Game Week 1 Analysis: Battle Taunts, Braille, and the Birth of Impressionism
Reviewing the hits and misses of the Season 4 opening week.
Game Week 1 went way better than I could've hoped for. Vikas and I have been alternating the 'lead editor' duties for question sets and this one was mine, and I loved how it turned out (largely because of quads that weren't my own).
I end up measuring question sets by their ‘moments’, i.e. instances where it's possible for someone to pull an answer out of nowhere. Even if nobody actually does it in a quiz the opportunity alone, if explained well by the reader, can sometimes elicit a gasp from the players, and that becomes a moment. I thought GW1 had a fair number of those.
The opening week of the league always features random draws, which means you might’ve been up against someone far better or far newer at this than you are. Don’t worry though, it gets better. Every week the draws will get more and more competitive until every game becomes a nail-biter (we hope).
We had a reader shortage on the first two days (we still do, please volunteer to read!), so I read far more quizzes than I ever have in a single week of the last few seasons. I read a quiz at 4.30 am, it was amazing.1 This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It's good cos I think I have a very good sense now of which questions worked and which didn't and why, and what could've been changed to make them better. It's a bad thing cos reading 12 quizzes can make you hate any question set, let alone one that you then have to write a detailed analysis for.
Fortunately, I have received a few words of encouragement for these posts from participants (and a few non-participants, thanks Nicholas!) and so this is still happening. Let's go.
As always, the question set can be found on this link, both in the order it was played and the order in which it's covered here: Season 4 Game Week 1
Data for the analysis: Raw Data
Share your feedback for the set here: Feedback. I promise you we're reading every single one, and will even address some of the submissions in this post. I know you're waiting for that Braille one, it's coming.
Contents
This is a long post, so feel free to jump to the bits that interest you.
Quads
Homework: FindTheFunda
Over the past 3 seasons, one of my favourite things was when someone would text me a few days after their quiz showing me a screenshot of their Twitter or Instagram feed, a shelf from their local supermarket, or a book in a library, wanting to share an instance where they organically came across something that they had recently learnt about in a B612 quiz. "Just wanted to show you I'm buying agave syrup cos I learnt about it in week 4" or "look that meme you asked a question about is now all over my feed". There is definitely some Baader–Meinhof at play here, but it's still great fun to share active learning, especially as it relates to your daily life.
So this time there's homework. Optional of course, nobody can make you do this. But if you do see something you recognize from this week's set, maybe post it on our Whatsapp group or on social media (please tag us so we know!). I'll try collecting them all in one place and adding them here.
What's in it for me?
Well, if we get multiple submissions (this is not a given) then we’ll pick the best one and the winner gets to choose a quad theme for use in next week's question set.
What, really?
Yeah, sure. Knowing the theme isn't the same as knowing the questions, and it's just 4 questions in a decidedly non-competitive league anyway. The trade-off seems worth it.
Go forth and #FindTheFunda, and tag us when you do!
Key for Newbies
For each quad, we'll be sharing a list of answers and the following numbers:
Total: Number of people who attempted the question, i.e. did not pass.
Correct: Number of people who got it right
%Correct: % value of the previous two numbers. This is a good approximation of the question's difficulty.
The objective is that each quad should have a ‘smooth’ difficulty gradient, meaning the first question (L1) should be the easiest and have the highest %Correct value, the second (L2) be slightly harder and have a lower %Correct, and so on.
The ideal %Correct values aren't actually fixed, since we sometimes intend for a quad to be easier or harder than the others, but a nice gradient would probably be:
L1: >50%, L2: 40-50%, L3: 20-40%, and L4: <20%.
Quads 13, 14, and 15 are non-ascending, which is a fancy way of saying they are supposed to be all of the same difficulty. They can be easy or they can be hard, they just need to be roughly level.
Almost none of these ideals are actually met in practice, but this is the target anyway since it results in perfectly level difficulty for all 4 seats in the quiz. When we're going through the numbers, I see any difficulty gradient with L4<L3<L2<L1 and call it a good gradient.
