger, the jingoistic British poets in the 1910s tossup), I believe I succeeded entirely in this. This is to say: I believe that at no point in its history has literature been served by an academic apparatus competent to analyze it holistically—this in opposition to e.g. Western classical music, where critics often have a far more cogent understanding of what is going on in a work than the composer themself—and therefore that the best standpoint from which to make analyses/criticisms of literature (and quizbowl questions are in a sense a criticism of literature) is that of the working writer. (In fact, there was so much overlap between the works I wrote about in CO and alluded to in writing I did at the same time that I could not share said writing with friends until after the tournament!) I wrote my categories entirely from the standpoint of a very interested amateur—I have very little formal literary education—but I tried my hardest to write them in the way someone like T.S. Eliot would write them; and I believe this to be the correct approach.

- My categories very intentionally did not have much post-1950 (the date chosen rather arbitrarily) fiction, and frankly I think they should have had less. This is for a number of reasons, not limited to: that no critical apparatus yet has elected a cogent "canon" of post-1950 fiction; that the experimental trend in post-1950 fiction has both dipped even further from the mainstream and fragmented into innumerable pieces; that the expectations of "artistic merit" we inflict upon authors have advanced at a rate much faster than the "artistic merit" of said works; that most seminal works of post-1950 experimental fiction are entirely inaccessible (Bottom's Dream). For these reasons, despite the fact that many of my favorite works of fiction were written after 1950 (Woodcutters, The Sea, Malina, to name three I clued in this set), I would not be particularly grieved (though I am emphatically not calling for such) if post-1950 fiction disappeared from quizbowl entirely.

- I am extremely in favor of the sort of answerline difficulty restriction this set employed, and would enjoy a future CO that used them significantly more. This is to say: I agree wholly with Andrew that works clued in the same tossup should be meaningfully related—this is why, for example, I converted a submission on the first name Shelagh to the A Taste of Honey tossup—and in this sense that every question should be very tightly themed; however, I am strongly opposed to an idea that this in any way mandates an increase in the average difficulty or specificity of an answerline. Four of the seven "extracanonical" answerlines in my categories were an author, one was a work name, one ("Gracchus") was effectively a work name, and one was "Marguerite." With the exception of "Marguerite" (which I stand by, both because it's in the title of an Arnold poem, and because I think it is only respectful to remember the actual names of the ""muses"" of notable male authors) all of these were incredibly easy to get to if you had any knowledge of what was clued in the question. In general, one of my least favorite things about quizbowl is that I often find myself having to "quizbowlify" my "real knowledge" to contend on questions; for example, I spent a half-hour or so earlier today making cards on part of the first volume of E.H. Carr's A History of Soviet Russia, which I had already read in detail and taken notes on, so that I wouldn't mess up the name of Vinnichenko or Hrushevsky or Petliura or whomever in a game setting, an endeavor that could be entirely avoided if a hypothetical tossup on any of them were instead on, for example, the 1910s. We tend to remember incidents and descriptions better than reified names, and I enjoy questions that—to the extent such is possible in a game based around "knowing names of things"—acknowledge this.

There's a lot more I could say, but I think I've gone on much too long already, and covered far too much ground. If you have any comments or criticisms on either my overall ideology in editing (e.g. perhaps I went too far in not including a single tossup on European literature after 1950; perhaps I clued far too much from the French Symbolists or English Romantics) or any specific question, please do either post them below or send them privately to me (I should be locatable on Discord; you can reach me at the email aryakarthik [dot] work [at] gmail [dot] com). Especially if you're an experienced literature editor, I would really like to hear what you thought, and what I could have done better. Also, as I mentioned in the Discord, I do not pretend to be experienced enough to give feedback on your submissions, but if you would like to know what I thought of them, and why I did or did not use them, please do reach out.

[etotheipi]

I [...] wanted to praise the tossup on "The School" for more nearly approximating the experience of being in a writing workshop than any other tossup I've played recently.

Thank you so much for the praise - I just wanted to mention that the "The School" tossup was entirely inspired by a post (which I believe is unfortunately paywalled) on George Saunders' substack. Hence the "writing workshop" feel, I assume.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Thanks for the candid reflections, Arya. All in all, your work on this set represents an outstanding debut for an editor at this difficulty level, and I really hope you write and edit for more things at various difficulties in the coming years. (Future editing teams: recruit this person! Thanks)

Two quick things I wanted to reply to:

But first, submissions. I did not use very many of them—...most notably—I believe I was too strict with subdistributions for this set. I had instituted quotas for time period, genre, and answerline difficulty within both British and European literature, which hopefully improved my categories' quality, but also meant that I rejected a number of well-written submissions that I could have probably kept. I'm sorry for this.

