I, in the Quiz Olympiad thread wrote:More thoughts about the disconnects between qb and "the 'trivia' community," and how and whether we want to bridge them, coming soon.
As promised!I also wrote:I haven't written more fully about my experiences... yet—and I probably should ...there's certainly some interesting compare-contrast between that community and this one.
Intro
If you went back in time a decade and told me I was going to write this post, past-me would likely snort and drop his lemon poppyseed muffin in surprise.
In my years playing quizbowl, I was pretty unfamiliar with other forms of trivia, and vaguely disdained game shows and their most ardent fans. I started out in the mid-Atlantic high school circuit, which came to dominate the country as (because?) many teams started blowing off the local show, It’s Academic. I also dislike most bars and am not a drinker; playing in a dim, crowded, loud place didn't appeal to me (it largely still doesn’t). I hadn’t intently studied “trash”, and am not a fan of any sport, so little appealed to me about non-pyramidal questions on stuff I didn’t know.
A few things changed my outlook. For various reasons, I burned out pretty fully on quizbowl in mid-2015. Around then, I got the call to go on Jeopardy, which I prepped for intensely by cramming years of neglected pop culture. That experience burned me out further.
After the taping of my Tournament of Champions, I was greeted by Brad Rutter and Pam Mueller, who had been in the studio audience. They invited me to go that evening to a place called “O’Brien’s” for trivia with a bunch of other Jeopardy people. Having just exhausted myself, I said something like “I’m too tired, but thanks” and didn’t think more of it.
I did almost no quiz activities from 2016 to 2018, and started slowly dipping my toe back into other parts of the question-answering world in the spring of 2019. Through the Jeopardy All-Star Games taping experience, I met people who do non-quizbowl trivia pretty intensely in LA. Those folks invited me to a thing in Las Vegas called Geek Bowl, where I in turn got invited to Trivia Nationals, a conference event also in Vegas (where I met Steve Perry!) I asked for a referral to LearnedLeague that same spring.
Since then, I’ve been thinking over what I’ve seen and mulling over a potential post. I'm glad I didn't write it 2019, though—because a ton has changed since. COVID spurred a massive boom in Web-based question-answering, and many people whom I assumed would never meet were thrown together as a result.
I’ll run through some differences I’ve seen, then turn to thinking about the current moment and what, if anything, these worlds can learn from and do for each other, as each tries to be the best it can be.
Note 1: I’m just one person with a pretty atypical social status and perspective. Please take this as just one person’s thoughts rather than gospel, and disagree where you think I’m off-base. This is an open-ended invitation to discussion, not a polemical essay or a prescriptive agenda.
Note 2: I write this mostly as a quizbowl person talking to other quizbowl people. I do aim to make this readable for those of other backgrounds, and will be sharing it with some non-quizbowl people.
Some Pre-emptive Caveats: Or, What I Talk About When I Talk About “Trivia”
I’ll focus on the U.S.-based community. Though engagement across countries and continents has soared in the past 2 years, I simply don’t know much about conditions on the ground elsewhere.
Some people don’t love the word “trivia,” which can connote unseriousness. But the only other name I’ve seen in wide use for the cluster of activities I’m talking about is “quizzing”, which looks a lot like “quizbowl” and could be confusing. In the absence of other generally-used names, I’ll call it the “trivia” community, with the T-word in quotation fingers.
In discussing his own game, Magic: the Gathering lead designer Mark Rosewater uses the term “enfranchised players” for the small minority who are most vocal online, visit stores for organized play, etc. Over 90% of Magic players never attend an event beyond their friends’ kitchen tables; a similar portion of bar trivia players never venture beyond their bar. In this post, I use “trivia” as shorthand for the set of people who are “enfranchised” in Rosewater’s sense—the small sliver for whom attending local trivia nights and/or watching game shows is not enough, or for whom the game is part of their identity. (Also, some “trivia” people rarely if ever go to their local bar. It’s not a requirement.)
Major U.S. “trivia” institutions include:
- Nationally syndicated pub quiz vendors (e.g. Geeks Who Drink, Sporcle Live)
- Online single-player leagues (LearnedLeague, the nascent BPTrivia, Mimir’s Well (since 2020)).
- Ex-contestant groups for knowledge-based shows (Jeopardy, Millionaire, The Chase; niche-er ones like Master Minds and the late 500 Questions)
- Fan sites and forums for same (e.g. JBoard, WWTBAMBored, TheJeopardyFan)
- Big pub-style events with cash prizes (e.g. King Trivia Tournament of Champions, Geek Bowl)
- Power users of cash-prize phone apps when those existed (HQ, Confetti)
- Multi-day conferences (the late TCONA, Trivia Nationals, the upcoming SporcleCon)
- Quiz-show podcasts, often with fan contestants (e.g. Trivial Warfare, Miss Information, Recreational Thinking)
- Select local bars and leagues with many “trivia” community members involved (most notably O’Brien’s Irish Pub in CA)
- Team-based online leagues (OQL USA) (since 2020)
The Two Cultures: A Compare-Contrast
Much of this may be obvious, but I don’t know how familiar all readers are with these communities, so I’ll err on the side of prolixity.
Demographics
“Trivia” is much older than quizbowl, as are most people who do it. The bulk of attendees at an event like Trivia Nationals are between 40 and 60, whereas almost all players at ACF tournaments are under 30, and most are between 17 and 25*. This makes sense—U.S. bars don’t let you in until you’re 21, the average game show watcher is in their late 60s, and to get to something like Trivia Nationals you have to use disposable income, which younger people have less of.
(*It’s very amusing to me that by about age 25, you’re “a dinosaur” in quizbowl and a “baby” in “trivia.” I was 23 when I last played a quizbowl open, and did my first serious “trivia” events at 26—very much at this bizarre saddle point.)
