The Quizbowl Resource Center

Hey everyone,

I'm planning to write a visual arts-only doubles tournament at CO-difficulty. Since it's at that difficulty, I'd like for it to be run at a CO-like event where there are lots of good visual arts players. I don't think I can finish it by July (and I don't even know if there's room for it in the schedule) so that's why the thread title says "2015." But the real reason I posted this is that I'd like to request 2 things from the community:

First, I need 1 experienced collaborator who probably won't be able to play this tournament to be my consultant re: difficulty and powermarks. I plan for this tournament to be a bit experimental (you can think of it as an analogue of Will Nediger's WELD) but I also want for there to be a meaningful number of powers and meaningful final scores for games between good people. For writing 0 questions and submitting to any final decisions I make, you can have half of the proceeds from the tournament and my eternal gratitude.

EDIT: Doug Graebner is my collaborator and co-writer.

Second, I want to know if there are lots of people who take issue with my proposed distribution. I am writing 12 packets and the distribution is as follows, not counting tiebreakers (which will not follow a distribution):
45% Painting/2-D Art (22.5% Pre-1870, 22.5% Post-1870)
12.5% Sculpture/3-D Art (6% Pre-1870, 6.5% Post-1870)
10% Architecture
5% Photography
15% Film
12.5% Misc: Non-Western/Writing/History/Performance/Anything Else

The only non-negotiable thing is that I will not write more than what I've already planned of non-Western art, not because of any theoretical reasons, but because I want more space in the tournament for areas of art I'm more interested in.

FIELD (16/16):
Will Holub-Moorman/Jacob Reed
Will Nediger/Saajid Moyen
Auroni Gupta/John Lawrence
Matt Jackson/Chris Ray
Jordan Brownstein/Chris Manners
Rob Carson/Ike Jose
Mike Cheyne/Dylan Minarik
Chris Borglum/Billy Beyer
Tommy Casalaspi/Matt Bollinger
Andrew Hart/Trevor Davis
Mike Bentley/Evan Adams
Jasper Lee/Jerry Vinokurov
Will Alston/Andrew Wang
Matt Lafer/Connor Teevens
Mike Sorice/Kelly Tourdot
Charles Hang/Seth Ebner/Athena Kern

The deadline for third-player registrations is Saturday, July 11. At that point, if you are on the waitlist, I will arbitrarily add you to a team. Otherwise, the field will be permanently closed.

WAITLIST
Foster Hughes
Daniel Hothem
Kenji Golimlim
Greg Peterson

STAFF (9/9):
Me
Eric Mukherjee
Ashvin Srivatsa
Richard Yu
Tejas Raje
Shan Kothari
Naveed Chowdhury
Andrew Nadig
Joe Su
(Derek So)
(Patrick Liao)

Oh, and to PACE editors: I won't be working on this until I've finished my commitments for NSC, so don't worry about this getting in the way.

Cool. It's extremely likely I'll play this.

Mike Bentley wrote:Cool. It's extremely likely I'll play this.

Likewise!

I'm down for this.

I'll play the heck out of this.

I'll play.

Interested

I plan on playing this.

I'll play this if i am at CO in 2015.

Hey, I'm really happy to see that there's some interest for this, but I really only announced the tournament this early because of those two requests I outlined in the first post. I'm guessing no one is really objecting to the distribution, but are there any takers for collaboration? I think it's pretty important for this set to be as appropriate as I'd like it to be.

If I am in the Chicago area at the time of this tournament, I would be interested in playing. Your tournament sounds cool!

I'm just curious as to whether the Architecture distribution will also be split 50-50 between pre and post-1870s. (Inigo Jones, Palladio, Michelozzo, etc!)

I'd definitely play this.

I'd be interested in playing.

Since it seems like Jeff and John also want to run side events on CO Sunday next year, we might want more compact events in order to ease up on the schedule. I'd like for all of my questions to be played, so I don't want to write more than I need to.