We don't acknowledge enough that there is a Genuine Tradeoff between editors having firm sub-distributional control in their categories and being able to accept usable submissions from teams. In particular, I think complaints at the level of John's above (e.g. "some packets had 0 poetry tossups while others had 2") are, to some degree, a thing players just have to accept at packet sub events, if submissions are to keep influencing the contents of question sets to a meaningful degree.

no critical apparatus yet has elected a cogent "canon" of post-1950 fiction; that the experimental trend in post-1950 fiction has both dipped even further from the mainstream and fragmented into innumerable pieces; that the expectations of "artistic merit" we inflict upon authors have advanced at a rate much faster than the "artistic merit" of said works; that most seminal works of post-1950 experimental fiction are entirely inaccessible (Bottom's Dream). For these reasons, despite the fact that many of my favorite works of fiction were written after 1950 (Woodcutters, The Sea, Malina, to name three I clued in this set), I would not be particularly grieved (though I am emphatically not calling for such) if post-1950 fiction disappeared from quizbowl entirely.

I get that you're deliberately being a bit more polemical than necessary here, but yeah no. There's a lot of great, meritorious, and/or accessible literature since 1950, and we should keep asking about it.

That said, I do think there has been a pretty strong, largely un-counterbalanced trend towards highly contemporary literature in recent quizbowl sets. (To give two possible reasons why: that's what "sparks joy" for many editors; you have many more options for achieving a diverse slate of identities if you look toward the present day.) It's good to have some corrective sometimes, in that there is a lot of value for people today in literature that is older, including (but not limited to!!) lit by oft-derided "dead white guys," and I think this set (like ACF Nationals 2022 before it) did a good job of showing, not telling players that.

A recently developed rationale for opposing "trash capture" is that people have many opportunities to express knowledge or enthusiasm for pop culture topics in other settings later in life, whereas rewards for going deep on academic subjects are much rarer and harder to preserve outside this game. I can confirm that a similar dynamic is at work for literature; even among people who are dedicated "readers" out in the Real World, almost all of them skew very intensely towards works released within the past 0-5 years, and many of them skew heavily towards largely qb-eschewed genres like sci-fi, fantasy, YA, and "book club" fiction as shaped by figures such as Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and big accounts on BookTok. This is also true of non-quizbowl "trivia" questions about literature, when they exist at all, which is not guranteed. Insofar as that is the case, it's good for quizbowl to keep its focus on something somewhat different, ideally without tying that focus to conservative or traditionalist ideology, or making overreaching claims of a decline in "artistic merit" These Days.

[tpmorrison]

I’ve seen a few bold manifestos like this one crop up recently, and while I admire the passion they demonstrate (and, in this case, think Arya did a great job as an editor), I tend to find these things rather overstated. Quizbowl is, fundamentally, an academic trivia game. I hold it in very high esteem among such games, but let’s not pretend that we’re engaging in some grand artistic endeavor when we write questions.

A quizbowl question should test engagement with some area of human knowledge, ideally in a way that is interesting (a benefit that many of us derive from the game). For a novel, that may very well be an unthemed list of memorable plot details, provided that those details are ordered pyramidally. It is also good for a slate of quizbowl questions to reward knowledge of various types — for a literature distribution, this includes criticism and the avant-garde, yes, but also more recent literature and canonical works that one would by no means label experimental (though I do agree with Matt that we could probably stand to scale back a bit on contemporary lit). I think we limit ourselves and pigeonhole the game when we hold strongly to very subjective ideas of what X category “should” be and don’t consider other genuine forms of engagement with the subject.

[Auks Ran Ova]

I’ve seen a few bold manifestos like this one crop up recently, and while I admire the passion they demonstrate (and, in this case, think Arya did a great job as an editor), I tend to find these things rather overstated. Quizbowl is, fundamentally, an academic trivia game. I hold it in very high esteem among such games, but let’s not pretend that we’re engaging in some grand artistic endeavor when we write questions.