I suspect these age differences make for differences in vibe. Many “trivia” crowds seem comparatively chill, more set in their personalities and interests and place in life; there are fewer outward displays of ambition, even among skilled players who try hard. Tantrums and outbursts do happen, but seem rarer.
The “trivia” world is quite gender-imbalanced, though less overwhelmingly male than quizbowl. The Jeopardy contestant pool, from which “trivia” draws, is about one-third women; LearnedLeague, by recent tally, is about 68% men, 30% women and 2% nonbinary. Every Chicago Open or ACF Nationals I remember attending was about 95% men to 5% not.
“Trivia” also seems noticeably whiter, and in particular less Asian American, than quizbowl. (I imagine this is partly because older generations in the U.S. have a higher percentage of whites than Millennials and Gen Z, and partly because “trivia” has its own history of bigotry and racist exclusion, some of it quite recent.)
I’ve also played “trivia” with people from a wider variety of hometowns/states than have quizbowl circuits. This may be in part because game shows seek geographic diversity in casting, so smaller towns and/or places with little academic quizbowl (but, often, at least one bar!) eventually produce someone who makes their way to “trivia.”
Event length
A huge cultural difference between quizbowl and “trivia”: with regards to volume of questions, quizbowl largely acts as if “more is better” and “trivia” doesn’t.
A well-run quizbowl tournament goes from about 9 AM to 5 PM on a Saturday (or later, depending on reader speed and schedule length). At in-person events, all teams are expected to play 10+ rounds, and online at least 7 or 8; forfeiting or leaving early is a big faux pas. The norm of “more rounds = more fun” makes sense given the context in which quizbowl grew; since school teams drive themselves long distances to compete, and often pay out of pocket, getting bounced from an elimination bracket early in the day really stings. So tournaments offer everyone a full day of games, and the people who stick with the activity are those who want to play all day, regardless of how they do.
Most “trivia” contests are much shorter. A typical pub quiz is 1-2 hours on a weeknight, constrained by the presumed hours of a “typical” “day job” and the need for people to commute home and sleep before their next workday. The regular season of LearnedLeague offers 6 questions a day, five times a week, for five weeks; you theoretically have all day to think about them. Geek Bowl, which leaned heavily on high production values, live bands, and ornate video clues, only asked 64 questions in a ~3-hour time span. Even at multi-day conventions like Trivia Nationals, the schedule divides into smaller events that usually last 1-3 hours apiece.
Many people in “trivia” have major life commitments, including full-time jobs, spouses, and kids. Quizbowl is built largely for students who don’t have those yet (though of course many active players do). The differences in scheduling preferences reflect that to a degree.
The rate of “clues per minute” is far lower in “trivia” than in quizbowl, too. Depending on question length and difficulty, a well-moderated quizbowl match takes 20 to 40 minutes, and uses a packet with 140 to 200 sentences in it. Live events like OQL USA or Mimir’s Well give the initial addressee of a question more like 15 to 30 seconds to give their answer, with something more like 80 to 120 sentences total; a usual pub-style or written competition gives even more time to process each sentence.
Some of this difference may trace back to effects of aging on recall speed; in events with conferring, giving more time also lets teams talk, think through hints, and just goof around and bond (which is largely shunted to time between games at quizbowl tournaments). I’ve seen many “trivia” people complain about feeling rushed when readers from the quizbowl community moderate at what I’m used to as a normal quizbowl pace. (I assure you, it could be much worse.)
Question content and emphases
First off: the “trivia” community values, and asks about, pop culture to a far greater degree. (I’ll try to avoid the word that rhymes with the Best Picture Oscar-winning film released in 2005.) The usual biggest categories are TV, film, pop music, and sports. Because question writers often appeal to nostalgia, and most “trivia” players are older, you’re often asked about older pop culture, with occasional dives into things like kids’ shows (to reward parents). And many people get on a trajectory towards a more pop-heavy knowledge base as they get further from school.
The balance varies. Jeopardy is about 30-40% academic, 30% pop culture, 20-30% “general knowledge” in neither bucket, and 10% wordplay. LearnedLeague is about 60% academic, 30% pop, and 10% GK. Online Quiz League USA aims for an even 50-50, and many syndicated bar games are between 50 and 100% pop culture.
In “trivia,” unexpected links between categories, and questions with both academic and pop culture elements, are encouraged. In quizbowl, such crossovers sometimes induce groans when asked by NAQT (as Mixed_Impure_Academic) and are all but banned by ACF. I once inveighed against Mixed_Impure_Academic questions on this site, and now wonder why I thought they were an issue.
On the academic side, “trivia” often asks some kinds of clue that quizbowl largely stamped out over the last two decades, including:
- Award winners by calendar year (Nobels, Pulitzers, TIME Person of the Year, etc.)
- State and world capitals, symbols, currencies, etc.
- Screen adaptations of literature or history
- Biographical clues (though qb has loosened up to allow more of them lately)
- “Almanac clue” geography: high points, long rivers, etc.
- Animals
- “periodic table Scrabble”: elements’ chemical symbols, etymology, atomic number, place on periodic table, etc.
- High-ranking works on subjective rankings (TIME Top 100 All-Time Novels, etc.)
- kinds of content that hard to ask pyramidally, such as wordplay and state/national flags
The difficulty of academic “trivia” caps out lower, and when studying, it’s usually wiser to study a breadth of basics than to engage with any one work in depth. (The unofficial ACF motto of “Read a book” doesn’t apply as strongly.) If you know enough to go toe-to-toe with an All-Star at HSNCT or the lead scorer on a team in an ACF Fall playoffs, you’re in good shape.
