Game Week 6 Analysis: Beer, Beversea, Badami Mangoes, and the Boys in Blue
Also, some notes on how to handle a particularly tough quiz question.
Setting new precedents by publishing this on a Thursday, but here we are.
Raw Data: Game Week 6
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
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Note to Readers: Handling a Tough Question
Before we dive into the topics, there's something else I wanted to talk about. I know quiz content works differently for everyone, and an easy set for someone is hard AF for someone else. But the numbers do back me up when I say that Game Week 6 had a fair number of unusually difficult questions.
A difficult question here doesn't just refer to something that doesn't get answered much, but to questions whose answers seem completely inaccessible. A completely new name, a country you've never heard of, that kind of thing.
If you're reading games for us, or for any of the other leagues, please know that how you handle these questions often dictates the resultant experience for the participants. This doesn't matter much for quizzes amongst the top folks, but as we've talked about before, newbies can be easily discouraged. If you're a reader and you find yourself revealing that the answer to that last question was something like Hedda Sterne...please take a moment to acknowledge that difficulty. Crack a silly joke. Or just say something to the effect of "I'd never heard of her myself lol". It doesn't change the quiz results, but it reminds the newbies that they aren't alone in learning something today, and it lightens the tension in the room. If you can make them smile at a question that X-ed for the whole group, that's a good sign that you've succeeded as a reader.
Note to Some Quizzers
One more thing. We wanted to quickly acknowledge what we inadvertently put some of our participants through this week. Foreigners who found themselves in Seat 4 (there were 6 of them!) this week had to contend with this set of questions in Round 4.
I know right? Honestly, the Indian content is measured and we try never to cross the threshold of 2/15 quads per week, but this sequencing can be really disheartening. We wouldn't change the content at all, but in hindsight, we'd probably spread the topics out a bit so you didn't have to deal with all of them together.
Okay now let’s dive in.
Artist Name Changes post-George Floyd
It wouldn't be a B612 analysis if we didn't start with a quad where we dramatically messed up the difficulty ordering. Turns out the The Chicks and Lady A are fairly well known (60+ answer rate).
One thing that we still don't have a good rule of thumb for is what to do with particularly workable questions. Sometimes they make sense on L1 since the no-cost guessing opportunity that the first player gets means that they'll usually get it right. Other times the fact that it's "workable" turns out to be completely subjective, like Mulatto getting missed by over 80% of the attempts.
Sports Jersey Colors
Everybody's favourite quad of the week may have had ordering problems, but the phrasing of the questions has gotten plenty of high praise.
Even though the punchline has been given away, here's the question itself.
While one of the colours on this nation's tricolour flag had politico-religious connotations and another had been chosen by its neighbouring country for their sports jerseys, white was rejected since it was not unique. The fourth colour on the flag hence became the popular choice for sports jerseys by the 80s, replacing yellow. Which country?
Answer: India
(another example of workable questions not being workable for everyone though, at L1 this was answered only 35% of the time)
Goodreads Choice Awards 2021
Look everyone, B612 got a literature quad right! Right matlab the quad idea was good IMO, nice and current.
I think we tend to assume that anything that's current must also play out easier as a question, but that doesn't always end up happening. Sally Rooney's name has been all over bestseller lists and at the front of every bookstore you've walked past in the last 2 years, but people had trouble remembering her name. The absurdly unmemorable name of John Green however comes pretty easily.
I will admit that Andy Weir at L3 is a pretty big mistake.
Mango Cultivars
First of a few 'local' quads this time around. I read 8 quizzes last week and my one big takeaway is that we should've made a question about the Chausa, which seems to be everyone's favourite mango. It was attempted on all four of the questions, and was never right, which can be a bit upsetting (I even cropped one out of the image above). You should always give the people what they want, especially when what they want is mangoes.
The difficulty was spot-on though, and congratulations Sreyashi Dastidar for being the only one in the league to get Anwar Rataul!
