Game Week 2 Review: British PMs, Bollywood Universes and Books Retold
Let's have tête-à-tête about Maddock Supernatural Universe question, although you can't respond so I don't know how much of a tête-à-tête it really is.
Game score is the total points across all seats for a game, and I think it’s a decent proxy for set difficulty overall. This chart tells us that GW2 played significantly easier than GW1, which certainly wasn’t planned. Most league organizers will want their easiest set to come in the first week, so it’s a bit strange seeing than way more groups scored over 37 (arbitrary) this week.
Seat Averages
The seat averages for directs and Xs aren’t interesting enough to comment on, but that just means I can use this space to share top players for each seat. Pat Gibson missed Game Week 1 this season due to a time zone issue, but he’s announced his comeback by immediately scoring 13/16 in owns, tying with Nitish Khadiya on Seat 2. But Achyuth Sanjay gets the highest ‘Own’ score for the second week in a row, answering 15 of his 16 directs.
Toughies
Here’s a quick dump of how each triad faired.
The Correct% column is the number of correct answers divided by the number of ‘opportunities’ the players had to answer each question. This means it includes correct answers, wrong answers, and even passes. It’s a measure of question difficulty, but on an individual player level. 100% would mean that each question in the triad was answered as an ‘Own’, without ever passing.
The Get Rate% column is a little more intuitive. It describes how often the question was cracked across all 80 games. So it isn’t an individual player metric, but treats each game as a single team. 100% on this metric would mean that every question of the triad was correctly answered in each of the 80 games. Even if each question was passed twice and then answered correctly by the last player, the Get Rate would still be 100%, since Get Rate is just an inverse of Xs in Mimir terminology.
This means a 100% Correct triad is always a 100% Get triad, but not every 100% Get triad is a 100% Correct triad.
As an example, consider the ‘easiest’ question of this week’s set.
While the Greater species of this bird migrates to India from parts of Europe and the Middle East, the Lesser species migrates to India from Africa. **Which "flamboyant" group of birds** is this whose name is used to describe both Kutch Desert Sanctuary and Navi Mumbai as [BLANK] City?
Answer: Flamingo
This question was correctly answered by some player or the other in 79 of the 80 games that were played this week. That means it was an X (an unanswered question) in only one game, and that means a high Get Rate of 98.8%.
But Correct% goes into more detail and reveals that when you consider how often the question was passed or answered incorrectly, it was answered 79 times out of 111 opportunities to do so, giving it a Correct% of 71.2%.
Looking at Correct% gives us a different result for ‘easiest’ question:
Deriving from the French word for 'head', **what phrase** literally means ‘head-to-head’ in French, but is used in English to imply a conversation or exchange of ideas?
Answer: **TÊTE-À-TÊTE** (Pronounced Tet-ah-Tet)
So while Flamingo was answered in more games (79>77), Tête-à-tête was passed less often (103<111). You can decide which one you consider easier.
There is no equivalent debate about which question was the hardest.
Triple Doubles
I told you last week that I expected the number of ‘mustketthree-ers’ (sigh) to go down during the season, but the easier GW2 set meant even more people ended up answering all 3 questions of a triad. This week, 58 people aced at least one triad!
4 of these players scored a double-double, i.e. answered all 3 questions for two distinct triads, and their names are Anup Kumar, Ingit, Rohan Mitra, and Zubaer M.
But there’s more. Remember last week when I questioned whether anyone would ever score a triple-double again? Oh how wrong I was. This week, no less than 4 players achieved that goal by acing three distinct triads. This warrants a full list, so here’s this week’s honour board. Take a bow folks!
Survey
Tell us what you thought of the triads in Game Week 2.
Something interesting happened in a game from early this week. It was day 1 of the GW2, and the reader of Quiz #143 was reading his very first game of the week. The game was played by Aditi, Anubhav and Aastha.
Remember that we have several exclusive readers this season (Fiza, Rajdeep, Ankit, Shrotam and Priyojit are all racing for the the max games title). This means there are readers that aren’t playing in the league, and they aren’t setters, which means they don’t have usually have access to the question set prior to their first game. In fact on Day 1 of the game week the setters are still reading a few games themselves and making small changes and corrections to the set, so readers tend get the question set pretty damn late. So when the reader reads their first game, they are experiencing the set for the first time, along with the players.
The very first question of the set was from the French phrases quad.
Deriving from the French word for 'head', **what phrase** literally means ‘head-to-head’ in French, but is used in English to imply a conversation or exchange of ideas?
Answer: **TÊTE-À-TÊTE** (Pronounced Tet-ah-Tet)
The question was Aditi’s direct, and she answered it easily. Just before moving on, in the spirit of making some small talk, our reader said out loud something along the lines of “Hmm, I thought the answer was vis-a-vis, but that’s Latin so never mind.”
You can probably guess what happened next. Several rounds later, the following question popped up.