In contrast to “Weiner’s Law #1,” which admonishes quizbowl writers for trying to be “cute” or “clever,” “trivia” writers get praise for adding clever hints and providing “ways in” for people who might not know substantive information. I think some gameplay differences explain this. In quizbowl, clues fly by fast, and you have little time to think or react to each clue; expecting people to unpack your hint at gameplay speed is unrealistic, and the hint takes up space that could be used for a more concretely buzzable clue. In most “trivia” formats, there are fewer clues total, you have more time to think about each, and you don’t always have to include the basic information that’d be in a pyramidal giveaway or easy part. (Even Jeopardy, with its split-second signaling device, gives contestants a few seconds to scan over the clue as the host delivers it.)
Whimsy, vanity, and variety
It’s much more accepted in “trivia” that different events will reflect the whims and wheelhouses of their writers; barring serious quality issues, this variety is mostly celebrated. Aside from the most mainstream content, writers are less constrained by distributions, and can freely turn the things they find exciting and interesting into questions. This means you often feel a direct injection of what “sparks joy” for a particular writer by playing their content. Most don’t mind when, say, you got their question from browsing their blog or reading their status last week. If anything, a touch of vanity is encouraged, on the grounds that if you don’t ask a thing, there’s no guarantee anyone else will. (“Know your quizmaster” is a common adage.)
By contrast, if a quizbowler pushes the same interest too hard, or repeatedly asks about stuff they’ve talked up, it’s frowned upon and treated as a fairness issue. (Some of that is likely a legacy of an era with more packet submission tournaments and lighter editing; active players had to be cagey about what they were actively reading/studying, lest they give others an unfair advantage.) And at regular-season quizbowl events, there’s far less formal experimentation with distributions and question format—almost every tournament uses mild variations on the ACF distribution, about 20 tossups and 20 bonuses per game, and questions that are 5-6 (HS) or 7-8 (college) lines long. In a world where improvement is writers’ main motivation, game theory suggests they’ll converge on writing in a similar way about similar topics. But it does softly discourage distributional whimsy and relegate it to “side events.”
Studying, getting good, and the artifice of excellence
I’ve also seen differences in how the communities treat seemingly “innate” levels of skill and the process of improvement. Those differences seem to narrow at more serious levels of competition.
Historically, quizbowl has been pretty honest that there’s an art and artifice to getting good. Every serious school team practices multiple times a week, with the express expectation that exposure to past questions will improve future results. Because people’s stats are preserved going back years, it’s easy to see that people can in fact improve over time. Our game’s legends include Subash of the 32,000 Leadins and many other “epic study binges.”
My impression is that for a long time in “trivia,” at least in less enfranchised locales like bars, if you said you deliberately worked to get better, people would look at you like you sprouted an extra head—or think of your efforts as somehow unfair, unnatural, or unjust. It’s far less socially accepted, perhaps in part due to normative expectations at the life stage most participants are in—don’t you have a job to go to, kids to raise?—and perhaps because studying alone codes as socially ill-adjusted or “loser”-ish. Even among those who love the game, some say that “trivia” people possess an uncommon “neurological quirk”.
Some of that attitude might also reflect the norms of American game shows. For decades, U.S. TV producers crafted an ethos of amateurism. This is why Jeopardy announces each contestant by their day job and hometown (“A plumber from Walpole, Massachusetts...”), and likely motivates the clauses in contestant contracts that bar you from going on a different game show for 6-12 months. When contestants are relatable, ordinary people—not ringers with flashcard decks—more people feel comfortable coming forward to try out. (I’m told that in British media, norms are a bit different, and for decades semi-professional quizzers have become notable to the public by appearing on show after show.)
But it seems the “ordinary people Just Like You” ideal is starting to crumble. The Experts on Master Minds, chasers on The Chase (a British import), and the “What makes them a genius?” introductions on the short-lived 500 Questions are all presented as people who stand apart from you, not as something anyone can become. The Jeopardy All-Star Games and Greatest of All Time series ditched career introductions, leaving mostly unmentioned that several participants ditched traditional careers to live off game show winnings and/or pursue full-time vocations in the question-answering realm. (The show’s ratings also go up during long winning streaks.)
Interestingly, contestants themselves are getting more candid about doing work to improve. Many Jeopardy superchampions mention J-Archive in interviews; Ken Jennings’ Brainiac discussed a precursor that posted most clues from the 2002-03 season. (My infamous “364,878 flashcards” are digital Anki flashcards with a Web-scraped J-Archive clue on the front and its correct response on the back. I excluded cards in categories that I already knew cold, and reviewed the remainder for about three months. I only got through ~4% of the remaining deck.)
Enfranchised players off the TV aren’t hiding much, either. There’s now a “Trivia Studying Support Group” with about 300 members on Facebook. If you know who to ask, Anki decks for recurring topics such as fashion can be traded to you. The by-season and by-category stats on LearnedLeague make progress visible in real time. People who make huge strides later in life inspire others to do the same. Victoria Groce, who upset a 19-time champion during her sole win on Jeopardy in 2005, went supersonic a few years ago; she’s now among the top five active “trivia” players in the country. (Quizbowl resources help here. Many “trivia” people use NAQT’s You Gotta Know pages as a resource for academic topics. More regrettably, some have found Pr*t*b**l.)
Notably, more quizbowl players are opening up about the toll that “epic study binge” type questing can take on mental health. At least at the college level, there seem to be fewer stars all-consumed with the will to power tossups. It’s settled now that one can cram one’s way to greatness; whether it’s worth it is a different question.
Community gathering places
“Trivia” is more diffuse than quizbowl geographically, and its social world seems more diffuse too. There’s no clear online signpost pointing those who want to get serious about “trivia” to a specific meeting point, the way quizbowl has had these boards, QBWiki, and the Discord (and before that the IRC) for years. It’s hard to figure out where to start.