A quizbowl question should test engagement with some area of human knowledge, ideally in a way that is interesting (a benefit that many of us derive from the game). For a novel, that may very well be an unthemed list of memorable plot details, provided that those details are ordered pyramidally. It is also good for a slate of quizbowl questions to reward knowledge of various types — for a literature distribution, this includes criticism and the avant-garde, yes, but also more recent literature and canonical works that one would by no means label experimental (though I do agree with Matt that we could probably stand to scale back a bit on contemporary lit). I think we limit ourselves and pigeonhole the game when we hold strongly to very subjective ideas of what X category “should” be and don’t consider other genuine forms of engagement with the subject.

Not too much to add here beyond that I really strongly agree with this post.

[gyre and gimble]

I’ve seen a few bold manifestos like this one crop up recently, and while I admire the passion they demonstrate (and, in this case, think Arya did a great job as an editor), I tend to find these things rather overstated. Quizbowl is, fundamentally, an academic trivia game. I hold it in very high esteem among such games, but let’s not pretend that we’re engaging in some grand artistic endeavor when we write questions.

A quizbowl question should test engagement with some area of human knowledge, ideally in a way that is interesting (a benefit that many of us derive from the game). For a novel, that may very well be an unthemed list of memorable plot details, provided that those details are ordered pyramidally. It is also good for a slate of quizbowl questions to reward knowledge of various types — for a literature distribution, this includes criticism and the avant-garde, yes, but also more recent literature and canonical works that one would by no means label experimental (though I do agree with Matt that we could probably stand to scale back a bit on contemporary lit). I think we limit ourselves and pigeonhole the game when we hold strongly to very subjective ideas of what X category “should” be and don’t consider other genuine forms of engagement with the subject.

Is contemporary literature really over-asked? I wonder if part of that perception has to do with vanity side events and Festivus packets having a disproportionate amount of contemporary literature, as opposed to full regular season, Nationals, and open-level sets.

[Quinctilius Varus]

I really enjoyed playing this tournament! The literature was some of the best I've ever played and was clearly written and edited with great care. In particular, I thought the American literature did a great job of probing the output of canonical authors like Faulkner and Vonnegut while also highlighting lesser-known yet still important authors that can only meaningfully be asked about at high levels (Danez Smith, Spalding Grey, etc.). That balance is exactly what I want to see in a Chicago Open set.

One minor complaint I have is that some of the geography felt like it reached into other areas of knowledge too frequently. Specifically, the Tennessee River and Rio Grande tossups felt like, after tweaking a clue or two, they could be straight-up history tossups. I'm all for writing geography with an interdisciplinary perspective, but there's already plenty of history in quizbowl sets. The bonuses on Lake Dòngtíng (for pure geography) and Le Havre (for more of a mixed approach) felt more ideal.

[Heiliger Dankgesang]

I thoroughly enjoyed editing the classical music and opera questions for 2023 Chicago Open. Thank you to Henry, Alex, and Young for encouraging me to join this year’s production team and bringing me aboard, especially when I wasn’t feeling entirely confident at the outset since all of my prior writing/editing experience had been at 3 dots or easier.

I had two main goals in mind while crafting my questions. My first goal, which I’ve also sought to implement in prior sets, was to try and clue “real knowledge” as appropriate and draw from practice and the current goings-on in the music world (current ensembles, commissions, performance practices, etc.), since they are important not only in building on the legacies of old and new repertoire, but also in informing my and others’ perspectives as musicians. This underscored questions like the “retuning up a half step” part of the bass concerti bonus, working around that awkward bass trombone glissando in Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, an entire bonus that only scratches the surface on how to interpret figured bass, and the Shostakovich tossup that largely focuses on discography and interpretations of his work. My other, specific-to-CO goal was to strike a healthy balance of “purely extracanonical,” “under-asked / deep cut,” and “canon” ideas. Sometimes I also tried blending these classes together, such as in the tossup on the Ospedale della Pietà cluing its students (and Vivaldi) who also went on to have fruitful careers in music, and the rivalry that underlies Puccini's and Leoncavallo’s versions of La Bohéme.

Ultimately, whether I did achieve the aforementioned goals is up for debate, and maybe some of my questions didn’t play as well as I had hoped. However, I’m still happy overall with how they turned out, and I hope that those of you who were at Northwestern had as much fun (or more) as I did writing and editing it. Thank you all for playing (and staffing)! I eagerly await any feedback that you may have.

