Directors Commentary

[Mike Bentley]

Motivated by a Discord discussion of how there should be more forum posts and an idea from Mike Cheyne (plus my secret motivation to get more sign-ups for my upcoming Shock of the Old tech/business/science history/whimsy tournament) I thought I'd dive into a few questions from my 2020 set Myth of the Machine.

6. They're not toll plazas, but a system called EZpay is widely used in these locations. In the early '90s, the city of Monterey, California commissioned Maxis to develop SimSite to simulate the economic impact of closing of one of these places. Until 1973, otherwise useless currency called MPCs were issued to people working at these places to help protect against inflation. Daniel Immewahr credits one of these places in Burtonwood with building the vibrant rock culture in Liverpool that produced the Beatles. In 2018, Nathan Ruser pointed out how the location and boundaries of these places were inadvertently made () public by allegedly anonymized Strava fitness data. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo forced the evacuation of one of these places in Subic Bay in the Philippines. In 2002, several prisoners were tortured next to one of these locations in Bagram, Afghanistan. For 10 points, (*) name these places where US troops congregate.
ANSWER: US military bases [or US defense bases; or Army bases; or Navy bases; or Air Force bases; or US Naval Stations; or air field; or secret military bases; or US military black sites]

A lot of my questions emerge from reading something, highlighting a passage, then going back and turning that passage into a clue in my gigantic OneNote of unfinished questions (for reference, in my Post-1945 American History notebook, there are 375 skeletons of questions in there).

In this case, the origins of this question date back to reading Daniel Immewahr's excellent book How to Hide an Empire. I added a stub about the influence of military bases on the Beatles. I later came across the game SimSite which seemed like a great clue for the sensibility of this tournament. At this point, I started doing some actual research into US military bases to get enough clues for a full tossup.

I had previously read about the Strava data leak and knew to seek that out. I can't recall the specifics of how I found the other clues, but probably some combination of looking at Wikipedia articles and doing some site specific Google searches. I find that stuff like site:nytimes.com or "history of military bases" Google Books searches often are a path to finding meaty quizbowl clues.

Looking at the final question, I think I could have done a better job on the EZPay and MPCs clues. They both mostly rely on knowing that specific term and may be too hard to buzz on in isolation. It was hard to give the most important info about MPCs, namely that they were issued to prevent the local currencies from being inflated by a strong US dollar. In retrospect, I probably could have just said something to that effect without this tossup being transparent. I think I have a higher fear of transparency than most writers and editors and it sometimes ends up with questions that play too hard.

17. In a unanimous Supreme Court decision, Sandra Day O'Connor ruled that a company named for these devices had created a hostile work environment for employees such as Theresa Harris. A maker of these devices, Hyster-Yale Materials, bought Nuvera Fuel Cells; one of the only widespread uses of hydrogen fuel cells is in these devices since they produce no emissions and don't slow down on low power. According to an OSHA scale, Class IV ("four") versions of these vehicles are not designed to go () outdoors. These vehicles usually have a counterweight in the back and a hydraulically powered mast. In the 1930s, these vehicles became more useful after pallet sizes were standardized. The use of these devices in a Home Depot requires aisles to be closed. For 10 points, (*) name these vehicles which have two prongs on the front to help raise stuff up.
ANSWER: forklifts [or lift truck; or fork truck; or fork hoist; or forklift truck; or reach truck; or stacker; or stock picker]

If I recall correctly, I had the idea to write something on forklifts since I first jotted down some answer lines for the first tech tournament I wrote. But I didn't expand this into a full question until I came across that fact about hydrogen fuel cells in a BusinessWeek feature. In retrospect, that clue may be a little hard to buzz on because I had to drop the important context of why having a low power forklift is dangerous.

I tried to use a few different types of clues in this one. Saying "OSHA" and "outdoors" was something of a context clue to get you thinking that these were vehicles used at work sites. Pallet sizes is another clue that is going to reward your general knowledge of what a pallet is. That Home Depot clue is one of those observations from real life clues I try to include in this set as a fun side event.

