If we extend my argument from last week that what is chosen for answers can change as the writer builds up their supply, but what is demanded by the format will not over the course of a season, we should expect that certain things will be coming up time and again. In the case of the fourth round of the new format, they're calling it "Math Time" and it's going to be the questions from before just formatted a little differently. In the episodes aired thus far, they've added plots of graphs from graph paper, which is new, and asked a question which was about math, but was written out as a regular question, because that was the technology offered to them.
This also informs my opinion about these questions being written by someone who is genre-savvy and has some circuit experience. When you take the time in your first couple episodes to reconcile what the TV program called math, and what the circuit calls computation, and import the circuit definition of math, questions that would be considered vocabulary of math, you've made a conscious decision to change the rules, in reaction to believing there's a distinction between math and computation in spirit. It wasn't necessary to make the change, you could almost put those questions on autopilot, but the writer chose to make the change.
Near the end of last week's note, I mentioned that I had another deduction which I was going to use for this week. The deduction was this: The writer is not kidding around with this format about images being used as clues. In fact, they are making it so that over half of the questions your team faces have associated images. That's a slight increase from the old format, but there's a second part of this. The clues in the questions seem to be more often blanks, unless you have circuit knowledge. There's less context given with questions that allow you to answer without the knowledge from the associated image, and the key context that is missing is the last clue that would usually be provided.
Let me explain what I mean with an admittedly made-up example:
[The question begins with a picture of Buckingham Palace being displayed from a distance down a street where Union Jacks are hung at regular intervals from poles.]
If this were the previous writing regime, the question would be read with some context clues for it, stating the building was in London and was the residence of the British monarch.
In the new regime, based on what I've seen the clues would focus on names of monarchs who had previously resided, or the architects who built and expanded it, but there would probably not be the mention of it being in the United Kingdom. Instead, it would be expected that the series of flags would provide the context clues to get you to Britain and then the context clues about royals in residence would point you to the fact that it's a palace.
My conclusion is that these questions are going to benefit visual learners, and they are going to play heavily towards that until they run out of ways to visually clue questions. That’s actually an interesting approach, and one that I don’t think that the circuit has tried in a standardized way. The issue with that is that it also means that the expectations of what can be asked about changes. Just as I was able to eliminate a bunch of categories from televised competition because they couldn’t ask about them, we can also make the case that certain types of questions will be oversampled as a result of having space for them and only them.
So what will be in that area of questions? The obvious answer would be art, and geography, and things in other categories that have visual cues to their identity. Science thus far has been dominated by visible or viewable phenomena; astronomy showed up twice. Subjects that don’t have a visual component and aren’t able to fit in the large size of the lightning rounds (see last week for an explanation of that) are going to be hard pressed to fit in the episode.
With this principle in mind, I prepared two slideshows for the team this week. The first was artwork that I knew was likely to come up. The second was a set of world and US landmarks. I chose this because the pattern I saw across the episodes was a few questions where a landmark is displayed, the architect, known on the circuit for only one building, is mentioned and some other non-geographic detail is given. In order to crack these, you need to recognize the picture itself as the last clue.
What I did not include in this set of slideshows is a set of maps. Partly this was a decision based on what was present and absent in the first three matches viewed, but it was also a guess about the process of gathering images. Stock photos of landmarks, artwork and the like are available in royalty-free and fair use libraries. Maps by and large, are neither, and would require extra work to mark out the geographic names emblazoned across them, and not have the image wrecked when it’s upsized for HDTV. When the writer is committed to the bit, it’s good to understand that some things would require more work than is possible to provide and still complete the overall task.
The decision was also influenced by the other categories that weren’t geographic clues. In at least two cases a question asking for something in the foreground of the picture was taken where the location was also a photographic landmark. I added those to the slideshow on the premise that such a picture could return as part of a question asking for a different detail.
Finally, I started writing questions for practice that used the images as background. This gave me some example questions to show the team how the show would use images in questions, and gave me the possibilities of outguessing the writer.
The one item I’m currently undecided if I need to create a slideshow about is flags. I did see one question that was solvable only by noticing a flag detail in the side of the image, but I’d like more data just to confirm whether those pieces are valuable enough to dedicate study time to.
My second conclusion is that these questions are written ambitiously. They are written with the intention that we don't need to include those last clues that were so canonical in televised quiz bowl. The intent is that the pictures attached to the questions are to replace the last clue. When I call that ambitious, I mean it expects a great deal of the level of the teams competing on the show. It asks them to know the last clues, and adapt to the questions now being aired, and to know exactly how to adapt to the new style. If I thought the majority of teams had the experience to do that, I wouldn’t have started writing this book to give teams knowledge to simulate that experience.
This style is an ambitious experiment, probably the most ambitious design change since COVID. It has the potential to give a more visually arresting style to competition, which would bring in visual learners who aren’t being served by circuit questions. It also might build an additional audience of people who aren’t covered by other programming.
But all of that depends on the writer(s) being able to produce enough questions to establish the style over multiple years, and on teams adapting to the new ways of asking questions and interpreting clues. It wouldn’t be easily adaptable to face-to-face competition, but it might be something that could become competition on augmented reality or VR devices.
But right now, we’re still in the “mystery flavor” part of the production process, so could also turn back into the format we saw before.
I'm kind of glad at this point I didn't rush the production of the book to be complete for my 50th. I would have missed this, and would have needed to but a hasty and extensive rewrite of sections of the book. I can see where this is the way you would want to refurbish a televised competition, by making it a competition that can only exist in a visual medium. It’s a way I hadn’t considered completely before, and would have been a hole in the finished product.
While thinking about these rounds, a two word phrase popped into my head, that I hadn’t thought about in a long time, back when I had a copy of Martin Gardner’s columns: “psychological force.” This is not a term of psychology, or science, even pseudoscience. It is pure con artistry, specifically mentalism. A psychological force is when you create a choice that seems to have many possibilities, but the person who is offered the choice is highly likely to choose one particular option.
It’s supposed to make you look psychic, as you guess what the mark chose. For examples, go read chapter 16 of this Martin Gardner collection (starting on page 150.) There are a few cases where the writers of quiz bowl questions have accidentally left psychological forces in the questions they wrote. Nowhere is this more clear than when you see the first two words of a question begin “Which continent…” or “This continent…”
Until writers catch up with the fact that this is a psychological force, the vast majority of the time, this is “Antarctica” and you can just play the odds for points. It’s stage magic, a parlor trick, but it’s a good one, and I’ve used it myself.
It works because if someone thinks about the answer being a continent, they’re going to initially see it as a choice between seven options. Most of those options are never going to be selected to be answers. A question that starts “which X” where X is a geographic term is likely to have a set of details which apply to or are confined in that X. The writer after writing a certain number of questions is primed to organize details around discrete political units, not natural geographic units. The answer the writer is more likely to choose is a country, a state or a natural feature, and if they have those they will pass right by the grouping level of continent. Even if there is a choice between starting with “this continent” versus “this nation” as would be if the answer were Australia, the writer chooses “This nation” because there’s more possible answers to start from.
The reason this came to me was that I saw this in play twice in the first couple episodes, when we’re hip deep in the “mystery flavor” transition. It may not come up again this year, but we’re already two points of data in favor of playing the psychological force.
Just remember to underplay your reaction when you get it right. It’s ten times more imposing to watch someone do this, and act like they do it all the time. It’s a psychological force multiplier.