Would it be a better idea if I shortened my set to 10 or 11 packets instead of 12? What do people think? I'd rather know sooner than later because I'm trying to maintain at least a little balance across time/medium/etc. in my answerlines and therefore require some planning.

In the interest of not risking bad schedule overruns, that might be a good idea.

That sounds reasonable; you could even cut down to an 8 or 9 round schedule if you want to emulate the timing from last year more closely and prevent delays.

Since I've taken a liking to learning about visual arts in the past year, I think I'll give this tournament a go and probably do rather poorly at it. Are there any updates on it?

I'm planning for 8 rounds in two brackets plus a 1-game final and a tiebreaker packet, for a total of 10 packets. The questions are all about 9 lines powermarked, so I don't think this will take longer than 20-25 minutes per round. People should assume it's doubles for now and start putting teams together. Given the format, I guess that means this is capped at 36 players.

Should this be moved to the "announcements" forum or are you going to start a new one?

I'm playing this with Jacob Reed.

I would like to play this.

I'll be playing this with Saajid Moyen.

Since I'm officially going to be at CO this year, I'm looking for a teammate for this.

Seeking teammate.

I only really know things about 2-D art and a little about sculpture; I'd like to play with a teammate who knows a non-zero amount of things about the other categories. Not that I really expect to do well at this event or anything.

Depending on the timing and when this is scheduled, I'd like to play this. I don't know anything.

Yeah, this thread should be moved to the announcements thread. Thanks in advance to whoever does that.

gyre and gimble wrote:Yeah, this thread should be moved to the announcements thread. Thanks in advance to whoever does that.

Moved.

When during the day will this tournament take place?

Playing this with John Lawrence.

Mike Bentley wrote:When during the day will this tournament take place?

Stephen, Jeff, John: Can you three sit down or email each other or something to finally figure this out? Seems like History/NotHistoryOrLit/Lit worked fine as an order last year, but people have flights to plan and the three of you should declare something by fiat to expedite those plans.

I am playing this and have reached out to a potential teammate.
EDIT: That teammate is now an actual teammate named Chris"t" Ray.

Chris Manners and I are playing this.

Matthew J wrote:

Mike Bentley wrote:When during the day will this tournament take place?

Stephen, Jeff, John: Can you three sit down or email each other or something to finally figure this out? Seems like History/NotHistoryOrLit/Lit worked fine as an order last year, but people have flights to plan and the three of you should declare something by fiat to expedite those plans.

I am playing this and have reached out to a potential teammate.

We had an e-mail exchange this evening: Stephen is taking the first slot, I'm taking the middle slot, and Jeff is taking the last slot.

Ike and I are playing this together.

With the finalization of the schedule, I will definitely play this. I know some film, I guess.

EDIT: I am playing with D. Dylan Dinarik.

Florida men Billy Beyer and I would like to take our chances on breaking out of the bottom thirdish of this tournament.

Matt Bollinger and I are playing this together.

Also, I realize this is probably late in the writing game for Stephen, but 15% sculpture seems like a ton to me, especially when the huge category of architecture is being shaved down to 10%. As Aidan demonstrated with his architecture tournament, it's perfectly possible to write six packets of nothing but architecture and still have it be fun and accessible. That would definitely be impossible with sculpture. So I would favor swapping those percentages, giving 15% architecture and 10% sculpture.

I want to play this, looking for teammate.

felgon123 wrote:Matt Bollinger and I are playing this together.

Also, I realize this is probably late in the writing game for Stephen, but 15% sculpture seems like a ton to me, especially when the huge category of architecture is being shaved down to 10%. As Aidan demonstrated with his architecture tournament, it's perfectly possible to write six packets of nothing but architecture and still have it be fun and accessible. That would definitely be impossible with sculpture. So I would favor swapping those percentages, giving 15% architecture and 10% sculpture.

I agree with this. The number of accessible sculpture answers is much smaller than the number of accessible architecture answers.