Things Voltaire Didn't Say
Look everyone, B612 is back to calling things "lit" when they're really not lit!
The big lesson from this topic was simply that it is always Voltaire. When asked for a French Enlightenment writer in a quiz, particularly if he's said anything clever, just blindly go for Voltaire.
Difficulty notwithstanding, this was still a quad I particularly enjoyed reading since any text in quotation marks gives readers a chance to try dramatic voices, which is basically what I live for at this point.
Satan played much harder than I expected, while I'm as shocked as you are that anyone knew Evelyn Beatrice Hall. That was Eric Mukherjee, and he barely hesitated. @Eric, why do you know this? Nobody should know this.
Children of Empress Maria Theresa
A quad I'm rather proud of because it was born of a trip I made last week to Croatia, where the walking tour guides mentioned Maria Theresa enough times that I decided to spend a bus journey just reading her Wikipedia page. The woman was a force of nature, giving birth to 16 children in 20 years, while also reigning over battles and implementing reforms. My favourite line from the page: “Maria Theresa asserted that, had she not been almost always pregnant, she would have gone into battle herself.”
The Marie Antoinette reveal was one of my favourite moments in all quizzes this week (after the Indian jersey question), and I was surprised by how many people knew about the Holy Roman Empire.
We misjudged the difficulty of Modena, as Italy seems to have more than a few options for sports car towns (Maranello is a province to the south of Modena). Naples was intended to be kind of a TIL, since I loved the title "King of the 2 Sicilies" and just wanted to use it somewhere.
Rashomon Style Films
That's right, we asked Lee Harvey Oswald 2 weeks in a row, like the America-obsessed pop culture enthusiasts we are. No, it wasn't intentional (it almost never is), but we didn't do much to avoid it cos I wanted to see if there were any cases of people getting it right in Game Week 5 but wrong in Game Week 6.
I am thrilled to report that the opposite happened, with 11 people missing the question last week but scoring in the week that followed: Abhinand, Aditya Sriram, Akshat Jain, Akshath A, Ashwin CV, Harshit Joshi, Jeswin Jose, Sandeep hari, Soham Bhaduri, Subrat M, Utkarsh Rastogi. Great job folks, easily the nicest thing that happened this week.
The L4 of this quad also exposed some latent biases in the quizzes I was reading. This week was a notably tougher quiz than most others, with plenty of snorters1 including Hedda Stern, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, Leigh Bardugo, etc. Lots of things that you had no real shot at answering unless you just happened to know the answer already. But none of those questions evokes the kind of genuine annoyance that Ulidavaru Kandante does. Quizzers will see that answer and react as if they've been dealt a truly unjust hand. "How could I answer that?" one participant asked me.
A quick reminder to everyone that there are a fair number of non-Indian participants in the league this year, and in spite of their presence, the question setters continue to select 2 ‘Indian’ quads every week. We're an Indian league, and we like Indian pop culture, so it makes sense to do it. The foreign participants don't complain (seriously, why would they?), they just nod their heads, call it a TIL, and move on. All new info is good info, whether it comes from another country or another state. Nod and move on. It’s not hard, try it.
Beer Styles
This was a fun quad if you aren't a teetotaller, but also a bit of a shootout. Participants knew there were limited options, and so were willing to guess more. Say Pilsner enough times and eventually it'll score, right?
The IPA question in this quad was also a bit of an old chestnut. There's a common story, shared often in quiz slides, that IPAs were created exclusively for export to India, with the addition of extra hops intended to help the beer survive the journey. I've now been told this is a false legend, and with such vigour that I feel I should probably share it here too: IPAs existed well before they started getting exported to India, and the name is mostly a marketing ploy. Fun fact.
🎯 Nrupal C has his priorities right, scoring his first musket of the season in this quad. He did this while also scoring miss-kets (3/4) in 2 other topics!
Conspiracy Theories
I...have nothing interesting to say about this quad. Sorry.