1. In the 1940s, this man secured a handshake agreement with announcer John Hicks to run one of his businesses before screwing Hicks out of the agreed share of the business's profits. A series of businesses owned by this man's family were purchased for over 100 million dollars by Emmins Communications in 2003. This man built his powerbase by distributing huge amounts of cash raised by Brown & Root, a business that built the Marshall Ford Dam. This man's wife served as the president of a holding company whose main asset was () KTBC, purchased at an extreme discount in 1943; that TV station was later made much more valuable by rules changes he secured from the FCC. This man was likely the first politician anywhere to campaign by helicopter in a campaign he notoriously stole from Coke Stevenson, earning him the nickname "Landslide." For 10 points, (*) name President whose wife Lady Bird "owned" a profitable Austin TV station.
ANSWER: Lyndon Baines Johnson [or LBJ]

This one basically came directly from Robert Caro's LBJ biography. It was one of my favorite questions as it asked about someone famous for a bunch of things in a narrow way suiting the distribution of this tournament.

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Well, that was just three questions but did take a while to write. I need to make dinner but will likely be back with a few more later. Hopefully this is motivation for others to post about their own questions and for people who don't know if they want to play Shock of the Old to consider there's a lot of questions in this set you may not have expected from the logline.

[Fado Alexandrino]

I was going to reply to this post with just "llamas" but realized that wasn't you.

Your tech sets are always a delight not just to play but also all the things that the audience gets to learn. I am no less excited to play or read through your next set.

[Cheynem]

I was actually curious what prompted the Babe Ruth tossup in this set, since I don't remember ever hearing many of those clues before.

[Mike Bentley]

I was actually curious what prompted the Babe Ruth tossup in this set, since I don't remember ever hearing many of those clues before.

16. This man's father made the bartender George Sowers sign a letter stating "I … fucked [this man's mom] March 12 1906 on her dining room floor," one of the earliest unexpunged uses of the f-word. This man recorded a terrible comedy album where he makes fun of a rival spending 7 years as a freshman at Columbia. Twenty years later, the Washington Post ran a front-page headline on a "cure" to this anonymous patient's cancer from the then-novel use of combination radiation and chemo. This man, who once refused to work in "the () bellyache heard 'round the world" was the elder of two men who went on a 1927 barnstorming tour. A product clearly named for this man is technically named for Grover Cleveland's daughter; the maker of that product had the temerity to sue a rival chocolate maker for stealing their trademark. For 10 points, (*) name this baseball star nicknamed H. Herman Hercules, The Big Fella and The Sultan of Swat.
ANSWER: Babe Ruth [or George Herman "Babe" Ruth Jr.]

Like the LBJ one, this one was mainly based on a book I read, Jane Leavy's The Big Fella. The first clue is mentioned in the book and then I heard it again in some John McWhorter book or podcast on swearing.

Looking back at this, it's probably a little too hard early on. The comedy album could use another context clue and the cancer story is less famous than I thought it was. I think I tend to overcompensate on difficulty on sports questions as it's an area I'm generally weak on and I see sports players get good buzzes. But this doesn't mean my hard clues are actually buzzable enough.

And one more question from this same packet:

2. Musing on Donkey Kong, this critic wonders if Nintendo will soon be bringing us "The Loch Ness Marmoset. The Puppy from 20,000 Leagues." One book by this author ends with a six-page BASIC algorithm on how to solve a Rubik's Cube. This author wrote about how skilled players can rack up points by targeting "Fatboy" and "Pimple" while lurking in Asteroids in a book with an introduction by Steven Spielberg that was one of the earliest to seriously study videogames. This author of Invasion of the Space Invaders wrote the screenplay to the sci-fi film Saturn 3 and received a National Book Critics Circle award for his 2001 essay collection The War Against Cliché. The aforementioned Saturn 3 experience informed his book about burgeoning () director John Self. For 10 points, (*) name this British author who probably mentions videogames in his novel Money but avoided the subject in his reverse-chronology Holocaust novel Time's Arrow.
ANSWER: Martin Amis [or Martin Louis Amis; prompt on Amis]

This one basically wrote itself after I discovered that a quizbowl-famous writer had made a non-trivial contribution to the golden age of arcade games. At the time, Invasion of the Space Invaders was very out of print (Amis supposedly disowned it). I had to lean on a UW student to get an Inter Library Loan for it.

This question is a bit more indulgent than one I'd put into a regular set. I don't realistically expect most teams to have in-depth knowledge of Invasion of the Space Invaders. But for a set like this, I'll usually allot space for a couple of questions or parts of questions that are "for me." A more restrained version of this question would probably have gone a bit deeper into Money or Time's Arrow. As is, the second half of the question mostly is pegged to knowing some Amis titles which isn't fully ideal. Although I think I'm more sympathetic than most writers to questions that go a bit more broad on a topic. Quizbowl has rightly pivoted from 2008 when Matt Weiner was posting about how you got more quizbowl points by memorizing 3 character names from Too Late the Phalarope than deeply reading Cry, the Beloved Country. But I think there's still some space for sometimes asking about more minor works by an author or a span of their career. Especially in a weird set like this one.

