Game Week 7 Analysis: Ducks, Dead Celebs, Diego Velasquez, and the Disgusting Food Museum
Prakash, what is this tacky behaviour?!
Setting new records as the season winds to a close, here’s the analysis, published on a Friday.
We’re in the semis now, so these quizzes suddenly have stakes! But also we’re doing friendlies for everyone who’s eliminated, so maybe they don’t.
Raw Data: Game Week 7
You can find the question set here, both in the order they were asked as well as in the order they’ll be covered here: Question Set
You can share your feedback on this set by leaving a comment, or using the Feedback Form.
Note: The Two Types of Quads
The way I see it, there are basically two types of quads in a Mimir quiz: List Quads and Deep Quads.
A List Quad grabs a very specific list of items, and then makes questions on each of the items in the list. Examples of such quads from this week include Forbes' List of Highest-Earning Dead Celebs and Prakash's Favourite Books and The Lovecraft Circle. The answer to each question in that quad is often the name of the list itself, but this isn't mandatory. So the Lovecraft Circle quad didn't always ask for the names of the authors in that list, but just asked other questions about their works. List quads are generally easy to make once you have a topic in mind, but coming up with the topics themselves is really hard work! They need to be "fresh", meaning creative without being repetitive.
A Deep Quad on the other hand takes up a subject (not a list) and then makes 4 questions that somehow connect to that subject. We had only two Deep Quads this week: Life of Aurangzeb and Velasquez's Las Meninas1. There's no guideline for what elements within that subject can be turned into questions, and so Deep Quads are generally much harder to make. This is because you need to spend some time simply reading about the subject and making notes about potential questions. On the flip side, coming up with a topic for a Deep Quad is far easier, in fact, it's no work at all. Literally anything that has a Wikipedia page can probably be turned into a Deep Quad, and a lot more too.
Personally, I have always enjoyed Deep Quads more. Deep Quads make me feel (who knows how accurate this is) like I've actually learnt something, probably because we approached the same subject in 4 very different ways. Deep quads make me want to go back and google things and read more about them. At B612, we try to include Deep Quads as much as we can, even though they're so much harder to make, because we know they're the real deal.
1. Velasquez's Las Meninas
Okay so here's why I started this post with that little essay about Deep Quads vs List Quads. I really just wanted you to understand how much I adore this quad about a single painting. Yes I know the difficulty was all over the place and some of the clues outright didn't work, but given the choice, this is exactly the kind of Arts quad I want to see in every quiz we do. Don’t spread the net too wide, there's no point, cos none of us are real art connoisseurs. But if you can focus on one painting and pull questions out of it and make me stare at it and then stare at little segments of it, over and over again, then I have no choice but to come away from a quiz having gained a new appreciation for Velasquez's most important work.
@Other leagues, please do this. Pick up topics I don't know anything about, and use the framework of quiz questions to connect it to stuff I do know about.
Did the quad work though?
No of course it didn't work. L2 was the easiest, L3 was harder than L4, and literally only one person answered it (Thanks Ritwik Ghosh!).
I also liked that we accidentally connected this quad to last week's Maria Theresa. It was a happy coincidence and really goes to show you just how interlinked all European royal families are.
2. Diabolical She-Villains in Gaming
Here's a wonderfully specific List Quad to follow up. System Shock played harder than we expected, but the highlight of this topic for me was watching long-time gamers smile just a little as they realised they knew something and were also simultaneously pretty confident that nobody else in their group knew it. Doesn't matter where you are in the passing order, if you've played Metal Gear, you're probably going to get a point for it.
🎯 Eric Mukherjee must have used a cheat code or something, he had all these games on his fingertips and scored a musket in this quad!
3. Malmo's Disgusting Food Museum
Next, we have a whole quad inspired by a single question in one of our older sets. Remember that whole bull's penis vs testicles thing? Well, naturally the Disgusting Food Museum website has an entry on both those things. We've asked about testicles before but turns out the penis is edible too:
Bull penis is eaten for its health benefits and its alleged aphrodisiac effect. It is cut down the urethra and washed to remove the urine smell, then blanched in hot water and the tough outer membrane is removed like a condom. Bull penises need to be boiled for a long time to become edible. Enjoying penis is more about texture than taste, it is described as fatty and a little slimy. According to the experts, women should eat the whiter meat, whereas the darker penis meat should be eaten by men.