Facebook is a major gathering place, including groups for former game show contestants (the most active being Jeopardy groups for people who share an identity characteristic). In general, using Facebook for community discussion makes me sad. The site deliberately scrambles the post order in Groups and makes search hard to use for threads on people’s walls; it’s hard to build stable repositories of tacit knowledge in such “shifting sands” conditions.
Game show-specific discussion fora, like JBoard, collect some enthusiasts.
Though LearnedLeague has a big message board, LL is invitation-only and the league size was recently capped; it excludes a lot of people getting their start. Some have said that a combative, toxic, and sometimes sexist atmosphere keeps them from wanting to post on the LL boards. (It says... not-great things about that the first time I saw those reactions, my thought was “this is nothing compared to vintage HSQuizbowl”.)
There weren’t many national in-person gatherings, even before the pandemic knocked out those that did exist. Some major cities have semi-regular game show alumni meetups, and there’s a patchwork of local proctored sites of World Quizzing Championship each year.
That said, I’m told there’s been more splitting of qb discourse into regional, age-gated, or identity group-specific spaces lately, so the communities may be evolving in a convergent manner here.
Discourse, criticism, and argument
In general, I’ve seen more discomfort with a culture of criticism in “trivia” spaces. This could just be that my reference standard (these boards) was toxic for far too long, but I’ve often seen what seem like pretty mild criticisms of questions get perceived as personal attacks on the writer. Trends I mentioned in the “Vanity...” section above might explain this; with more variation and individuality expected across games, it looks pettier to object to any one person’s approach, and there’s less chance that your critique will get the community as a whole to change its ways. If you didn’t like something, that’s just your opinion, and the next thing you do might be different.
I’m pleased to see the quizbowl community interrogating and reshaping some of its bad discursive habits. I’m certainly displeased looking back at my own sharp words about things that were, in the big picture, not that important. But it’s still a fundamental value of quizbowl discussion that it’s fair to note what you didn’t like, so long as your comment is aimed at helping future contributors do better. I don’t really see that in “trivia,” in which non-positive feedback is often treated as more inherently rude. There’s also less of a culture of “Theory” discussion in general, in part because there’s so many different formats and fewer people see themselves as stewarding the “trivia” ecosystem in a more holistic manner.
I love that both communities have people who get beyond small talk to intriguing conversations filled with fascinating stories, intriguing hypotheticals, and personality-probing questions. I’ve had some of the best discussions of my life with quizbowl people and “trivia” people, and I want to see more meetings between you in part because I know you all could have more with each other.
The Twain Meets
How have these two communities interfaced recently?
The twain was always already met
A lot of today’s most active “trivia” people were quizbowlers of an earlier era. If you look back at Best Quizbowl Players threads of years past, you’ll see some of their names: Joon Pahk, Steve Perry, Shane Whitlock, Patrick Friel, Raj Dhuwalia, David Dixon, Steve Bahnaman, Richard Mason (the late-90s Caltech one, not the late-00s Yale one), Guy Jordan, Jonathan Hess, Yogesh Raut, Andrew Ullsperger... Because question styles have since diverged (as I discuss above), it may be easier to excel at “trivia” if you optimized for the quizbowl canon of the 90s, rather than the canon of today. That said, some more recent quizbowl alumni, such as Andy Kravis, Greg Peterson, and Drew Scheeler, are already quite accomplished. And many others who were second- or third-scorers or on non-contender quizbowl teams have since surged to “trivia” stardom.
I don’t know much about the era when standalone pop culture tournaments like TRASHionals happened in person during the quizbowl regular season. My impression is that many regulars at those events were former academic quizbowl players, and some disliked the direction academic quizbowl was taking. There was a time when “Trash capture” was considered a serious danger for school clubs, and that time seems to have largely passed. I’d welcome more background information here, as it may be important for understanding quizbowl-”trivia” relations since.
Quizbowl: The Next Generation
Some “trivia” people now have kids old enough to do middle or high school quizbowl. A few have informal coaching roles with their kids’ teams and/or staff local events in their kid’s circuit.
Staffing championships
I talked above about the 2011 and 2012 History Bowl championships, which relied heavily on quizbowlers on one hand, and Jeopardy community people on the other. I haven’t paid attention to NHBB-world for years, but I gather they now relied less heavily on either of these groups, and have built up their own roster of players and volunteers. That’s probably for the best. In any event, the founder of NHBB being a major Jeopardy person likely brought some J-connected people into closer contact with pyramidal questions.
NAQT has also turned to “trivia” community members to staff its national championships as they got huge in the past decade or so. I believe this was driven in large part by staff recruiter extraordinaire (and sometime J contestant) Nathan Murphy. The first QANTA human-vs-robot exposition match, in 2015, used recent Jeopardy superchampions for Team Humanity in an attempt to draw media interest.
In both cases, welding an open pop culture tournament to the weekend was a key recruiting tactic and reward. ACRONYM now abuts HSNCT, and NHBB long had a “Sports and Entertainment Bee” aimed largely at staff. (The 2015 rescue crew was not required to produce that year’s edition.) Compared to 15 years ago, there's probably more institutional acceptance now of pop culture as a body of knowledge that can lie alongside academic quizbowl without “infecting” its institutions or threatening its teams with “trash capture” .
Going back further, some form of “CO Trash” has sometimes (not every year) abutted the smaller, ultra-hard academic event Chicago Open; sometimes players who are only interested in one CO weekend event have volunteered to staff the other.
The inf-LL-ationary epoch
LearnedLeague began in 1997 as 20 coworkers in New York, and expanded slowly as existing members invited new people. By April 2010, LL had 350 members. From a few early adopters, including Pam Mueller, it quickly spread to the “trivia” and game show communities, and exploded in size and importance. By the middle of the 2010s, it was quasi-compulsory for serious “trivia” people to be on LL, though some disliked it or quit for other reasons.
