Yesterday I wrote 52 trivia questions as part of an expansion for Trivy, my take on a trivia / bingo hybrid. But I’m no stranger to writing trivia questions.
Background
In college, I used to write for Kaleidoquiz, a 26-hour trivia contest held by the local radio station. This tradition has been going on for almost 60 years.
Kaleidoquiz
The way Kaleidoquiz (KQ) works is this: for 26 hours, every 6 minutes a question is read over the radio. Then, you have 6 minutes to answer that question until the next one is read. It used to be that the questions required several disciplines. You’d need a bible nerd on hand to know where Moses died (or at least where to start looking in the bible!) You’d need sports nerds on hand to know stats of old Yankees teams (or at least know where to start looking!) and so on. Now, there’s the internet.
The questions are things you can’t find with a simple Google search. “Where did Moses die” is too easy. That’s one search away! So the questions got harder. Questions are ranked from 10 points to 50 points. A 10-pointer is two or three searches away, with maybe some clever combining of facts. A 50-pointer might take leaps of logic or have several parts.
Questions would be things like (none of these are mine, just ones I remember from my time as a player): There’s a cash-for-gold business on Lincoln Way that used to be a computer repair shop. What kind of computers could you get repaired there?
While you could start googling cash for gold places (there were 3 on Lincoln Way at the time) and finding out historical data, the smart move is to guess “Mac” (the correct answer), because it’s unlikely that any other brand of PC would have a dedicated repair place. Of course, most teams would run down the other path anyway, but when that timer started getting low, a call had to be made1.
Other questions were things like: in a 2-player game of Smallworld, if one player goes first and rolls a 2 on the Victory Die while playing the Flying Amazons, what’s the most number of territories they could conquer on the first round of the game? (9). This is a brilliant question. Very difficult unless you’re familiar enough with the game to look up the rules online and find the information you need.
Sometimes 50 point questions are almost unintelligible. I remember one questions that was something like: Take a transliteration of a foreign book (but not the most common transliteration!) and change the last letter. This gives you an anagram of a country. Name the country and the book. Stop! That’s too much! How do you even start with that question? It’s a bad question and I don’t like it.2.
Oh, also
While this was going on, questions being asked every 6 minutes, there were also other events, usually one an hour. These included events where you’d send a team member to a certain place to do a challenge (like blindfolded Mario Kart where your partner gave direction, or a Portal Speedrun). Sometimes you knew the challenge ahead of time, other times they’d just tell you what to bring.
Scavenger hunts: show up in 2 hours with as many of these items as you can: a high school yearbook. An AOL install disk. A pizza box from a different state. A jury duty summons. A professor (this was the 1am scavenger hunt).
And there was the famous traveling question, which dropped around 2 in the morning. One year it send people to Cananda. Another it was just “Go to Omaha and find the man in the KQ shirt”
My favorite was a crossword where almost all of the clues were “City in Iowa”, except for one that said “Our city”, and one that was “Destination city” and you had to get there just by looking at word lengths and intersections. Brilliant stuff!
The beauty of KQ was that during that 26-hour period, you could use it as an excuse for anything. “Why are you dressed like a nun carrying a cardboard fish at 2am?” “Kaleidoquiz!” “Oh, okay.”
The Question
My junior year, I joined the question writing team. I don’t remember the exact breakdown of how many questions I wrote, but I remember that they asked me if a) it was okay to make a leaderboard to encourage other people to write some, and b) if it was okay that I wasn’t on that leaderboard for the same reason. I liked writing questions.
Some of my favorites that I wrote were:
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Complete the sequence: Super Mario Bros, Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, Super SMash Bros. Melee, __ 3
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Complete the sequence: 151, 100, 135, 107, 156, 72, ___ 4
I wrote many others, and most of them weren’t “complete the sequence” (in fact, I only wrote two that were, and the only way I got them both approved was by spacing them 18 hours apart5 ).
But there’s one question I wrote that got more hate — and more love — than any other. Most questions received no feedback. Sometimes you’d get a positive shoutout about one question, or a complaint (especially if you got the details wrong, like the time when they had shadow-dropped a new pokemon 3 days you asked how many pokemon there were!). If any question got 3 responses, you knew it resonated. Usually this only happened on really bad questions.
One question I wrote had 7 people comment on it. 4 negative, 3 positive. Two teams said it was there favorite question. One described it as the worst question of the show. Before I get into it, I want to reassure you that I know how to write a good question.
Writing Good Trivia
Good trivia depends on the audience. For KQ, the assumption was that everyone had the internet. This means that questions have to be hard, harder than what you’d ask at a typical bar trivia night.
For any trivia game, if 100% of the audience gets a question right, it’s too easy. If 0% gets it, it’s too hard. Really, that’s the same for 90% and 10% as well.
For general audiences, I want 60–70% of people to get most questions. These are the “standard” ones that fill the bulk of a show, maybe 60% overall. Then you want some toughies, that you expect only about 40% of the audience to get. These should be about 20% of your overall. You want a handful of gimmes, but not too many. And even these should aim for 80% accuracy. These should be no more than 15%. For the remaining 5%? Go wild. Have something terribly obscure, or so easy people second-guess it. But most of the time, you want most people to get most questions.
Unless you’re running for an “expert” crowd, or one where they have more tools, in which case you can make things harder. If you’re running for people who are particularly old, young, or distracted (the trivia isn’t the point of the event), you can make your questions a touch easier as well.
Okay okay the question
The most divisive question I ever wrote was:
What were the first words that Malcolm Reynolds spoke on television?
There it is. Want a challenge? Start a timer for 6 minutes, see if you can figure it out. You’ve got the internet at your disposal. Time starts…. now!
This question has a few parts: First, who is Malcolm Reynolds? That’s easy, if you don’t know it, Google will tell you. He’s the captain in Firefly, a sci-fi show that ran on Fox for half a season in 2003.
Great. Next question, can we find a transcript of each episode? Yes, okay he’s got a line here… wait, this question was worth 50 points? There must be a trick. Look at the wording. Oh, trailers! Find any promotional materials for the show. Yup, two trailers… and he doesn’t speak in either of them. What’s next?
Here’s where having a Firefly fan OR an attentive player comes in handy: the episodes on Firefly (rather famously) aired out of order. The second episode aired before the first. So the first words Malcolm Reynolds spoke on television were from the second episode: “I live on the edge”.
The people who got the right answer loved it. The people who didn’t notice it tended to hate it (except one person who got it wrong, realized it after, and held it with a sort of begrudging respect).
Anyway, I like trivia, and if you’re reading this, you do to. Go buy Trivy, print it off, and play it with some chums. It’ll be a grand time.
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This question is from my freshman year, and my team overruled my logic and called in “HP”. We did not get any points. No, I’m not still hung up on it, why do you ask? ↩
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Korea, Koran ↩
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The answer is “Wii Sports”, the theme is “best selling video game on each Nintendo console” (and this was just before the Wii U launched). ↩
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The answer is 81, the sequence is pokemon introduced in each generation. ↩
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Fun aside: KQ is a 26-hour competition, so most people take shifts. Some, of course, try to pull it off themselves. The crew running the show get fun around 3 or 4 in the morning. One year they played whale songs. Another year, heavy metal. The year that got them the most complaints was lullabys, as teams struggled to stay awake. ↩