My favourite bit of that is "outer membrane is removed like a condom." What an excellent expression.
Urine being used for boiling eggs was nice and guessable (or perhaps only guessable), but Surströmming played much harder than we expected it to, considering we were also accepting simply 'fermented fish'
4. John Green's Anthropocene Reviewed
This one you really should have seen coming. We didn't just mention this book in last week's set, we even recommended it.
Yips played harder than expected, and I can tell you exactly why. The question had a mistake in the framing. Here's the question text:
Which condition does John Green rate only 1.5 out of 5 stars in his book Anthropocene Reviewed, because it can rob even the most experienced athletes in the world of the skills they need to perform basic moves on the field? Most frequently affecting golfers, cricket bowlers and baseball pitchers, the condition probably got its most coverage in the 2020 Olympics, when a fan favourite chose to opt out of the tournament rather that risk injury.
Do you see the problem? By saying it most frequently affects players in certain roles, the question implies that the malady is physical rather than mental. And although this is true, the yips really are more likely to affect golfers (over a quarter of all players are affected), it's still a crappy sentence to put in a quiz question. Sorry about that.
I mentioned earlier that I don't consider this a true Deep Quad, cos I ended up taking the easy way out and just using chapter titles from the book to turn into questions, and that's proper List Quad territory. Some Deep benefits still exist though, in that I hope I was able to share with you the scope of topics John Green is covering in his book. If one of you ends up reading the book after this week's quiz, do let me know.
5. Songs to Arsenal Chants
Sigh. What can I do? One of the organizers (yes, Vikas) is a long-time Arsenal fan, and I suppose that makes the whole team and every reader an Arsenal fan by association. A Gooner-in-law, if you will.
With that disclaimer, we included 4 very poorly sung Arsenal chants in our quiz: a music quad born out of sports. The difficulty gradient was actually pretty decent, and I'm surprised 13 people got the L4. I think I only saw it happen once out of about 7 quizzes read.
6. ...Ducks
We make such a big deal out of how quads need to be specific, I actually laughed out loud when I saw this set. Four questions covering the entire world of ducks. This isn't to say there isn't more, we probably should do another ducks quad someday (or maybe of the other leagues can), but here's what we picked for now.
Oatmeal played like an L4, and I think I contributed to Runner Duck being harder than it needed to be by not accepting 'Running Duck' (Sorry Vohra!).
7. Forbes' Highest Earning Dead Celebs
I'm allowing myself one quad to be skipped entirely in these weekly analyses, and this is the one I want to skip today. Nothing to say here. The difficulty gradient was perfect tho.
🎯 Cheyenne Fletcher thought so too, picking up all 4 of these to score his first musket of the season!
8. Indian Reality TV Moments
WE'RE NOT PROUD OF IT but this might be the quad that got the most positive feedback this week.
It's also responsible for the single greatest difficulty goof-up of our entire season, "her choice" being placed at L4. It wasn't an L4, it wasn't even an L1. It was an L0.03.
You'll be pleased to hear that following this week, I finally got around to watching the first episode of Indian Matchmaking. I am intrigued, but I think I will probably resist watching more.
9. Celebs vs PETA
Listen at this point we're as tired as you are. Lady Gaga is good and all, but nobody deserves 4 references in a quiz league, not even Shakespeare.
The difficulty gradient was great, even though there was really no way at all to guess Kanye (apart from outright guessing). Anna Wintour could've been L3 if we'd realized that sooner, but I'm glad we didn't.
10. People Starring in their own Biopics
Alongside Lady Gaga, Muhammad Ali was probably the most outrageously easy question in this week's set. Way too much information in the question, but I guess that's what you can do sometimes with an L1.