Many recent quizbowlers have found their way to LL, treating it with varying degrees of seriousness. The site’s “offseason,” in which members write One-Day Special quizzes or MiniLeagues on specialty topics, lets quizbowlers share academic content with “trivia” audiences that meets quizbowl standards of “importance.” For example, I edited a MiniLeague on Philosophy in 2020.
The site’s membership is now capped at about 25,000; new people come off a waitlist as existing users leave. It remains to be seen what effect this cap will have on LL as a core entry point to the “trivia” community; wait times are currently minimal.
Trivia Nationals does “Quiz Bowl” [sic]
Fans and occasional contestants once gathered at an event called the Game Show Congress. It had a component where attendees got to play simulated shows; some participants found that the most fun, and decided it could stand alone. That led to the annual TCONA (Trivia Championships of North America) in Vegas. Its manager ceded control of the event in 2018, citing the growing difficulty of running it; another attendee took it on herself to organize a spiritual successor, Trivia Nationals.
“Quiz Bowl” was a marquee event at this conference. Written by Mike Burger, a former NAQT member whose views have been criticized on these boards before, it had a lot of pop culture and used rather short questions. (Here’s an old round I found. I tried to dig up another video, with (I think) Ken Jennings and Drew Scheeler in a (semi?)final, and someone (Drew?) proudly crushing a question on the term “manic pixie dream girl,” but I can’t find it. Anyone?)
For personal life reasons, Burger stepped back from writing the set for Trivia Nationals, which instead used an adapted version of the 2019 NAQT SSNCT. The main adaptation was to add pop culture tossups that would have been out of place in a high school set, such as one on Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager (a show that ended before most of the 2019 SSNCT field was born). Teams played six rounds, divided into three-round “flights” at separate times. Stats were never kept.
Since I had questions in the set, I wasn’t eligible to play. (I wouldn’t have played if I were; as a former high school star, I don’t believe I should keep competing on high school questions.) I did watch a game or two between teams in the middle of the field. There weren’t many powers or 30s in the games I saw—but boy, were people proud when they did get them, especially on hard sciences. This excited engagement suggests to me that many people enjoy the unique thrill of buzzing on early academic clues before other players can get the late clues. This is hard to come by as an adult, since most academic opens are, by “trivia” standards, crushingly hard and largely unadvertised. If an active quizbowl community member can keep offering au courant quizbowl questions to future Trivia Nationals-type gatherings, that’d be a great gesture of good will.
Nick Clusserath of ACE Quizbowl Camp also hosted a demo of “Let’s Play Pyramidal!,” an automated reading/scorekeeping program that ran rounds in shootout format. Official stats weren’t preserved for that either. (Nick and ACE seemingly disappeared shortly thereafter; I’m not sure why.)
Trivia Nationals also had a pyramidal Trash tournament by Bill Patschak, the “BP” in “BPTrivia.” Most attendees played and reportedly enjoyed both events.
The Online Era (2020-)
On March 7, 2020, with word of a deadly epidemic circulating, the hosts of Geek Bowl XIV jokingly welcomed teams to “the last in-person event... ever.” Days later, huge swaths of the U.S.—including most bars—shut down.
About as quickly, TONS of trivia hosts moved games online. The amount of content that anyone with high-speed Internet could play from anywhere skyrocketed. Many people on the edges of the enfranchised “trivia” community dove right in. Others who were already decently involved made “trivia” a more or less 24/7 lifestyle. Though the hectic pace of the earliest months gradually slowed, some stalwarts kept quizzes going for over a year. In late spring 2020, before quizbowl fully figured out its move online, several quizbowlers found their way to this frenzy; some (such as Play Quiz Bowl) contributed events to it.
Another COVID-era convergence of the twain: British formats got attention and buy-in from U.S. enthusiasts. Adapting games that had existed in the UK for decades, the team-based Online Quiz League and the individual competition Mimir’s Well opened to American players.
The spun-off OQL USA, run by sometime quizbowler Steve Bahnaman, has been an especially fertile site of cross-contact. Like quizbowl, its matches involve two teams of four. With each season (it’s now Season 5), more quizbowlers past and present make their way to OQL, having (mostly) pleasant pre- and post-game banter with people of different eras. Each week, there’s also an unofficial but playtested “friendly” packet by a rotating league member, which any number of the league’s ~400 members can play for fun with whomever they want.
In the same stretch, quizbowler-run events such as ACRODEMIA, PAVEMENT, and Dede Allen caught the eye of “trivia” folks, and teams of quizbowlers entered pyramidal events by people largely unaffiliated with quizbowl, such as BPTitans. Likewise, the “Open” and Pop Culture divisions of NAQT’s Buzzword led many players with little recent quizbowl engagement to the largest pyramidal question vendor.
It's very cool to me that QB League leapt into this breach to introduce quizbowl proper to online “trivia” audiences, and that world quizzing stalwarts with less pyramidal experience, such as Pat Gibson and Olav Bjortomt, did well at it. I hope its creators enjoy their well-earned hiatus.
Preliminary Thoughts on Quizbowl-”Trivia” Relations
Does the “trivia” community have anything to teach quizbowl about how to be? The reverse?
No one has to do anything they’re not interested in
These are all leisure activities. If what you value about quizbowl is the chance to engage deeply with academic fields of study, and you don’t get that elsewhere, that’s all very well. If you’ve been doing pop “trivia” events for years and don’t see the appeal of a tournament that might have 20 pop culture questions strewn across 12 rounds, no one’s forcing you to sign up.
