This is a fairly late review post. The game week got over last Sunday, and it's Thursday as I type this. Some of that is procrastination and just being busy finding readers for the next Game Week, but not all. I just had very little to say this time around.
Now, this could mean that I'm not writing enough questions myself or not reading enough quizzes during the week to form opinions about what is and isn't working. It was also a tougher and more unbalanced week than usual and that led to us receiving some unusually mean feedback, which is the kind of thing that can seriously affect your motivation to write a giant blog post talking about silly quiz questions.
But we're here now. Headsup: We might skip some quads if I think there's nothing to talk about.
One of our biggest learnings from putting together these question sets and running them for 50 groups a week is that there is really no such thing as a completely workable question. Nor is anything ever 100% trivia. Every question needs to presume some knowledge, no matter how basic, and then demand that you take a running leap from that cliff of prior knowledge into the mist of the unknown in a direction that you can only guess.
Sometimes that cliff may feel low to you, and sometimes the mist may clear up to make the leap look easy. But there's always a cliff and there is always a leap. You may think a question is workable, but that's only cos you're on the cliff already. If you're not on the cliff yet, all questions seem like trivia.
(This analogy would've worked better if it accounted for different people being on different cliffs, and dropped the whole "high vs low" metaphor for something more egalitarian, but hey this blog is free)
Essentially, this week's set had a lot of cliffs. It was partly intentional since we were very deliberately trying to make a set that was different in tone than our past sets, most in terms of categories and difficulty. But that's just the intention, it's up to you to decide what the result was like.
About the Saviours
In spite of how many times I've used it, it is no real defence of a question set to say that we had "zero unanswered questions". People know strange things, especially in this community, so the fact that just one person in a group of 200+ knew the answer to a question doesn't exactly make it a 'good' question. That's just the bare minimum criteria.
So while we can't say that having zero unanswered questions is necessarily an achievement, we can say that having an unanswered question is a possible indicator of a bad question set. It’s a sign that the setters badly misjudged the group that the question set is for. For that reason, the league should be thanking the Saviours, i.e. the people who stopped a question from going unanswered this week. We had two of them this week, in the Climate Chart Exhibits and Dall-E quads Read on to meet them.
1. Minard's Flow Map for Napoleon's 1812 Campaign
During a quiz I read in Game Week 2 this season, Anupama Srirangan had this map hung on the wall behind her, and one of the other participants in that group told us all a bit about what it was.
It's a fascinating map and ideal for a deep quad, which just means it's a cool piece of history that one can pull 4 different questions out of. The questions have the same chance of success as standalone questions, but the theme is interesting enough that it gives people something to google after the quiz.
The difficulty gradient was smooth, but the questions themselves played pretty hard.
Minard is pretty much 100% trivia, although I did hear of one quiz in which someone (one of the Gauthams?) managed to spot the mapmaker's name in the image of the first question, and then remembered it when it was asked in the second question! Points for paying attention.
Berezina is as tough as it gets, only getting answered twice in 50 quizzes, by Pat Gibson and John van Maris.
Moscow was an easy answer made a little too hard by its placement in the quad, i.e. after answers like Minard and Berezina, people just didn't expect something as basic as Moscow.
2. Fermat's Last Theorem
My issue with this quad (and a lot of other science quads) is that although it is ostensibly within the realm of science, what it eventually asks for is just names. Names of people and equations and formulae and concepts. Sometimes these names are common enough that people who are proficient in the space will know them. Sometimes they aren't, and on those days these questions will seem a been hacky. I think we did okay this time, with 3 of 4 names being common enough in the field of science being discussed.
The difficulty gradient was decent, if not perfectly smooth.
Diophantus and Germain played about the same in spite of being leveled at L3 and L4 respectively.
Pythagorean Triplets saw a lot of people guessing the first word correctly based on other clues, but going instead for 'solutions' or 'equations'. The former isn't technically wrong, but the letters would fit only if you accounted for the fact that the solutions to the equation appear in sets of three.
3. Fashionable Neighbourhoods
Perfect difficulty gradient, maybe with a relatively easier L4.
4. Classical Music Fests
Classical Indian music is a criminally underrepresented topic in quizzing, certainly in this league. The latest addition to our question-setting team, Rajat Gururaj, used to play the tabla in childhood and reclaimed the hobby recently due to the pandemic. This quad is him giving us a taste of that world.
Perfect difficulty gradient too.
I witnessed an unfortunate moment where Dhruv Mookerji was confident of the answer being Swara Samrat but didn't attempt it because it didn't fit the letters of the answer. This is because he assumed it was spelt the way it's pronounced, i.e. "Swar", which is just very bad luck.
🎯 The quad also gave us our highest number of musketeers in a single topic. Sreyashi Dastidar, Ankit Vohra, Soumya, Sumit Roy all picked up muskets. Note these names so you can ping them later asking them why they didn't sign up for Flames India.
5. FIFA World Cup Balls
Are you already tired of the football representation in quiz leagues? Are you ready for it to get much, much worse?
This wasn't intended to be a non-ascending quad, but that's exactly how it played, which is pretty fascinating for 4 pieces of information within a fairly specific topic.
6. Amendments to the Constitution of India
Another underrepresented area gets its due, and I quite enjoyed the TIL nature of this quad.
The difficulty gradient was good aside from the L3 vs L4 misjudgement, which is always confounded by stuff that's topical.
Anglo-Indians produced some of the finest guesses from the league this week, and also provided the best funda for those that didn't get it right. Yes, the 2011 census really did note only 296 Anglo-Indians in the country. The number was cited in the Lok Sabha, where it faced a fair amount of opposition because of how ridiculously small it is.
