KABO General Discussion

[kdroge]

This is for general comments / feedback about the set. I will create another forum for question-specific discussion.

[kdroge]

So, here's my reaction to the tournament and a bit about my philosophy in general.

First off, I'd like to thank Ashvin and Will for helping me with the set. Ashvin wrote all of the science. Will stepped up to write some non-science that Ashvin didn't have time to get to and wrote 1/1 linguistics, as well as reading through the set and helping me go through several tossups to improve them.

Overall, I think the set was okay, but by no means spectacular. I tried to write on topics that were interesting, important, and not stale; I wanted to tournament to have a "new" feel (whatever that means). There were lots of tossup answer lines that hadn't been tossed up before. However, I wanted to create a set that was accessible to people who have a decent grasp of college canon, at least in their categories. I really, really tried to make sure that every bonus that I wrote had a true easy part. This happened most of the time, but there were a few facepalm bonus parts, and some that were very easily overthinkable. An easy part should be an easy part to a team with any level of knowledge, so that was definitely a problem sometimes. Some bonuses just didn't have middle parts. Some of those were because I was genuinely surprised to find that people didn't know certain things (like Chinampas), and some of these I knew were too hard but didn't have time to fix (the Lareau bonus), but either way, bonuses that are guaranteed 10s for everyone in the field are inexcusable. Some hard parts were more exploratory and were harder than other hard parts, but I don't think this was as much of a problem, and teams were able to pull parts that I thought were amongst some of the hardest in the tournament several times. With regards to tossups, many more ended in buzzer races than I would have liked. While sometimes I think this was just unfortunate coincidence or people having deep knowledge of certain topics, more often than not it was either a misplaced early-to-middle clue or a tossup that had a lack of middle clues and got to the giveaway. In the question-specific section, I'd definitely like to know which tossups people thought displayed either of those problems.

That being said, it seemed like most players did enjoy the set, and certain tossups or bonus parts people got excited about. I hope everyone at least had fun playing.

Also, on a random note, I apologize to teams that had to play slap bowl at the main site. No one brought a buzzer, and I should have been more aggressive about calling people on Thursday before they'd traveled; I just assumed that someone would bring a single buzzer, but I was wrong. I did distribute the ten dollars that I would have given as a discount to the two-person teams that played slap bowl all day, but that's a poor consolation.

[Cheynem]

Yeah, bonus difficulty was all over the place at times. I've never read Blood Meridian, for example, but I read a two-sentence plot summary of it once and 30'ed the bonus on that, while stuff I've studied or read I could only 10 or 20 because the parts seemed far deeper. Some of this may have been you having a different understanding of what is well known than others, which I can sympathize with.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I'm not in the sizable "this totally SUCKED" camp, but I didn't think this set was that great. I'll have more comments if you'd be willing to email it out to people who played.

This set was way harder than I went in expecting it to be. Kurtis, you are very good at quizbowl, and you have learned lots of things to get to that point. I think this has led you to consistently overestimate what other people, even good players, know when you go to write questions. Sometimes this results in large blocks of very difficult information in many of your tossups (and many less-than-generous middle parts in bonuses). I was reminded often of that unfortunate Harold Pinter tossup from MOO. Stats bear out that, even adjusting for the smaller number of rounds, this was much harder than last year's VCU Open (which you named in your initial post as your target difficulty) in terms of power rates, tossup conversion, and bonus conversion. I realize that sometimes after lots of exposure to questions, the distinction between easy and middle information at a given difficulty can start to feel fuzzy for a really skilled player and one's "difficulty sense" can sort of erode. I'm not entirely sure how to combat this (the only partial solution I can think of now is carefully looking through past tournaments whose stat profile you want to emulate, seeing how they did things), but it's worth thinking about ways to ensure that you're not overshooting as often in the future. Maybe further discussion can help brainstrorm on this front.

One problem with several questions in this set was that they narrowed down to three or possible answers very quickly, which meant there were several instances of buzzer chicken between teams thinking through to an answer. Off the top of my head, the Azande question made it pretty clear we were talking about an African tribe in an anthropological study very quickly, the Xibalba question was pretty clearly a non-Greco-Roman, named myth locale with a "lord", genetic algorithms had to be a type of newfangled algorithm, and strict scrutiny had to be some kind of legal concept applied to a narrow set of cases. (Mike Cheyne has even more examples of this in the other thread, but it's a general enough trend that I wanted to bring it up here.)

[grapesmoker]

The largest problem with this tournament was the sparseness of the middle clues. There were some questions that had some very easy stuff at the beginning, and lots of other questions that transitioned from really hard clues to really well-known ones very early on.

