Housewrite
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A housewrite is a question set produced independently by a team or multiple teams for their own tournament. Housewrites can be written by and for both high school and college teams, and they are often mirrored in several places.
Tournament directors usually have to decide between using one of many housewrites created each year, as well as sets from professional question sources including NAQT, HSAPQ, and ACF.
Some housewrites are single occasion only, while others are produced annually by the same school(s). Typically, the schools that write a housewrite each year are also the ones who field consistently good teams.
Historical usage
As it was originally used, a housewrite was a set written by a single institution (typically a college or university), which would produce and edit all the questions. Contributions from freelance editors and writers in the open circuit were not uncommon, but there was always a central school which was doing the bulk of the production.
Long running examples of housewrites from this era include Terrapin (Maryland), Cardinal Classic (Stanford), and Penn Bowl (Penn) at the college level and Prison Bowl (Hunter), GSAC (Maggie Walker), and LIST (Ladue) in high school.
Modern usage
In modern usage, the term "housewrite" no longer necessarily means that a set was written by a single school, or even a school at all. Any set which is produced by an independent group of writers (i.e. not an organization like NAQT or ACF) is often considered a housewrite. This definition continues to include sets written by individual schools (with or without outside assistance) but also includes sets written by
- multiple schools (Southeast-Midwest Housewrite, PIANO/MO, FST)
- mentorship programs (PADAWAN, WORKSHOP)
- residents of a state (CALISTO)
- loose agglomerations of unaffiliated people (SUN, EFT)
The transition to this new concept of a housewrite has been accelerated by the growing adoption of various foundation software, including collaboration software like Google Docs and QEMS2 and social media like Discord.
Historical developments
- The oldest question set in the packet archive written by a high school team is a single packet from the 1989 Georgetown Day tournament. There were certainly earlier sets written entirely by one high school club, but none are preserved.
- The oldest question set in the packet archive involving the current model of writers from more than one high school is 2008 Prison Bowl. That model was uncommon or unheard of prior to 2008, and Prison Bowl may indeed be the first set created in that way.