Not everybody grew up having what you had
“Good quizbowl” as we know it today coalesced in the mid-2000s. Everyone who graduated before that didn’t have a serious chance to do it in school. I firmly believe some of the more academically-oriented people in the “trivia” world would have crushed at quizbowl if it had existed. (Jerome Vered, with his fearsome knowledge of world Jewish history, comes to mind.)
Many people today don’t get a chance either, as quizbowl is still highly concentrated in specific states and urban areas (far more so than bars, broadcast TV, and the Internet, anyway), and it’s often pretty arbitrary which schools in a given area have serious teams. In my generation, I imagine Brandon Blackwell, lately of University Challenge, would have been excellent if we had found him at Bronx Science or NYU. I think often about the alternate universe where Alan Lin, who reads tons of fiction and cares a lot about visual art, went to a school with a strong quizbowl program.
If a person’s tastes tend toward animals or elements or Pulitzers, it’s in part because that’s what the game they’ve gotten to play has asked them to know. The glint of joy in someone’s eyes when they feel the thrill of figuring out a tough question is very similar. So is the joy of creating an exciting question out of a fact that’s never been done before (and the crumple of dissatisfaction upon finding out it totally has been done). These feelings are perhaps even more precious in Gen-Xers and Boomers, who are often further, geographically and chronologically, from places that validate brainy interests. There’s a lot to empathize and bond with here.
Wide swaths of adult American culture are quite anti-intellectual, and “trivia” is as close as most people get to a place that validates them for caring about things beyond ongoing cultural ephemera. For some who grew up without well-resourced schools, it’s their first real chance at a well-rounded education.
People have interesting stories, if you want to hear them
So much quizbowl history is lost to time. Matt Weiner once expressed desire for more recorded interviews with people from earlier eras; those largely haven’t happened. There are precious few people still in the collegiate quizbowl orbit who witnessed the series of changes the community has undergone from the 90s to now. Many active quizbowlers, focused on the present day, are incurious about the deep history of the game. (I’m told that in the Discord, today’s players are sick of “Olds” reminiscing about events ...that I was at!)
But if you’re willing to approach people from a different era and ask questions, you may hear some pretty wild stuff. Here’s a thing I learned while at the Olympiad: There was a 5,000 person trash tournament, held on buzzers, happening at the University of Colorado-Boulder, as far back as 1980! People across the campus watched this annual “Trivia Bowl” on local closed-circuit television. And some of the people involved in it (such as Team USA coordinator G. Paul Bailey) are still quizzing today. That's utterly wild to me, especially given that CU was largely unconnected to the academic circuit until the mid-2010s. (I have a paper pamphlet detailing the history of Trivia Bowl that I can scan if there's interest.)
More generally, many “trivia” people have pretty incredible life stories. I haven’t met many people with a life path like Jackie Fuchs (Jackie Fox), a trailblazing bassist turned patent attorney turned board game designer and question-type innovator. If you adopt a warm, non-dismissive attitude, you may learn from all kinds of perspectives you’d otherwise not get.
People remember how you treated them
As Alex Damisch alluded to in this post sharing empirical testimony from women, many people quit quizbowl because it wasn’t welcoming to them. At least one “trivia” participant mentioned to me that the demeanor of this board’s founder drove them from further involvement in quizbowl—and has kept them from wanting to check back in. Many other people absorbed that rhetorical style. (I count myself in that set, and have had to work to unlearn it.)
By now the heat of the "format wars" has largely subsided, and in many areas, good quizbowl is largely free to chart its course. So let’s say some people who want to read at your high school tournament played the bad format twenty years ago. Or you find out a new friend’s high school only did Chip back in the day, and they have fond memories of it by virtue of never getting to do anything else. Must we give a ? They’re not out here trying to upend our game, and our institutions are resilient enough that they’d fail if they tried, so it seems prudent to just let it rest. (I don’t think you’re obligated to absolve specific people’s acts of harm, ethical misconduct, or bigotry. I just ask for shifting the default view of new-to-you people away from “suspicious interloper” towards “possible asset.”)
Upon entering a community that’s new to you, it’s usually wise to leave your presumptions at the door. Declarations like “I don’t care about the periodic table” likely won’t get you far if you’re being asked about the etymology of dubnium. (I’d know.) In the other direction, complaining that pyramidal questions are “so LONG” isn’t endearing if you sign up to read them to teams.
Let’s maybe do less to stereotype and mock “game show people,” too. I’ve met only a handful who are egregiously socially maladjusted, and even the most infamous of those have accrued friends and defenders after persisting for many years.
- Especially if you belittle someone you’ve barely met by diagnosing them from afar as “autistic,” as if there’s something wrong with that even if they are. Get ALLLLL the way outta here.
- Perhaps the most alarming discourse I used to hear referred to people who preferred “trash” or “trivia” to quizbowl as “sewer mutants” (!!!!!!!). Let’s bury that one permanently if we haven’t already, please??
Some of the unease about Jeopardy fandom staff at early NHBB championships (as discussed in this post on down) came down to a sense of misplaced priorities: it felt to some like the event catered more to the experience of those people than to the kids competing. Though this perception had subsided greatly by the time of the one History Bowl championship I staffed (in 2015), I think the discussion helps illustrate a worthwhile general precept.
Whenever you’re at an event outside the community you’re most familiar with: It’s not about you; it’s about the players. Nobody owes any deference to your game show connections or your LL Rundle or whatever, especially if you’re doing badly at the task the TD assigned you. Teams play things they want to play, not as a feeder for Geek Bowl or what have you. (No one’s stopping you from hanging out with people you know who are there, of course.)
If you’re genuinely famous, people might make it about you for a bit anyway. (There’s a funny story about an HSNCT where some attendees wanted a photo with 2013 Jeopardy TOC champion Colby Burnett, and the random passerby to whom they handed their camera was ...2014 Jeopardy TOC champion Ben Ingram.) Just endure for a bit, then get back to the business of the event.