A particularly interesting situation arose in one of the quizzes I read this week, with regard to the L2 question. When you first start quizzing post-college, in open quizzes and city clubs, you pick up a bunch of unwritten quiz rules that are designed to make adjudicating easier. For example, you learn that "Unless the question expressly asks for a first name, surname is enough". Sounds good. As a follow-up, you learn that "Skipping first name is alright, but INCORRECT first name is not." So for example a question that asks who wrote Anthropocene Reviewed, you can say "Green" and get points, but "Hank Green" would be wrong. Again, seems reasonable. Finally, you're told "Spelling doesn't matter", which is actually a rule for written rounds but extends to spoken rounds in the form of "Pronunciation doesn't matter, unless egregiously wrong". Cool. All of these rules seem like they make sense.
Then someone said "Kamal Nanjiani".
Here's the thing. If they'd said just "Nanjiani" they'd get points, but they didn't. They gave me an incorrect firstname, so this should be marked incorrect, right? Except, since this is a spoken round (and league), you could argue that replacing "Kumail" with "Kamal" is just a matter of pronounciation rather than being egregiously wrong. Vowel sounds aren't set in stone, and pronunciation doesn't matter, so does that mean "Kamal Nanjiani" is correct?
I did end up giving a point for this, reasoning that we're a nice league and we try not to be finnicky. But I'm interested in hearing what you think. Let me know in the comments or on any of our other channels.
11. The Lovecraft Circle
The lit quad that broke our 0-week streak. After Hedda Sterne last week, this week it's Frank Belknap Long that went unanswered, and honestly we should've seen this coming. 43 quizzes and we still haven't found anyone who's even heard of the guy. Damn.
12. Life of Aurangzeb
Deep Quad, so I'm in favour of it, but it didn't actually play out very well. Also, I feel like we keep sharing the positive feedback we get but never the negative stuff people tell us, however kindly. Here's a solid bit of analysis we received:
And the numbers back him up. The L1-3 questions all played like a non-ascending quad, and Kollur suddenly dipped to just 5 correct answers all week. It's possible that even some of the people who got it right it were actually confusing it with Kolar Gold Fields (yes, the same KGF from the Kannada movie series), a very different mine in a very different state.
13. Weird Al Parodies
Definitely the nicer media quad this week, being less of an assault on the ears than the Arsenal chants were.
Intended to be non-ascending, Tacky turned out to be far more difficult than any of the others, in spite of multiple hints in the question. I think this might have something to do with the fact that the song is relatively recent, compared to Canadian Idiot and Amish Paradise.
We've been asked if this quad was made because of the new Weird Al movie coming soon, and the answer is "we're not sure". Quads come when they come, ideas come from general reading and surfing. In this case, the setter Achal Gupta had come across Weird Al fairly recently (last year) and had heard enough songs to do a whole quad. Now it's quite possible that the reason he came across Weird Al was because there's a movie coming out, but we can't be certain of it. Oh well.
14. Dishes x Coat of Arms
IMO this is a great example of how absurdly specific and creative a List Quad can be. The full name would be "guessing foods named after European capitals from their coat of arms.” Phew.
We knew Paris Brest was significantly harder than the others and ended up using it to adjust for seat balancing from the other quads. I love non-ascending quads, you can do so much with them.
15. Prakash's Favourite Books
The experimental quad of the week was probably a little too easy to really prove anything significant.
I was at a friend's house last week and he had a poster on his wall that looked a lot like the image above. It was one of those "scratch it out when you read it" things, and a nice collection of recommendations. I asked him what the source of the list was, cos I thought the artwork would make for a good Lit quad, and B612 always needs more of those. He said he had no idea, it was just some random dude's opinion of what "the top 100 books" are.
Random dude was then named Prakash and the rest is history.
I did initially intend on making the questions a little more challenging, the Catch-22 question still has some traces of that. But that idea got set aside for a later quad and here we just decided to go easy and gift everyone points. It worked, this is one of the most highly answered quads we've ever had.
Seat Averages
X’s, or direct questions missed by all 4 seats.
Seat 1: 4.18
Seat 2: 4.37
Seat 3: 4.71
Seat 4: 4.24
Owns, or direct questions answered by each seat.
Seat 1: 7.05
Seat 2: 6.21
Seat 3: 5.87
Seat 4: 7.18
You can share your feedback on this set by leaving a comment, or using the Feedback Form.
If you made it this far, well, I suspect your final game is over too. How was it?
You could make an argument for John Green's Anthropocene Reviewed being a Deep Quad too, but it's probably a bit of both.