At 10:17 PM 9/10/03 +0000, Jason Mueller wrote: > Is using Trivial Pursuit questions for quizbowl practices instead of > packets a good idea, because that's what the new leadership at Mizzou > wants to start out with, as they're still mad at me for starting last > year off with Moon Pie questions. The short answer is: it depends, based on what goals you are trying to pursue. If the point is to retain as many people from the first day as possible, no matter if those people end up being nothing more than warm bodies or buzzer rocks, Trivial Pursuit questions, being familiar to many, might be helpful in the extreme short-term if your newbies tend to have no high school quizbowl experience or have an experience so divergent in form from what we play in college. If your new players tend to have some experience, Trivial Pursuit questions are probably a step backward. I don't think they're more likely to chase away prospective players than Moon Pie might, but they potentially lower expectations to intolerable depths, because you have to move on to college-style questions in practice at some point. If you must involve Trivial Pursuit with quizbowl, I suppose you can use it for social purposes outside of practices, in lieu of or in addition to the alcohol that many teams seem to use for that purpose, if they even bother to spend time together outside of qb. I have to wonder why your peers objected to Moon Pie questions. The most common complaints from relatively inexperienced players are that questions are too long or too hard. If one or both were the problem, I advocate searching for easier and/or shorter question sets to begin and graduating to more challenging and interesting questions (which harder questions generally are). Such sets exist. Ideally, players will move up to better questions. If not, well, you have staff for tournaments you run and other teams with more dedicated players who are willing to work at it and need money to get to far-flung national or otherwise prestigious tournaments get better funding through more entry fees for the tournaments that _they_ run (and that's why I generally don't approve chasing away quizbowlers merely for being stupid, but I do strongly support the existence of a niche for those who want much more difficult questions). > I oppose using Trivia Pursuit questions instead of packets for the > following reasons: > > 1. The canons of TP knowledge and QB knowledge do not have complete > overlap. If you want to succeed at QB, study QB questions. In theory, correct. On the other hand, what exists of a quizbowl canon contains things that we would not necessarily want to reinforce. It's nice to expand one's knowledge beyond the orthodox quizbowl canon, although Trivial Pursuit is probably not the best way to do so. On the other hand, it's no more pointless a diversion than quizbowl itself, and it's possible to both enjoy playing Trivial Pursuit with friends and prefer well-written and challenging questions in quizbowl. > 2. TP questions are poor preparation for tossups, as TP questions > are not pyrimidal. So are some tossups I've see in regular tournaments. "Clue. The same clue restated using different words. FTP, Clue Restated for Dummies." > 3. Difficulty of TP questions are hit-and-miss, as some are > ridiculuosly easy and some are incredibly obscure. Once again, so are some questions I've seen at normal tournaments. In the same packet, even. > Does anyone else have an opinion on this? Many do, I'm sure. Anthony, who notes that tomorrow's date will mark a momentous occasion in world history, the debut of The Mullets on UPN
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