(Sometimes the “not getting it” takes more bizarre forms. I staffed one championship where a person at the staff meeting was in full cosplay as the Tenth Doctor from Doctor Who. Like... yes, this is a conference hotel; yes, we’re nerds; no, we’re not a sci-fi geek convention... what...)
On the origin of species
Professional tennis players don’t diss squash as “bad tennis.” (At least I don’t think many do.) We accept uncritically that different people play those sports, which share features and historical precursors. Maybe a similar re-framing is in order here: “Trivia” contests aren’t “bad quizbowl”, they are simply not quizbowl. They’re closely related activities with common ancestors, but speciation processes have rendered them distinct.
And just as is the case with phylogenetic trees of organisms, our notions that some species are “more evolved” or “less evolved” are misguided. Academic quizbowl has developed into its own thing, with a distinctive canon and somewhat different communal values. But those who are so inclined can traverse other branches of the "tree" linking us to other activities, without treating other species of knowledge-contest as less valuable.
(Maybe everybody already has accepted this, and I’m hesitant because part of me expects to get yelled at by a voice from an earlier era. I dunno.)
Broken recruitment “pipelines” in both games
I probably never would have participated in “trivia” if I hadn’t done well on Jeopardy and been invited in by Jeopardy alums.
There seem to be only three ways to get into enfranchised “trivia”:
- Go on a high-profile knowledge-based game show (usually Jeopardy) and join its contestant community.
- Get a referral to LearnedLeague.
- Be personally/socially close to someone who has done one or both of the above—close enough that you feel comfortable accompanying them.
Though pub trivia is everywhere, I’ve heard of almost nobody who became a “trivia” stalwart just from enjoying their local bar and seeking out more. Even being a longtime trivia writer/host is often not enough without a push from a game show or LL; Austin Rogers wrote bar trivia every week for 15 years before going on Jeopardy, but as far as I know didn’t connect socially with this world until after his run on the show.
Maybe I’m a hypocrite to say so, but I’d suggest that the “trivia” community de-center game show experience a bit, or do more to assure people that it isn’t necessary for joining the fun. So much chance goes into how contestants get selected and which ones win. Some of the best “trivia” players ever (and many of the best quizbowlers) did not win their lone game show appearance; others have never done one, and others still (such as LearnedLeague commissioner Shayne Bushfield) have said they don’t want to.
People are social creatures who come to communities via networked acquaintances. There are likely many potential “trivia” whizzes out there who just never make the connections to get discovered. But this is also true of quizbowl due to ongoing de facto school segregation, property tax disparities, uneven distribution of preexisting good teams, etc.
In both cases, the key questions are: How do we get people who don’t know about this at all to hear about it? And how do we get people who kinda enjoy this sometimes to become enfranchised? (These are the ur-questions of outreach and marketing.) A lot of “trivia” is decentralized and amateur, and I don’t know if anyone’s been well-positioned to do a survey of how people got there, or crowd-source thoughts on appealing to people it’s not reaching. A huge operation that gathers data from hosts, like Sporcle Live, might have some insight, but I don’t know what data they keep, or what they’d share, or what if anything it shows about people going on to broader participation in other brands.
A hare-brained idea
It’s interesting that no one’s set up a high school or college circuit for confer-and-write pub-style trivia minus the pub. Part of me hopes no one does, if only because it could cut into quizbowl recruitment. But given current U.S. law banning under-21s from bars, that’s what you’d want to do if you wanted a reliable pipeline into “trivia,” right...? Rent a basketball court, fill it with tables, invite local schools, keep all alcohol off the premises, offer prizes, watch students prepare seriously, ...profit?
Can We Do More to Encourage Crossover? Should We?
We probably should. For one thing, if more “trivia” people want to do quizbowl, that’s more money into the Quizbowl Economy. For another, at least a handful of new people might staff events if they know when those events are and where to go. (They aren’t on the forums or in the Discord; you have to find them and develop real relationships.)
“Trivia” has some resources that quizbowl groups could ask to draw on. I’ve mentioned the Toutant Fund as one entity whose interest in leading people to “trivia” might overlap with quizbowl outreach. It may also be courteous to let people from other games/organizations leave fliers at the info desk at national tournaments. “Graduating? NAQT/PACE/ACF Won’t Be There For You, But Here’s This Other Challenge You Can Try...”
Open tournaments, for people who never go to open tournaments
I once had an argument with Ryan Westbrook, in which Ryan (not a student at the time) said he wanted most or even all college tournaments to become open, and I (a student at the time) disagreed. I now think we were both somewhat wrong.
Currently, only 2 or 3 pre-nationals college tournaments per year are open, with maybe 2 or 3 more in the summer. These are usually high-difficulty tournaments. The main reason for this is that there aren’t usually enough teams interested in hard quizbowl to fill fields otherwise. It also rewards Olds for their continued service to the game by giving them something they can play.
Existing collegiate opens are totally unsuited to the task of welcoming people from non-quizbowl backgrounds to quizbowl. They’re way too hard and last way too long. A “casual open” circuit (where “casual” encompasses many people who are quite serious about “trivia”) would have to be built totally differently, from the ground up.
As I considered making this post, I often wondered what a “crossover event” designed to bring “trivia” people into academic quizbowl should look like. For reasons discussed above, it’d be far shorter than a standard tournament, probably around the 6 rounds that BP Titans settled on. To adjust for what people know, we might want more pop culture per packet (perhaps 15-20%, up from the typical 0-10%). Tossups should be closer to NAQT’s 4- or 5-line length, with single-line bonus parts, so the game goes right on to the next question if one goes dead.
