Week 117: Quizbowl energy vs quizbowl forum energy.
And how I managed to miss the WQC
You may have read Jane Coaston’s newsletter this weekend describing the difference between quizbowl energy and debate team energy. (Not sure if you’ll get paywalled, but https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/04/opinion/academic-team-debate.html) While I’m pleased to see quizbowl come out the winner in the comparison, I also saw a great deal of negative response to the piece, from people who had a negative experience with quizbowl. In order to explain that, or possibly apologize for that, I have to draw out the point that there’s a difference between quizbowl energy and quizbowl interaction energy, and the latter is much closer the to “debate team energy” described in the essay.
There’s a lot of debate energy in player’s early development in quizbowl, because from the outside quiz bowl appears similar to debate: you are pitted against an opponent, you are trying to outthink the opponent. Untempered by experience and not yet getting guidance from a coach, the new player would find that the same emotional outputs to the same inputs come from quiz bowl as debate. In fact, having a scoreboard right there instead of debate judges is a more rapid feedback loop. So if anything the impulses that make debate an all-out war of one side against another over a comparatively small point should be even greater in quiz bowl. And it isn’t.
There’s also a performative aspect to the competition of debate, and there is that to the first matches of a quiz bowl team. A certain degree of emotional posturing can intimidate an opponent into mistakes, and debate incorporates that into the adversarial structure as something to ignore or overcome. While that can happen in quiz bowl, it quickly burns out as an effective strategy, as teams improve they find better uses of their time, and teams see what their opponents’ plan is and learn to ignore it.
The mediating force that prevents quiz bowl energy from being debate team energy is the presence of a third party controlling the flow of the game. You achieve victory in quiz bowl not by beating your opponent but by mastering the material that appears in a packet, and performing better at that than your opponent. At a certain point, players and teams realize that your opponent is competing against you for a resource (questions, and by extension points.) While your opponent may block you from consuming that resource, you won’t see that dominate the experience until you’re facing very experienced teams and are experienced yourself. Most competitions for inexperienced teams don’t end in buzzer races, but in hitting the clues they know unopposed. Once that point is understood, all the performative aspects of quiz bowl strategy get exposed as asides to the direct strategy. Until that point is achieved, debate team energy, or performative energy can dominate. In the negative impressions of quiz bowl competition I saw, this mode was the major reason for rejection, and this seems consistent with the debate team energy Coaston was decrying.
Since reading the essay, I’ve been struggling with casting empathy into quiz bowl, because I’ve been largely casting that in terms of humility. Quiz bowl is designed for you to fail against it, not your opponent. It’s designed for you to learn by failure, repeated failure, to pick up some knowledge from this match and apply it somewhere down the line. It is not designed to hand out a winner and a loser at every step, it is designed to put you in a room with someone else, and sometimes you both are lacking, and neither of you get points. You are struggling through the packet alongside another team, not solely against another team. Everybody competing can be wrong, and that is a necessary part of the game, and that is what separates quiz bowl from debate. I can see where you can read empathy into that situation, but I’ve always cast that as humility. It is designed to make you approach it with humility about your own abilities, your own knowledge, but it is not to humiliate you.
There is a second point where debate team energy can come back in, social media and interactions with other teams on forums. Once you’re outside the structure of playing the game, there’s an opportunity for that type of energy to sneak back in. While I made the mental divide here into quiz bowl energy versus quiz bowl forum energy, it is present even in real life. In 1997, I was having lunch with a player from another team, and we were discussing why a particular facet of quiz bowl needed reform. When pressed on why I thought people weren’t up in arms about this particular point, I remarked "if people wanted to have that fight, they wouldn't have left debate." That’s kind of how I feel about debate energy, I take the engineer’s approach, and while looking at the discussion, I reach a point where my mind says: “You know this isn’t actually going to solve a problem. Wouldn’t your time be better spent fixing a problem?”
At this point, I don’t have any mention of debate in the book to be, and I don’t really feel a need to include it. Extemporaneous speech is a translatable skill to ward against stage fright, and the quick recall of points to refute the opposition could be adapted through study; but those are really the only two features of debate which are translatable. Even that second skill isn’t that adaptable if your team only has a week to prepare. I don’t want to wander into the performative aspects of quiz bowl posturing because it’s not a good use of a coach’s limited time. So I’m probably going to leave it as it lays, and trust that the coach, properly armed with the techniques in the book, will get them through the first wave, and give them enough time and training so that the second wave is blunted.
This week I managed to screw up and think that the World Quizzing Championships were still at the end of the month, as they had been before COVID. I regret that not only because I am still using my performance at that as a form of medical checkup on my mental stamina, but also because I had been using the competition as a way to keep in touch with the significant amount of quizbowl diaspora, those who don’t get to nationals, but who do still do WQC. It's also one of the limited times during the summer for me to meet that section of my online friends in person, and to get them to come near me. One fewer chance for in-person interaction is particularly disappointing these days.
I suspect I would have had a disappointing performance if I had gotten there. The pieces of the book I’ve been focused on the past month were not applicable to WQC or its tendencies. Between press releases for championships and Catie’s busy 8th grade graduation, what free time I’ve had was not spent on review, or running through similar activities; I’m not comfortable with going into anything completely cold, IF I’ve already spent the time to build a strategy. I’ll be back next year for that, and I’ve already put the reminder to register in my calendar.