Thank you to my freelancers: Ivvone Zhou and Arya Karthik. If it wasn’t already evident from ARCAD2A, Ivvone has some of the most impressive opera knowledge in the game right now, and I’m really grateful that she contributed more of her S-tier questions to this set. If you also like her questions, then you should totally play ARCAD3A this fall. Meanwhile, while Arya was writing a plethora of questions across categories and editing 2/2 literature, they still had time to write me great questions on 20th-century saxophone rep and on masked balls in Auber operas. Additionally, thanks to Joe Su, whose bonus on Beethoven’s “Andante Favori” was ultimately folded into the bonus whose hard part is my Forums username. Thank you to the playtesters, particularly Richard Niu, Michał Gerasimiuk, Jonathan Magin, and Ben Chapman in my category, for your time and feedback. And finally, thank you to all of the teams who submitted afa questions to this set— even if I didn’t end up using your submissions, I was still impressed with them and it was usually always for distributional reasons that they had to go by the wayside.

And… in keeping with a tradition established by some previous sets, I created a Spotify playlist of the pieces that I clued (including Gabriel Prokofiev’s turntable concerto ) for your enjoyment.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Playing on a team with John Lawrence, I did not get many opportunities to answer classical music questions at this tournament and was very hesitant to buzz when they did crop up. One thing I did notice, though, was that the tossups felt like they emphasized "being in the music world," music history, and performance clues much more than normal. Here are the non-opera tossup answers that were played at the general tournament:

A London Symphony (our submission)
Mozart (masses)
brass quintets - Most of the early clues are about current or historic quintets
Mendelssohn's revival of the St. Matthew Passion
Shostakovich (early clues are mostly recordings)
Price (common-link) - Significant amounts of history, with the power-bridging clue about 2023 recordings of Florence Price's work
frets (mostly music history)
A minor (piano concerti) - Half of the power clues are about recordings or piece premieres
youth orchestras (performance)
Mantua (very hard music history)
France (saxophone music)

All of these questions seem individually solid and as a non-specialist, I appreciate that there was not a lot of "note-spelling" in the early clues and it's cool to see a lot of music history incorporated. However, 6 out of 10 non-opera classical tossups were heavily or entirely focused on music history, recordings, performance, and specific ensembles. Comparatively, these tossups have relatively little in the way of straightforward description of pieces, especially symphonies and piano music. I could see an argument for this being a more accessible way to write high-difficulty music tossups, especially considering how difficult it is to describe pieces evocatively; however, I think this was a bit of a bridge too far. As someone who gets most of their music knowledge from casually listening to orchestral, chamber, and piano music and looking up program notes, articles, and old packets discussing the pieces I listen to, I felt like I had no chance on the vast majority of tossups in this tournament due to content almost as much as teammates.

I haven't taken as close a look at the bonuses, though my recollection is that these were a bit more balanced.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I appreciate that there was not a lot of "note-spelling" in the early clues and it's cool to see a lot of music history incorporated. However, 6 out of 10 non-opera classical tossups were heavily or entirely focused on music history, recordings, performance, and specific ensembles.

...And That's Good (TM). All of those are worthwhile things to learn about!

More generally, I think it's a Good Thing that subject editors, even at high-profile tournaments, feel able to experiment with pushing further into some areas of knowledge they find underrepresented, and pulling back on other areas that they find overrepresented (or simply don't "spark" as much "joy" for them). Assuming a baseline of question quality, it's healthy for the expansion and maintenance of the "canon" when different tournaments have somewhat different focuses and aren't all taking the exact same approach to subject matter. I hope the level of agitation at sub-subdistributional choices and clue selection in this thread isn't discouraging to future writers.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

One minor complaint I have is that some of the geography felt like it reached into other areas of knowledge too frequently. Specifically, the Tennessee River and Rio Grande tossups felt like, after tweaking a clue or two, they could be straight-up history tossups. I'm all for writing geography with an interdisciplinary perspective, but there's already plenty of history in quizbowl sets. The bonuses on Lake Dòngtíng (for pure geography) and Le Havre (for more of a mixed approach) felt more ideal.

I think this was my first time ever editing geography and I definitely short in this respect. In my defense, it's often hard to thread the needle between rewarding pure geography knowledge, and not writing ye olde "the tallest mountain in this country is..."-style questions which can be pretty boring to play.