1. Led Zeppelin X JRR Tolkien
This quad started life a little differently from how it ended up. Morder/Gollum was an L1, Misty Mountains and Ringwraiths both would've moved down in difficulty, and the L4 was a different question entirely. This one:
What is the name of Robert Plant's dog? It is the name with which we are introduced to Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings.
Answer: Strider
I thought this was a bit trivia-ish, asking for a very specific fact from a very specific book, a fact that has absolutely zero significance outside of the book. So I swapped it out to be the quad intro instead (even though that turned it into a music question in a Lit quad) and rephrased the Strider funda into a "fun fact" because why not.
In hindsight, the original quad would've probably resulted in a far better difficulty gradient than this one, although I do think it's a good thing that we didn't ask anyone what Robert Plant's dog is called.
🎯 There was a musket in this quad, just one in the whole league. But let’s save that for later.
2. Pronoun Books
Another quad that changed form between when it was written (early September during Season 3) and now, most notably in its difficulty gradient: it was originally intended to be a non-ascending quad, meaning all questions were supposed to be of the same difficulty.
One of the many great perks of the Mimir format is that because questions appear in sets, you can often use the order of the questions in the quad to affect their difficulty. The quad originally opened with this rather straightforward question:
Which 1887 novel about a mysterious white queen in Africa named Ayesha is subtitled "A History of Adventure"?
But by changing the order of the question and making sure the players have seen questions about books titled 'It', 'We', and 'Him' beforehand, the new question reads very differently.
Which 1887 novel subtitled *A History of Adventure* is about a mysterious white queen in Africa named Ayesha who reigns as the all-powerful '[BLANK]-who-must-be-obeyed'?
I was privileged to read for a couple of games where people were able to figure out the answer just by paying attention to the quad, and these were probably my favourite moments from the quiz.
3. Battle Taunts
The difficulty gradient may look good here, but this turned out to be a lot harder than intended, probably better suited for a non-ascending quad.
They shall not pass may have been easier than usual cos it was asked in a question set that was already giving bhav to Lord of the Rings in other questions.
NUTS is trivia max, no way of working that out or guessing it.
Russian Warship, Go Fuck Yourself is a nice example of a question that only makes sense cos it's a funny fact. Ideal for pub quizzes.
🎯 Seoan Webb and Matthew Marcus both picked up muskets in this quad, meaning they answered all 4 of these questions in their game. Congratulations folks, presumably the first of many this season 🎉 Someone else did too, but that comes later.
4. Kecak
Our newest question setter, Nidheesh Samant, opens his contribution this season with an almost perfect difficulty gradient. This is also a quad that leverages question order very nicely, starting the quad with a very challenging L4 (Kecak itself), but then using the revealed funda ('Ramayana') to make the remaining questions much easier.
We got some feedback complaining about this exact thing, saying that all questions except the first one were "too easy after kecak was known", but the data seems to indicate otherwise. In my mind, this is pretty much a perfect quad.
Actually, I did run into some trouble with the L3 where people happened to know it was a deer, but didn't know what to do when I prompted them for more detail (I wanted ‘golden deer’). Eventually, I asked "can you tell me the colour of the deer?", as direct as that, and that did see some of them across the line, but quiz questions should probably be clearer than that.
5. Liverpool vs Besiktas
I am not a football fan. Unfortunately, the rest of the world of quizzing is, so we need to give it representation in our quizzes. I enjoyed the narrative quality of this quad. It sounded like a commentator talking about a game as it happened, going minute by minute, but stopping here and there for the players to fill in the blanks.
Quite a lot of people seemed to enjoy the Peter Crouch "would need to [BLANK] to see most of us eye to eye" hint in the L1, and I even got to see a non-football fan guess "Is there a player named Crouch?" which was lovely.
Too much info was given away in the L2, with the overt Tower of Babel hints. I wanted the end of the quiz (this was the last question) to be a good one, but this was a little too much.
🎯 Vikram Shah picked up the league's only musket in this quad, answering all 4 Liverpool questions in his game. What an upstanding Liverpool fan he is!