🎯 Jayant Mahadevan picked up a musket in this topic, scoring 4/4 in Amendments!
7. Taylor Swift's Midnights
Ronak Gupta, who finished his B612 quiz early this week, pinged me after seeing a Taylor Swift quad show up in a different quiz. Let's call that quiz Amesflay. He pointed out that though he usually struggles with music questions in B612, he'd actually done quite well in the Amesflay Swift quad. Some of this could be chalked up to just having some easier questions (Eg. "Who is this rapper?" *Shows a picture of literally the biggest rapper in the world*), but I'll admit that the Amesflay set was a nicer way of doing a music quad.
Our difficulty gradient was slightly affected (again) by misjudging what's topical.
8. "Fun" Books
In hindsight, it was probably a bit silly to assume that the cricket question was going to get fewer right answers than the one on David Foster Wallace.
9. Climate Change Exhibits
Here’s a message from our friend Vikas Plakkot, who started his Masters in Public Policy at LSE a few months ago:
"One of the full unit courses I picked this term is Climate Policy, which focuses on making policies wrt climate change in an increasingly complex political setting. One of the chapters I was reading and debating with my colleagues was communication of climate change - Why do people not take it as a risk that is imminent? What kind of language truly puts light on the dangers of it? Does art work - like Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth or a powerful speech by a nation's PM or youth activism? These questions obviously led me down a rabbit hole and here we are."
The difficulty was all over the place though.
Garden Of Earthly Worries has been widely called out as probably the single most annoying question in the league so far (although we might break that record in GW5). There was enough in the question to get you to the Garden of Earthly Delights, but not enough to help you guess the exact last word.
It was only answered once all week, by Sai Prashant M, who credits his co-players with eliminating all the other guesses and allowing him to guess "worries". Thanks for saving the week Sai!
10. Bed Varieties
Listen I can't always bring myself to add something interesting about each quad of the week and if a quad is titled "bed varieties" then it's just asking to be skipped.
Sham of a difficulty gradient too.
🎯 Cheyenne Fletcher didn't mind it though, he picked up a musket by just knowing a lot about beds.
11. "Happy Birthday, Mr President"
A fun quad because of how far-reaching it is. I think the template can probably be reused too: take an iconic moment of popular history (1 question), then mine its covers, parodies and tributes for 3 more questions. It makes for a flexible quad that still naturally stays within a single category.
The Kim Kardashian Met Gala debacle played a little easier than Marilyn Monroe's original performance.
Man in the High Castle and Geri Halliwell played well as L3 and L4 respectively, with some people figuring out the answers based on quite limited clues.
Hold on, can’t let you miss the best thing that came out of the discourse for this week’s set on our Whatsapp group1.
12. Mountains of the Solar System
Skip.
13. Dall-E Reimaginings
Probably my favourite quad this week, and not just because Ananya was clearly annoyed at everyone getting Nighthawks so easily last week and wanted to punish us all by asking two-parters. The questions actually had a surprising amount of information to work with, and the quad was headed to be a nice non-ascending set, if not for that Matisse-Kahlo slip-up.
I'd advise seeing those paintings again if you have a minute, there seems a lot to learn. Most of the questions required you to identify a painting's title, then remember its original artist, and finally also identify another artist from the style and hints. It's a fantastic quad idea.
Srinath was our Saviour for the Matisse-Kahlo question, and I figured it made sense to ask him how he did it.
"For Matisse it was the colours. It seemed very similar to the Madame Matisse portrait. The figures were what made me think it's Kahlo."
And now you know.
14. Monopoly Tokens
Far and away the most popular quad this week, in a week that opinions split between all quads. No seriously, look:
Disney Villains played hard (too many people went for "Mad Hatter" or "Alice in Wonderland") and Godfather played easy (a horse head ffs).
I was surprised by how hard both James Bond and TheBeatles played, neither crossing 40% correct answers.
🎯 Nothing played hard for Sangeeth, who got all 4 of these and picked up a musket.
15. The Earth to The Moon
A nice, deep quad from Nidheesh, although you'd be forgiven for assuming that a Jules Verne could only have come from one person in the question-setting team.
Verne's novel was one of the inspirations for the first sci-fi film, A Trip to the Moon, a still from which you've likely seen before. It's the image used at the start of this section.
The Wikipedia entry for this novel is quite a treat. Here's my favourite bit:
In H. G. Wells' 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon (also relating to the first voyagers to the Moon) the protagonist, Mr. Bedford, mentions Verne's novel to his companion, Professor Cavor, who replies (in a possible dig at Verne) that he does not know what Bedford is referring to. Verne returned the dig later when he pointed out that he used gun cotton to send his men to the Moon, an actual substance. "Can Mr. Wells show me some 'cavourite'?", he asked archly.
Seat Averages
This was the single worst week we’ve ever had in terms of seat balance. If you were in Seat 4, take solace. The universe was very clearly conspiring against you, as evidenced below.
X’s, or direct questions missed by all 4 seats. Seat 1: 5.56 Seat 2: 5.72 Seat 3: 3.86 Seat 4: 8.18
Owns, or direct questions answered by each seat. Seat 1: 5.8 Seat 2: 5.34 Seat 3: 5.84 Seat 4: 3.1
Special Mentions
Vinoo S picked up 7 different L4s in his group, the highest of the week. That includes answers like Sophie Germain, Swara Samrat, EWS, Will Self, Vesta, Nadar, and Halliwell singing for Charles. The man has range!