[Mike Bentley]

5. Economists Howlett and Broadberry examined whether this decade's slogan of "business as usual" was appropriate or not for the British economy. In Britain, luxury goods such as clocks, movies and motorcycles were assigned a 33% levy in the McKenna duties passed during this decade. During this decade, the Bank of England raised bank rates from 3% to 8% but that wasn't enough to stop the first-ever closure of the London Stock Exchange. A Currency and Bank Notes Act passed in this decade took Britain off the gold standard. In this decade, American banks loaned the () Anglo-French Financial Commission five hundred million dollars and Britain's defense spending increased from 3.1% to 40.8% of GDP. A “Carthaginian peace” treaty signed in this decade was harshly criticized by John Maynard Keynes for imposing ruinous reparations on Germany. For 10 points, (*) name this decade in which Britain fought World War I.
ANSWER: 1910s

This one ended up as the fifth question in the tiebreakers packet, meaning it was effectively cut from the set. This is an example of a question being too tightly bound to a theme to work. I don't exactly remember how I got the idea for this question, but it was likely one of those middle clues about the economic policies the UK government enacted during World War I. I hadn't heard these clued before and thought this could make an interesting question with an accessible enough answer line.

I probably went back and forth on this one between having the answer line be World War I and the 1910s. I ultimately went with the decade as that felt a little less guessable and let me use a couple of clues from before / after the war like the leadin.

But it proved too hard to find a good middle clue that wasn't just some oblique way of talking about World War I. I'm betting there are some clues out there that fit this criteria. But at a certain point, it's better to give up on a question and work on something new.

It's also possible that reading this you like this question and would have liked to have seen it in the set. It's often the case that what I think are the best / worst questions in the set don't play that way. Some of my most thrown-off, "someone had that idea before" questions often turn into ones I hear the most positive feedback about. And for the ones I'm most excited about, my enthusiasm sometimes makes it hard to put myself into a player's perspective and keep the difficulty under control.

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Finally, I wanted to switch to The World As It Is, my Modern World set. We wrote this set in QEMS2 so I have the preserved history of revisions to the question.

This builds on some other Discord discussion from tonight about people feeling intimidated about writing outside their comfort zone because they may not have a perfect question. I definitely feel some of this but am also probably more willing than most to put something out there (see, for instance, any science questions with my name on them in the NSC).

This one isn't in a weak writing category for me, but does illustrate how a question evolves a lot from the initial version to the final one.

A software package targeted at these people feeds into the Integration Joint Operations Platform. Families of these people are encouraged to join the "becoming kin" program where they house government officials for a few weeks. These people are the main targets of a DNA collection program called Physics for All. In an incident often compared to 9/11, men and women from this ethnic group killed at least 31 people in a train station on March 1st, 2014. In 2016, one member of this ethnic group was killed in an attack on a foreign embassy in Kyrgyzstan. One government has made it extremely difficult for these people to own scissors or knives in cities such as Hotan. In 2013, a member of this ethnic group drove a car into pedestrians in Tiananmen Square. Perhaps 1 million of these people have been sent to "reeducation centers." Many of these people live in Kashgar. For 10 points, name this ethnicity of Chinese Muslims.
Uighurs [or Uygurs; prompt on Chinese Muslims before mentioned]

This is the initial version, written back in December 2018. It's okay but is definitely a rough draft. "Integration Joint Operations Platform" is a very generic name and hard to buzz on in isolation. But it also drops the hint that this is a group that is "targeted" which significantly narrows down the answer space in an artificial way.

Women in this community were encouraged to dress more flashily in the "Project Beauty" campaign begun in 2013, the same year in which "Document No. 11" was issued. Sean R. Roberts's book on these title people compares a campaign to the US War on Terror. A company called Meiya Pico claims that it has developed machine learning tools to recognize symbols commonly used by these people. In 2009, a group of these people waved flags and demanded the central government take action after some of these people were killed in a toy factory. A software package targeted at these people feeds into the Integration Joint Operations Platform. Hikvision claims it has developed software to identify the faces of these people. Families of these people are encouraged to join the "becoming kin" program where they house "big brothers and sisters" for a few weeks. These people are the main targets of a DNA collection program called Physics for All. In an incident often compared to 9/11, men and women from this ethnic group killed at least 31 people in a train station on March 1st, 2014. In 2016, one member of this ethnic group was killed in an attack on a foreign embassy in Kyrgyzstan. One government has made it extremely difficult for these people to own scissors or knives in cities such as Hotan. In 2013, a member of this ethnic group drove a car into pedestrians in Tiananmen Square. Perhaps 1 million of these people have been sent to "reeducation centers." Many of these people live in Kashgar. For 10 points, name this ethnicity of Chinese Muslims.
Uighurs [or Uygurs; prompt on Chinese Muslims before mentioned]