Deriving from the French word for 'face', **what phrase** literally means ‘face to face’ in French, but is used commonly in English to compare or contrast two things, usually two options or situations?
Answer: **VIS-A-VIS**
The question was Anubhav’s direct, and was passed to Aditi. Aditi considered her options. It did seem like the answer was vis-a-vis, but she’d just been informed by the reader that that phrase was Latin. Being a wily quizzer who uses all the information at her disposal, she eliminated that guess and saved herself a BA. The question then passed to Aastha, who smelled a rat and (underconfidently) attempted vis-a-vis anyway. And she got the point!
Now, I know what you’re thinking. This seems like a fairly scandalous reader error, but it’s actually a lot more common than you think, and one I’ve made myself several times while reading friendlies. If a quiz is new to you, you’re just trying to run it as best you can, with the occasional casual remark here and there, and sometimes that backfires terribly. The reader is question certainly won’t be making a mistake like this again any time soon.
On the other hand, when this was reported to me, I made the mistake of briefly blaming Aditi for it! “Onus is on the players to not put too much weight on what their clearly newbie reader has said in passing during a Day 1 quiz/They are clearly no authority on Latin or French, so why let their opinion influence your guessing?/Go for the guesses you were going to go for anyway.” Aditi patiently waited for my rant to end and then pointed out to me that this advice isn’t reasonable at all, since players will naturally assume the reader is familiar with the set they are running. She wasn’t even aware that the league had ‘exclusive’ readers who hadn’t seen the questions before, and why should she be? I can be an idiot sometimes.
Finally, it’s possible to lay the blame for this squarely on the organizers. What do you mean the reader got the set just 5 minutes before the quiz began?? They should get it much sooner! The reader in question has a passion for reading that is frankly infectious and in GW3 they’ve been extremely involved in proofreading the set, scanning for possible loopholes and confusing prompts, hours before their first quiz. This is what setters can enable by completing the set in time and giving our readers a chance to review it. We can do better.
That’s it, I have no moral of the story to round off this tale. Just thought it was an interesting situation that other people might like to hear about.
Bollywood Universes: Maddock toh theek hai, but what was the Wikipedia page called?
Yes, we asked this question.
**Which Bollywood media franchise** started in 2018 with the film 'Stree', and is centred on comedy-horror films that feature ghosts, spirits and werewolves? The franchise is named for the production house **and** the crossover world united by these common themes.
Answer: **MADDOCK SUPERNATURAL UNIVERSE**
That’s it. No prompt instructions, no alternate answers, nothing. We wanted Maddock, obviously, and we also insisted on ‘Supernatural’, as opposed to horror or comedy or horror-comedy or any other term. An older version of this question contained a clue along the lines of “the resulting acronym is quite similar to a globally famous crossover franchise”, pushing you towards MCU, but we removed it during edits cos it felt a bit blergh (aka forced).
At first glance, the answer instruction (or lack thereof) feels a bit pedantic and overly restrictive. Giving “please read the setter’s mind” vibes. Understandably the resulting missed points caused several players to be a bit annoyed, and it’s usually the players who felt they deserved the point. Fans of the series and people who pride themselves on being familiar with the works in question - these are the people we are pissing off and that’s obviously not what we want. Quizzes should be a celebration of things people happen to know, and nobody wants to rob you of a point purely out of spite (even if it may seem like that sometimes).
There are plenty of arguments in favour of insisting on ‘Supernatural’ over the alternatives though. MSU is by far the most widely used term for the franchise, by critics and fan wikis alike, and popular labels like that are to be honoured. ‘Comedy’ and ‘horror’ (and ‘comedy-horror’) are all termsthat appear in the question text, which, by unwritten quizzing convention, eliminates them from guesses. And while we’re not saying this is in itself a huge sign of credibility, the Wikipedia page for the franchise is now also called Maddock Supernatural Universe, which is not nothing. So there’s no doubt in my mind that this was the correct answer, although you could make a case for more generous prompting, which I guess is our learning for future game weeks.
My favourite take on this jhamela is the gentle reminder that Indian crossover franchises are still a pretty new subject in quizzing. There will be scope for debate irrespective of which answers we accept, since even the more lenient versions of this question (eg. points for simply saying Maddock) would still piss off some quizzers who felt they could’ve provided a better answer if the question has passed to them. Come to think of it, all questions have the ability to piss off some quizzers.
Best Ever Accidental Answer Reveal
I feel like we’ve covered some heavy subjects this week, so let’s end on a lighter note. We’ve been including spare questions in the question set for readers to use when things go wrong. Game #130 saw an answer get accidentally revealed, and Naren ended up using a spare. I will leave it to you to decide whether or not we should trust his explanation though.
Yeah okay Naren.
This is all we’re covering in this Game Week 2 review. Tell me what you thought of the set and this review, and give me ideas for what to include next, here in the comments or on our feedback form.
What's there not to trust about Naren's Explanation?? I believe it pawsitively!😂😂