[Magister Ludi]

I felt this was probably the worst open tournament that I've played in a few years. I made a long post in the MOO thread about Kurtis's seeming aversion to middle clues and this set was a confirmation that those problems not only persist, but have grown worse. There were far too many questions with almost no middle clues and leadins that achieved the dubious feat of being simultaneously unhelpfully vague yet transparent. My suggestion would be that Kurtis should write his tossups from the bottom up (i. e. writing the giveaway and middle clues before finding leadins) rather than the top down. The sense that I get from this tournament and MOO is that Kurtis finds some interesting leadin and spends three or four lines on those clues, which leaves little space for middle clues. Hopefully, this problem can be addressed in the future. I can offer more substantial criticism when I can see the packets.

The bonuses were another serious issue with this tournament. The preferred bonus structure of this tournament often seemed to be: an impossible first part, followed by a hard part, and then finished with an insultingly easy part that every player in the field could answer. Bonuses such as The Memoirs of Hadrian / Marguerite Yourcenar / Zeno (from Zeno's paradox), the minor Maori writers bonus that gave ten points for knowing the Maori come from New Zealand, and a bunch of social science bonuses seemed to follow this pattern. Kurtis should aim to have middle parts that he expects an expert in the field answer to have a good chance of answering.

I might also add that while I appreciated the creative impulse leading to the more inventive social science answers, many of these answers were ill-conceived. I think one of the worst problems plaguing college writers--the Kurtises and Ike Joses of the world--is a desire to produce questions that are "exciting" and "new" (in Kurtis's words) rather than questions that are good. There were five or ten tossups (across many categories, not just SS) that were so clearly terrible ideas it's bizarre to me that Kurtis wouldn't realize they would play poorly. It's not that I'm against creative question writing, but editors need to take a step back and think if tossups on the scholarship around telenovelas or rpgs will actually reward people who know real social science or will devolve into buzzer races/figure-it-out-bowl. If you must ask about the social science surrounding these topics do so as the hard part of a bonus.

[grapesmoker]

I thought the tossup on social science in RPGs was a really cool idea, but not executed well. For example, UC Irvine has a whole center dedicated to researching the economics of MMORPGs, and while you could question the value of the work, there's some definitely interesting stuff going on there. But the problem with the question was that it was a whole lot of really hard clues followed by "these things have players, gold, and levels." That's a lousy way to write that question. In general, sometimes it's better to take the cool stuff into the bonuses if you're not sure you can write the tossup well.

[Cheynem]

I think that's a similarly accurate criticism of the telenovelas question. You DO use telenovelas to learn Spanish (LA CATRINA! DESTINOS!), telenovelas (well, soap operas in question) are frequent topics within the perhaps dubious yet nevertheless a thing realm of television studies, etc. Yet as I said in the other thread, I got the question by putting together "Spanish things + appearing in a season like cycle," so even though I have utilized telenovelas in Spanish class and read the scholarship on it, the fact that I happened to watch a couple telenovelas (Alma Gemea is pretty good) is what allowed me to get it, so I understand Ted's frustration.

[Cheynem]

I think that's a similarly accurate criticism of the telenovelas question. You DO use telenovelas to learn Spanish (LA CATRINA! DESTINOS!), telenovelas (well, soap operas in question) are frequent topics within the perhaps dubious yet nevertheless a thing realm of television studies, etc. Yet as I said in the other thread, I got the question by putting together "Spanish things + appearing in a season like cycle," so even though I have utilized telenovelas in Spanish class and read the scholarship on it, the fact that I happened to watch a couple telenovelas (Alma Gemea is pretty good) is what allowed me to get it, so I understand Ted's frustration.

[ThisIsMyUsername]

I'm afraid that I'm in the "this totally sucked" camp that Matt Jackson describes: I thought this was the worst tournament I've played (obviously excluding tournaments that I've played only in practices). Part of this was that the average level of tossup construction was poor. There were copious issues with famous/important clues coming far too early (Narcissus, Whiskey Rebellion, Thinkery, Coca-Cola, The Other, Tennyson, Cassatt, etc.) and bonuses had the wildest swings I've ever encountered.

In many cases, I really don't understand the motivation behind the answer line choices: Why write a nine-line tossup on something like Daughters of Revolution, which is clearly lacking in rich details that make good clues? Why make people scrounge / play chicken for a title for the non-thing "Gericault's pictures of the insane", when you could just write a tossup on Gericault mostly from those paintings? Who on earth is being rewarded by a tossup on Untimely Meditations? What reason beyond an obscurity fetish is there for writing a bonus on that Tailleferre ballet (I can't even find a recording of this online)? And if you were going to do this kind of stuff, why on earth would you claim that this is a tournament that is friendly to people with "a decent grasp of the regular difficulty canon"?

I like the Amoretti by Spenser and the short stories of Steinbeck, and they are certainly under-asked relative to their real-world significance. I was really happy to see substantive clues and subsequently power those tossups. Having now read those tossups, though, I see that the end of both of those tossups have massive cliffs, because they are written to deliberately exclude reward any of the more common channels of Spenser and Steinbeck knowledge. Why do this?