Over the course of the 2 years I spent on this set, I came across some new clues which I gradually added to this tossup. You can see at this point that it's now at a really obscene length of almost double the character limit. But I at least have some more stuff to work with as I eventually get to editing this. I find it's always easier to cut clues than add them. It's been a long time since I've edited a packet submission set, but I greatly prefer as an editor that you send me something like this than a shorter question if I'm going to have to throw out 3 of the clues.

In this version, I toyed with changing the identifier to "this community" in an attempt to obscure the answer line a bit. I ultimately decided not to do that as it made it a little too obtuse to figure out what was wanted.

Sean Robert's recent book on these title people argues that ETIM is a "phantom group." In 2009, a flag-waving group of these people demanded the central government take action following a deadly incident in a toy factory. After the issuance of "Document No. 11," women in this community were encouraged to change their fashion tastes and the government launched a pro-smoking campaign. Families of these people are encouraged to join the "becoming kin" program. Many of these people were banned from owning scissors following a 2014 (*) stabbing at a train station. Nike has fought a bipartisan 2020 bill named for these people that would block US imports over forced labor concerns. A crackdown on these people began following a 2013 SUV attack in Tiān'ānmén Square. For 10 points, perhaps a million members of what Turkic ethnic group have been sent to Chinese "reeducation centers?"
ANSWER: Uighurs [or Uygurs; accept War on the Uyghurs; prompt on Chinese Muslims; generously prompt on Chinese terrorists; do not accept "Huí"]

Here's the final version. I think it's definitely better than the original version but like all questions still isn't perfect. I really struggled to find some meaty but non-transparent clues for this one, including buying that Sean Roberts book so I could read a chapter on tensions between Uighurs and the CCP in the early 2000s. That clue still hangs on an acronym in a way I don't find ideal, although I do recall someone buzzing in my room on it when I was reading. I love the taking up smoking clue, although it may be a little too hard to buzz on for where it is in the question because I couldn't say why they were doing that (smoking is sometimes considered haram). I was somewhat helped by taking so long to edit this question in having a new clue to work with in terms of that ban on cotton. (Let me also acknowledge that I'm talking about this topic in a pretty glib manner. I would gladly sacrifice "good clues" for bad things not happening in the world.)

All of which is to say that questions can evolve through giving them time, playtesting, getting feedback from fellow editors, etc. And not all of them are going to work out. Don't get stuck on trying to be perfect.

That's it for tonight. I may do one more search for some other illustrative examples of how I go about writing questions or issues faced in doing so. I hope people found this helpful. And others are welcome to subject their own questions to this type of analysis in this thread.

[theMoMA]

One thing I very much appreciate about Mike as a writer is that, like fellow Seattle-area legend Randy Johnson, he has great "stuff." He does not nibble at the corners with unspecific language or try to throw one in the dirt with a vague answer line. With each clue, Mike's essentially saying "here's a specific, straightforwardly written, and extremely interesting thing about forklifts; I'm going to throw it right down the middle and dare you to know it and knock it out of the park." And that's why I think his tournaments, especially the technology events where his style is most distinct, are so fun to play.

It's really no surprise to hear that these questions are the result of careful accumulation and shaping of information from reputable and interesting sources. Regardless of whether you prefer to write long and cut material or to build into the final shape and size of your question, there's no better way to get clues than to really learn the material (and what grabs you about it) first, although this luxury is not always possible under time constraints.

A minor stylistic divergence I have from Mike is that I do not favor the staccato sentence, and especially not two in a row (Perhaps 1 million of these people have been sent to "reeducation centers." Many of these people live in Kashgar.) I'd prefer to flesh out one of these stubs (or possibly to blend these stubs together in a natural way, obviously avoiding just putting the word "and" between them). This is a minor point, of course, but I do think there can be something a little jarring about an end-of-question barrage of dart-sized clues.