6. Prints & Places
This was a TIL quad for me, I would've scored 0/0, but you folks did better. Difficulty gradient was all over the place, with Damask being far more obscure than Argyle.
7. Quirks of Braille
I guess I can't delay it anymore. This quad was...a risk, I will admit. Intentions were good though, I promise.
I was on a train from Amsterdam to Bonn last weekend and I noticed that the seat numbers had braille on them. Interestingly, the 2-digit numbers like 86 and 84 nevertheless required 3 characters for their braille representation. Even more curiously, the first two characters were the same for both numbers (the 8-), while the last characters (6 and 4) were different.
So that means an extra character is being used in addition to the glyph which means 8. I looked it up and learnt that in Braille, the same glyphs are used for letters A-J as well as the numerals 1-9 and 0, so the extra glyph on the train seats was simply the number symbol, or hash (#).
I loved that bit of learning, particularly how it was prompted by a real-life experience as opposed to my usual mode of learning, i.e. staring at a screen. Subsequently, I figured it would be cool to make 4 questions that shared some of that learning with all of you. The objective was to give you a glimpse of the same thing that I had just learnt, namely that Braille letters are surprisingly structured and organized.
Even now, after watching the quad fail approximately 51 times, I don't actually hate most of the questions.
The opening question (the L2) was more of a stress test than a quiz question, so reading it calmly will give you the answer and there are about 3-4 different ways of getting it.
Letters in the braille alphabet are grouped in sets of ten and assigned a pattern of dots as shown. The first 'decade' i.e. letters A-J use only the upper four dots and also stand for digits 1-9 and 0. Patterns with the fewest dots are assigned to the first three letters (abc/123) and also to the vowels in this part of the alphabet, while the 'even' digits 4,6,8,0 are corners or right angles. What letter of the alphabet (or what digit) does this pattern stand for?
Answer: The letter I or the numeral 9
The second question (the L1) was much easier as a result of everyone having learnt the counting trick, but hey that's what an L1 is supposed to be. Easy.
The third and fourth questions are where the quad fell apart in my view, turning into history lessons rather than a lesson in Braille. The last few words of the L3 question (“system of encoding”) turned it into a second L1, and the W question was a stretch.
Strangely, the feedback we've received from everyone is that the first two questions were the bad ones, and the next two far better. I suppose this is because the latter set is more typical of quiz questions rather than involving simple counting. I still wish I had gotten 4 counting questions though, and maybe used them all as a non-ascending quad, which is a better spot for wildly experimental quads.
Sorry about this one. I'm not saying we won't do it again, we almost certainly will, but it'll be better executed then.
8. Ada Documentation
Thankfully, the worst-executed quad is followed here by the best-executed one. At least in terms of question quality, if not in terms of difficulty gradient.
Ironman was an easy starter, but most people forgot the context of the quad by the time they saw the second question in the set (the L3), going instead with 'blueprint', 'prototype', etc. The combination of forgetting and the difficulty of the question itself meant that Strawman should probably have been an L4.
Tinman and Sandman played much more easy once quad context had been set, and both had a nice collection of clues. But putting Sandman at L4 was a mistake any way you look at it, Metallica is no small deal.
🎯 Dibyo Haldar and John Liu both picked up the quad context early though, scoring their first muskets of the season!
9. Omar Rodriguez's Minimalist Magazines
We got some unexpected love for this quad. 3 of the 4 questions in it were answered in every single game of the week, which might've made it better suited to be a non-ascending set.
Demi Moore played harder than the others, with many guessing Angelina Jolie or Beyonce, who actually did have a fairly similar photoshoot done while she was pregnant.
10. Birth of Impressionism
We had a good laugh about what it says about a quiz community that far more people can guess "pointillism" than can say "outdoors". Nerds, all of you us.
I read a quiz where someone who spoke French decided to give me the name of Manet's painting in the original French: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Unfortunately, I do not speak French, and because he was pronouncing it perfectly, I had no idea if what he was saying was the same as what I had written in my answer key. After asking him to repeat the answer 3 times I gave up and asked him to just give me the English title, which he grudgingly did. Sorry man.
