As promised: my (minor) criticism of Matt Jackson’s call to connect the quizzing/trivia communities with the quiz bowl community. I would state I am very much in favor of more people rallying to this cause. I do not intend this to dissuade anyone from attempting this, but I am stating these points only because I’ve tried to keep connections in both camps for the past 25 years, I’ve seen and experienced several of the snags that connecting the two groups, and I want people in future to know where these problems lie and avoid them.
My notes:
1) To a certain degree there's already a pipeline for the pub trivia style to take root with college-age potential players and younger. One of the ways which pub trivia has always made money for their hosts is expanding beyond pubs into their restaurant section. And since those sections are not exclusive to 21 and over, there's a place where students and parents can compete. This is true about my experience with pub quizzes locally. There's a group of parents from Catie's dance studio which travel weekly to two local restaurants, and when those pub quizzes have a music round, we turn to our daughters who, familiar with all the music played in each of their teammates’ dance routines, carry us through the round. After a few weeks, they’re helping not just in the music rounds, but a few questions in both trash and academic disciplines. Whether that leads to more quiz bowl play in high school... we'll see. That's not to say that it's a two-way street yet, but it's easily possible to see the flow from pub quiz to circuit become a circulation rather than a uniform flow.
2) I was pleased with the note describing quiz bowl and pub quiz as having common ancestors and significant overlaps of useful knowledge. This came to play in The Joy of Quiz, and also shapes my work in progress. If we take the common origin to be radio and tv quiz programs, then pub quiz is an earlier branch, but clearly from the same root. We can point to the internet's influence on the circuit, and also to the comparative consolidation in the pub quiz market.
3) Some of the clues mentioned in Matt's account as being excised from the game aren't all that excised. They exist in the game as last or giveaway clues, because the answers that those clues lead to are still good and usable answers.
Giveaway clues aren't necessarily giveaway clues because they're the "easiest", it's because they exist in the memory of the most people, inside the community or outside. They serve as the last line of defense against questions going dead. They exist to be the lower bound of how obscure you can go with clues or answers. If you want to bring people into quiz bowl, those are the easiest accommodation you can offer, and it's often the thing that fails to be offered. I'm rather emphatic about this point because it represents the throughline for competitors to go from televised competition, where these clues must be present, into circuit quiz bowl, where clues are stacked ahead of these last clues.
If you create a format where there is no amount of transferable skills from competitions a player is familiar with, they won't stay with your format. So some common ground has to exist.
4) The memory of the circuit is far shorter than the memory of the trivia and quizzing communities. Much of the circuit's memory was lost when people left it for the quizzing community, and much of the reason for their exodus colors their impression of the circuit and its forums. So a circuit player may find themselves called on the carpet for someone they've never met.** It’s not fair, and it’s not just, but it may happen to anyone. Fortunately, the circuit is a bit larger, and the forums a lot smaller than they were in the most toxic periods.
**That doesn't excuse what was done in the name of preventing "trash capture," as they term it now. But I'm a little more sympathetic to how they could have whipped themselves up into a moral panic that demanded they fight for the purity of their game because they felt it was an existential threat. As somebody who was there for the events leading to NAQT's founding, I can see where they believed they had to act somehow, but that's where my sympathy ends. As someone targeted by such campaigns, I've never found the act of driving people out of the game to be superior to bringing more people in.
5) A followup response attempted to cast the circuit as the having the spirit of amateurism, which I have never found to have any basis in fact, other than the implication that "amateurism = not money-making." The quiz bowl circuit is infinitely more professionalized than any other academic competition out there, and than most quizzing competitions. This is by virtue of the large volume of freely available practice materials, which makes it easier to convert time into expertise, and a compact tournament structure that gives experience in a single day’s competition that would take a couple months to acquire in other formats. Unless you forget everything, quiz bowl experience always makes you a ringer.
6) The pipeline question for both of these will always be not a question of quality players, but a question of quantity of players. We focus too much on getting the best players to come, rather than getting more people in the door. That requires more accessible events (incorrectly read as easier), but more events in general. The more events you have the more opportunities to bring people into the game, and fill additional roles necessary to have the game continue. If you only focus on the getting the best players in another format, you add only those players for only a few events. If you focus on making it open to thousands of new people, you build and allow people to develop in your format. Building the opportunity to develop keeps people as part of your format.
While I’ve been watching a little of the Olympics the past two weeks, I’ve really enjoyed only one story that’s come out of the tournament. Sweden’s Nils van der Poel won the 10k Speed Skating gold, shattered the world record by two seconds, and immediately upon receiving the medal released a training guide recounting how he got to this point, intending it to be his final contribution to the sport.
I mention this because I have to guess this will show up in future international quizzing, but also because it’s an admirable flex. To achieve his goal and to have this ready to drop as he achieves his goal is awesome, and also reflects a goal to improve the sport by improving the competition to come. I hope that those of us with ties to quiz bowl and quizzing take this as a lesson of how to improve the game.
Next week, I’ll actually finish reading van der Poel’s pamphlet, and give you what I found translatable to our purposes. I’ll also go through some themes that came from a movie I saw for the second time last night.