Trevor Davis and I are teaming up.

felgon123 wrote:Also, I realize this is probably late in the writing game for Stephen, but 15% sculpture seems like a ton to me, especially when the huge category of architecture is being shaved down to 10%. As Aidan demonstrated with his architecture tournament, it's perfectly possible to write six packets of nothing but architecture and still have it be fun and accessible. That would definitely be impossible with sculpture. So I would favor swapping those percentages, giving 15% architecture and 10% sculpture.

It's actually not that late because I've only written a few sculpture questions. I have a couple points on this: First, I don't think answer space is a concern; keep in mind that at 15% there would only be 30 sculpture questions, or a quarter of Aidan's tournament, and this includes 3D art that might not necessarily be pure sculpture. Second, I do agree that the answer space is wider for architecture, but I think clue space is not actually much wider. Architecture questions tend to rely on quick physical descriptions of a building followed by its name or clues about what objects by other artists are located in which buildings. I'm not saying this is a bad way to write architecture questions, and sculpture questions often suffer from the same problem. But sculpture questions can be easily salvaged by other art historical clues, whereas this is substantially less true for modern and contemporary architecture.

I'm willing to discuss this further at a theoretical level, but also keep in mind that part of the goal of this tournament is to be somewhat experimental, and I prefer to be experimental in topics I'm more interested in. So there's a vanity element to this that's going to prevent me from spending more time on an area of art I personally consider slightly more peripheral.

That said, I'm going to reduce the sculpture distribution to 12.5% and increase "miscellaneous" to 12.5%.

I tend to agree with Stephen, while no doubt the architecture distribution is bigger in terms of answer space for architecture - because you can tossup fun things like the Transamerica Pyramid, just how many of those buildings feature unique, buzzable clues that will delight players - what do you actually know about the Transamerica Pyramid? Furthermore, I'm excited to see what other aspects of art he'll incorporate into 3-d art - handicrafts? environmental art? yarnbombing?!?!

Stephen, I hope you'll take this opportunity to explore some less asked about aspects of artistic culture. I look forward to seeing what awesome things you'll do.

Ike

gyre and gimble wrote:Second, I do agree that the answer space is wider for architecture, but I think clue space is not actually much wider. Architecture questions tend to rely on quick physical descriptions of a building followed by its name or clues about what objects by other artists are located in which buildings. I'm not saying this is a bad way to write architecture questions, and sculpture questions often suffer from the same problem.

I don't want to bog things down too much, but I feel like I should wade in here to offer Stephen some encouragement. I agree that many architecture questions to date have been written by taking an individual building or architect as an answer and then giving "quick physical descriptions" as all the clues. However, that doesn't mean that this is the only way to write architecture questions, and I tried to prove as much in my tournament. In just round 2, for example, there are questions on the planning of the Ringstrasse, the history of reinforced concrete, large churches of DC, and the archaeology of the Roman forum. Then there's stuff like the historiographical clues in the Gothic tossup, SOM's speculative design for a new Madison Square Garden, and all the clues about Le Corbusier's important place in the theoretical discourse of architecture. Clues and answerlines can go far beyond what buildings look like; the problem is that no one really writes that way yet. Gotta be the change you want to see in the world, man. As it stands, the overwhelming majority of my questions were still in the mold Stephen describes above, but if I hadn't written most of my tournament when I was a dumb high schooler, you would definitely have seen many more interesting things going on. I encourage Stephen and all writers of architecture questions to think bigger and give their best shot to writing questions that engage modes of thinking beyond formal description.

I'm also not exactly sure what you mean by

gyre and gimble wrote: But sculpture questions can be easily salvaged by other art historical clues, whereas this is substantially less true for modern and contemporary architecture.

but I'm pretty sure I disagree strenuously.

Been looking forward to this all year. Seeking teammate.

Evan Adams and I are playing this together.

If anyone needs a teammate, I'm looking for one.

Jerry Vinokurov and I are playing this together.

I want to play this. Looking for teammate.

I have interest in this and need a teammate as well.