This is more pipe dream-level, but while we’re talking about bringing people in, it’s worth thinking about how quizbowl is largely built atop selective universities and functionally selective high schools (magnet, charter, and private). As acceptance rates decline and some schools downsize or close, a more inclusive game should have options for people who don’t take the university path. If, say, Marco Rubio’s old dream of educating “more welders and less philosophers” comes about, or more teens eschew college to do tech boot camps or found startups, what could we offer interested people in those populations?
The “Quick Bites of Snackable Content” Model
To my surprise, a bunch of online events found an even better model. OQL USA and Mimir’s Well have weekly matchups; in lieu of top-down scheduling, players in a given match find a time that works for all involved (plus a moderator). Though large time zone differences can make this tricky, and many people are busier as in-person life resumes, the model in principle fits the rhythms of adult life pretty well.
In quizbowl proper, NAQT’s Buzzword releases 50-tossup rounds weekly, and has lured back some people who haven’t played quizbowl in years. (It’s been a delight to catch up with Anu Kashyap, who was fearsome at Rancho Bernardo HS in 2009.) “Asynchronous” events allow matches without needing any players to be free at the same time. Most notably, the first two seasons of QB League brought many new people to modern quizbowl with the weekly-scheduling model, an apparent smashing success.
Is there any way to translate this model to in-person space? Perhaps not. But we shouldn’t let these online institutions disappear altogether, precisely because they allow for such flexible scheduling. They’re also very good for people who are located far from everyone else, and/or lack the time and money to travel to in-person tournaments and conferences.
Who remembers the rememberers?
Like quizbowl history, a lot of “trivia” history fades as older people retire and old websites break. Activities like LL and Geek Bowl archive their own results, but many are password-gated or presented in unstandardized formatting. Some institutions like the online Trivia Hall of Fame preserve select stories, but aren’t comprehensive. Sadly, this problem is likely to get worse, as newer communities default to putting results in Facebook groups, which are all but unusable for archival purposes (and locked to those not on Facebook).
Though Quizbowl Wiki has its flaws, I’m glad it exists, and that there’s a unified Quizbowl Resource Database for past questions and stats. Maybe building a distinct “Trivia Wiki” with a similar archival focus would be beneficial. (There are game show-specific wikis, but they aren’t doing the same thing.) I couldn’t administer such a website, but if it were set up, I’d happily contribute articles.
Knowledge contest “cross training”...?
Perhaps trying other activities has practical benefits, like cross training or something. There may be some analogy here to teens who are getting repetitive stress injuries by hyper-preparing for one sport, whereas back in Michael Jordan’s era more star athletes lettered in three different sports in fall, winter, and spring. I certainly found myself quite lopsided when I got thrown into an environment that demanded a breadth of pop culture knowledge.
For “trivia” folks, academic quizbowl can hyper-prepare you for subjects that are harder to osmose in adult life; it can also get you used to pulling answers in a matter of seconds rather than minutes, and demonstrate how “canonical” answers are likely to recur. For quizbowlers, doing other kinds of “trivia” can provide refreshing topics for question writing that may not have come up much before; it can also build skill at conferring or using lateral thinking. If nothing else, taking time off from your main pursuit to do something less familiar can be pleasantly humbling; it reminds you that there’s always more to know.
I’ve also made some forays recently into competitive crosswords and “puzzle hunting,” which are seeing similar explosions of online activity. I feel like I see the edges of a sort of Grand Unified Theory of Clue-Answering Activities, where a few variables (team size, answering time limits, whether outside resources are allowed, etc.) have robust, reliable effects on the social values and community ethos around a game. But I don't want to be Edward Casaubon and promise more than I can deliver...so I won’t. Not anytime soon, anyway.
Can we have a section on these forums for “Non-Quizbowl Trivia Events”?
It’d be cool if things like Quiz Olympiad, International Culture Challenge, etc. could announce here, so long as they don’t compete for space with quizbowl event announcements. Quizbowlers could also alert friends if they make the finals of a streamed event like
“Wait, he isn’t dead!”: Would this help the bad quizbowl monster get back up?
Do we need to worry about people with nostalgia for archaic formats diverting people from good quizbowl to bad quizbowl? Or resuscitating those formats? Probably not. Most people with adult lives are not intensely dogmatically committed to pushing out events that currently exist. And most people get pretty used to whatever questions they’re exposed to; if we invite people to staff events on well-written pyramidal questions, that’ll just be the expectation. It’s unlikely anyone will throw a fit; if someone doesn’t like the experience, they’ll just quietly decline your next invitation.
This community has long overestimated its ability to “kill” competitors; NTAE (formerly “Panasonic”) came back a few times, Academic Hallmarks is back with more Auk-cellent virtual content, Bryce Avery still comes around here, and nothing has ever stopped Chip Beall. Richard Reid is a credited co-producer on the televised College Bowl! It may be unpopular for me to say it here, but let’s be realistic: The day of ultimate victory of good quizbowl over bad will probably never come. That said, quizbowl institutions are much stronger than they used to be, and the tenets of our game are much more firmly rooted; as long as our organizations are electing their own officers based on track records of accomplishment, it’s unlikely that any will be “captured.”
What Do You Think?
As pandemic conditions (hopefully) subside, some individuals who have been exposed to new things may be torn about which activities to prioritize. On a community level, it’s unclear how either community will incorporate online and offline components moving forward. We’re very much headed Into The Unknown.
In that spirit: I don’t have all the answers. I’m distant enough from current HS and college quizbowl, and new enough to “trivia,” that I may not be accurately describing either. Maybe I’m totally wrong about something!
Did you once play quizbowl and then get involved in “trivia”? The reverse? Is this your first time here? I’d love to see your thoughts below.