UPDATE: You should watch this.
Bangalore Bands
Another 'local' quad, and one that evoked some nice reactions.
I think we did a good job making Lagori and Kryptos workable, and while Djinn and Miskatonic does sound completely alien to me, I watched a quiz in which Achyuth Sanjay got that one right AND Benny Meyers said that that would've been his guess too, in spite of never having heard of the band! Which gives me some hope.
Nice difficulty gradient too.
The Only Woman in a Photograph
A great topic for a quad, and a nice difficulty gradient.
Boston Marathon was answered in every quiz, and your second big lesson this week is that when asked for a German actress who was active in the first half of the 20th century, always go for Marlene Dietrich. I've never watched any of her movies, but her name has gotten me a few points in various quizzes. May she serve you well.
Hedda Sterne breaks a nice streak we had going, being the only unanswered question this week.
Joker on Late Night Talk Shows
A gift from the Mimir format to us is that we get to make questions on topics that would be quite out of place in any other quiz. This is such a weirdly specific topic, and yet it's cool to know that the trope (or rough approximations of it) has shown up at least 4 times.
We made the recency mistake again here, assuming that because Joker was a recent hit, people would know Robert De Niro was in it. But the Letterman cartoon was apparently too easy to recognize (easier than De Niro's face though? I'm still confused about this).
Jerry Lewis is probably the right kind of L4. 13% is a good target for L4s IMO.
🎯 Shankha Ghosh Dastidar got the joke, and scored a musket in this quad!
Books by Neural
Have you tried getting your media consumption recommendations solely from quizzes? It's quite a treat since quizzes are obligated to be at least reasonably diverse, and that means your recommendations will be satisfyingly eclectic.
I started watching John Berger's Ways of Seeing last week (it's on Youtube). It's quite old and everyone's hair is hilarious, but the man is making some solid points. Did you know he's the guy who coined the phrase 'male gaze' to describe how women are typically portrayed in the arts? Seriously, go watch the second episode.
The other recommendation was from the intersection (quad convergence!) of this quad and the Goodreads one. I'm reading listening to John Green's Anthropocene Reviewed, and it's lovely.
Quad was nice too lol.
🎯 Vikram Shah doesn't need these recommendations, he's well-versed in this and more, scoring 4/4 for a musket in this quad.
Shifting Capitals
Every time we get to the geography quads, my interest in writing these analyses drops a bit. I maintain that the single most vital trait required to be a quizzer is to react positively when introduced to new information. Be happy and curious to learn that other people know things that you do not. Do NOT be angry. That's common too, and that's how people move away from quizzing.
Personally, I think I do well in this department, except when it comes to geography. Somewhere deep inside there is a tiny spark of annoyance when the question basically boils down to "what is the new capital of this tiny African country" and someone actually knows that it's Gitega. I'm not saying it makes me angry. But that's probably the closest I get to it. Oh well.
🎯 Amartya Saha could never annoy me, he's too busy getting muskets, scoring 4/4 in this quad!
ICC Elite Panel of Umpires
Back to happy topics, and this was a musket-heavy quad.
A particularly fun reaction I got to watch sometimes was “oh no, I can see his face but I can’t remember his name!” for Nitin Menon.
🎯 Riccu Varghese, Saahil Sharma, and Ronak Gupta all scored 4/4 on umpires, usually with a smile on their face.
Seat Averages
X’s, or direct questions missed by all 4 seats.
Seat 1: 4.78
Seat 2: 5.00
Seat 3: 3.10
Seat 4: 5.03
Owns, or direct questions answered by each seat.
Seat 1: 4.70
Seat 2: 4.78
Seat 3: 7.15
Seat 4: 5.6
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A fair few of you have already started with Week 7, so not much point in wishing you luck now. Hope you’re through to Week 8 :)
I learnt that word yesterday, it means 'ridiculously difficult question' in quizzing parlance. Thanks, Sourjo!