Raises an interesting question though. Have you ever said "chop-IN" or "rod-IN" in a quiz, instead of "sho-PAN" and "row-DAN", just to make it slightly easier for the reader to mark you? I certainly have. How did you feel about it?
🎯 Pradeep R, Seoan Webb, and Mario Fernando all had fun with this quad, scoring a perfect 4/4 score in their game.
11. Military Tactics
We did notice just in time that we were doing two military-themed quads this week, but we went ahead with it anyway given that the questions were decent. This one played even harder than Battle Taunts, with two virtual L4s.
Echelon did get answered a few times, and was a nice reveal even when it wasn't answered (since most of us have heard the phrase "upper echelon" in English too).
But Oblique was nigh unanswerable and would've likely gone for a 0 if it weren't for the last day save by Eric Mukherjee. Thanks, Eric!
12. Masala Lab Masala
Fun quad, messy difficulty. In hindsight, of course Ras-el-Hanout would be harder than Five-spice! But it isn't similarly obvious why Five-spice is so much easier than Za'atar.
Lots of clueless faces for this whole quad though. Cook more, people. This stuff is going to save your life one day.
13. Fake Athlete Viral Videos
A low-effort quad, at least for us setters. Also, a nice nostalgia trip since a lot of these videos were doing the rounds a little over a decade ago when low-res recordings weren't so intolerable, and yet that same low quality meant that fake videos were much harder to spot.
During the week, I had a few people tell me that they watched the David Beckham beach video just a few hours previously, which I initially thought was a cool coincidence, then thought it might be something we had prompted ourselves by asking questions about it and making everyone google it later, and finally concluded that the same network influence that caused them to see the video recently probably also caused me to make this quad in the first place. It's a wonder how the internet works at all.
14. Shonda Rhimes
Every week I want to pick one quad that I have nothing to say about. This is Week 1's skipped quad.
🎯 One final musket was scored here too, but wait, it’s coming.
15. Cameos in Feels Like Summer
My favourite quads are the ones that pull 4 questions out of the same, very specific piece of media. The video for Feels Like Summer looks like it was made for question setters though, and the actual list of cameos runs much, much longer.
Jaden Smith played much easier than the others, all of which were actually fairly challenging. We considered mentioning "BLACK ARTIST" in every question, but decided against the handholding, prompting a lot of funny guesses. In their defence though, the caricatures do look pretty racially ambiguous in that video.
Here's an extra for you, one that would've been an L4 before the quad was made non-ascending:
In this segment of Gambino's Feels Like Summer, who is skateboarding with a person that some think is SZA, but is probably more likely to be Tessa Thompson (whom she is rumored to be dating)? This artist released seven albums between 2003-2013 as part of a seven-part concept series called Metropolis that covered hit albums like The ArchAndroid.
Answer: Janelle Monae
Special Mentions
🏆 Santosh Swaminathan showed us what he can do with a Game Week 1 random draw, bulldozing his way to a new B612 record of 31 points (11 directs, and 20 steals!) in his game. 31 points in a 60-point game! It’s the first 30+ score (and also the first 25+ score) we’ve seen in the league.
On the way, he picked up 3 muskets (Led Zeppelin X Tolkien, Battle Taunts, and Shonda Rhimes) and 3 more miss-kets (3 questions answered out of 4). A ridiculous performance that’s unlikely to be beaten any time soon, as draws are expected to get a little more competitive every week.
Seat Averages
X’s, or direct questions missed by all 4 seats.
Seat 1: 3.15
Seat 2: 5.35
Seat 3: 3.88
Seat 4: 4.50
Owns, or direct questions answered by each seat.
Seat 1: 6.38
Seat 2: 4.68
Seat 3: 5.78
Seat 4: 5.92
That’s all we have today. Game Week 2 is already on, hope you’re busy scheduling!
My goal is to have read a quiz every hour of the day. If you've scheduled a quiz for an insane hour in CET, tag me.