I'm writing a long post on this not just to vent or lay into this tournament in particular, but to give these as illustrations of a problem that's becoming pervasive. Creative answer-lines should not be ends; they should be means: means of exploring untapped areas of knowledge while simultaneously remaining firmly grounded in the realities of what kinds of things people know /learn/study.

For almost every bad tossup containing good / creative early clues, there was a way to write that tossup that would have rewarded that knowledge but made it play better. You want to write on the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade? Great, that's probably cool stuff to explore. However, probably very few people in the field have any exposure to this, so it will play badly. Well, then either stick it in Misc. Academic so you can use literature clues for him in the second half or use clues from more read works of philosophy that deal with Sade (like the Dialectic of Enlightenment) if you want to still write an all-philosophy tossup on him. Want to ask about the literature of Zelda Fitzgerald? Well, it's obviously going to cliff at Tender is the Night. So cut a couple of lines on her own writings and transition in the second half to "A character based on this author…" clues.

Tossing up new things is not inherently creative. Constructing questions that find ways to reward new and interesting knowledge (therefore keeping the game fresh) without negatively affecting gameplay is what is creative.

[grapesmoker]

Oh yeah, that de Sade question. So, de Sade has several reasonably significant philosophical works (for suitably flexible definitions of "significant"), two of which are Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom (which incidentally is obscene past the point of hilarity). I don't recall the question entirely, but I don't think either of those works came up during the question (or at least not the parts I heard), and that's weird, because you'd kind of expect those things in there. Again, interesting idea, but lacking in execution.

[Mike Bentley]

I thought the tournament was okay. I guess I play crappier tournaments than John Lawrence because this wasn't anywhere close to the "worst tournament I've ever played". There were lots of enjoyable questions and I didn't really feel overwhelmed by the difficulty (but my perceptions about difficulty are often colored by who I'm playing with, and in this tournament I was playing with Magin who had a pretty good tournament). I do agree with most of the criticism that there were some dumb tossup ideas and several good ideas done pretty badly.

One issue I haven't seen mentioned is sub-distribution. After Chicago Open where there was probably 1 academic movie question per round, I don't have a big problem toning down the movies distribution, but I don't think I heard a single such question in this tournament. Similarly, there seemed to be more commodity type questions than I would expect--things like cotton (which I thought was a pretty well executed tossup), water and a couple of other examples I can't think of right now. Not that I really care, but there was also something like 1 jazz bonus in the entire set.

[grapesmoker]

Yeah, let's not get carried away here. This was by no means the worst tournament ever, or even the worst tournament of the modern era. It was just kinda not good.

[Mike Bentley]

By the way, I very much like the idea of open summer tournaments besides CO and would like to thank Kurtis and Ashvin for spending the time to write 10 packets for this. I hope other people are encouraged to write similar events in the future, albeit ones with some more quality control and ideally a couple more packets (although at the end of the day the packet situation wasn't a huge problem, as there were plenty of side events to take up the slack).

[Cheynem]

There was a bonus that wasn't totally film but did ask about Nanook of the North, which is a cool thing.

I haven't played as much quizbowl as John or Mike, but this was also not the worst tournament I have played. It was better I thought than the Ike-edited IO in that the answer lines were generally not insane (no offense, Ike).

[kdroge]

Well, it seems like some people really hated this set. I'm sorry for having been culpable for this. I will try to respond to specific question issues that people posted about as best as I can. Also, for things like tossups without middle clues, having specifics would be really nice so that I know exactly which questions were problematic and which clues I can use to remedy this, because it seems to me like tossups that had relatively accessible middle clues (OK City, Tennyson) were received as being too easy.

[Cody]

OK City and Tennyson didn't have accessible middle clues; OK City used one of the most famous photos of modern times in the second sentence while Tennyson had a bunch of hard clues before cliffing at Tears, Idle Tears while still in power. Both of those tossups devolved into buzzer races and did nothing to differentiate the majority of players.

[Kilroy Was Here]

Although this is my first college tournament, and I can't really judge the quality, I really enjoyed this set. It was, to my high school brain, absolutely ridiculous at times, but I really enjoyed some of the more creative answer lines, especially the commodity tossups.





I'm really interested to see how this is received in Texas, seeing as Roach and I's stats are pitiful (although I'm 99% sure my power number is wrong), and we're top 3 in our respective subjects. In high school, obviously.

[theMoMA]

I thought, in contrast to many in this thread, that this was one of the more amusing tournaments of recent vintage. Yes, as people point out, some of the questions were not good. And the bonuses certainly fluctuated in difficulty more than I would have liked to see. But on the whole, the tournament kept its feet solidly on the ground of answerability while asking for things in a new way. That's not something that every tournament, even at this open level, succeeds at doing. There may have been too many clunkers, too much bonus variance, and too much general weirdness for this to be a great set, but in my mind, it was the kind of tournament that I'd like to see the occasional summer open be.