--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, thefool75 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote: > --- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, madelman1 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote: > >Finally, I haven't said that people who don't put effort in should > >win tournaments, nor have I said that they deserve to beat more > >experienced players. All I have advocated is a system in which less- > >experienced teams have a chance to compete against more experienced > >teams. And the way that questions are set up now, they (not > >surprisingly) favor the people who have heard them before, rather > >than trying to find out who has the most knowledge. Basically what > >I'm saying is that if the game is set up in such a way that teams > >have absolutely no chance of winning going in, there won't be any > >incentive to get better for all but a few. > > You do realize that you just said "the more obscure the better." > Cause if we ask questions that have never come up before than that > levels the playing field. Hey, I'm all for it -- right now, we'll > play a set of Russian literature or U.S. history or whatever you > want, the only criteria being that they've never come up before in > qb. Dude, think about it. Ok, let's limit the game to only being on > topics that come up in freshman and sophomore survey classes. Ok, > we'll all be buzzing on the first clue....on second thoughts, CBI has > a better chance of equalizing the playing field. > Look, the average college student doesn't know very much (the average > college student who is interested in checking out QB will know a bit > more but still...) and will never have a chance against experienced > players, no matter how obscure or not obscure the answers. The only > way to actually give novices a chance to feel like they might win is > to introduce a significant amount of randomness and completely remove > pyramidality. Throw in single elimination playoffs, etc. Hmmm. I > bet you could bid on the ACUI contract if set up such a QB circuit. > Ok, Matt's comments can be rather intemperate and overstated. With > that said, if anyone is turned off from all qb because they didn't > like one ACFesque tournament, well, I assume they still run to momma > when they stub a toe. > my 3 cents, Nathan I oversimplified things. Let me clear up what I meant: There are certain subjects with which a typical, intelligent college student will never hear of unless he plays quizbowl, and that are reused to the extent that they are deemed easy by quizbowl standards, but by any other standard would be considered highly obscure. There are also certain clues that are perfectly legitimate but that have been overused ad nauseum to the point that a person who has bene playing quizbowl since the mid '90's could buzz in on it in his sleep. What I would want, at least in lower-level tournaments (I'm not saying that ACF Nats should lower its standards) is for questions to be asked on topics that both teams can be reasonably expected to have heard of, something that has gotten rarer and rarer as the years have gone by. You said, "Dude, think about it. Ok, let's limit the game to only being on topics that come up in freshman and sophomore survey classes. Ok, we'll all be buzzing on the first clue." Well, isn't that the point of pyramidality, to write the questions in such a way that they reward people with deeper knowledge, so that everyone isn't buzzing in on the first clue? I like to use the example of a tossup on Hamlet when I talk about academic questions. The reason being that you will probably never a hear tossup with that as an answer in an "academic" tournament, despite the fact that it is probably studied in some form at just about every academic institution in the country. Now, this is an example of an answer that both teams, novice and experienced, would be expected to know. Now, if you started off the question talking about Ophelia and Polonius, then yeah, you'll have a buzzer race, but if you started the question off by talking about it being based on Saxo Grammaticus's Historiae Danicae and that an earlier version of the play is rumored to have been written by Thomas Kyd, that would reward teams and players with deeper knowledge of the subject; it's not something that anyone who read it in 10th grade will know, but is something that requires a student to go deeper into the play's origins. A question like that would reward the team with more knowledge, while still being accessible to a younger team, since it can reasonably be expected that they would know something of the play, and would probably be able to answer it later in the question if the more experienced team doesn't know those clues either. In contrast, there are many subjects currently in the canon that would not be answered at all by inexperienced teams, simply because they don't have much academic relevance and are only in the canon because someone, possibly even someone in the game, wrote a question about it eight years earlier and it was repeated enough that it stuck. In the first case, with the question about Hamlet, a younger player who got beaten to the question by someone who knew more about the play is more likely to try to work harder to become a better player since they can see that it is a fairly achievable goal, whereas a younger player in the second example is more likely to wonder why it's worth knowing such an obscure thing at all other than for the sake of quizbowl. Basically, I'm not saying that questions should keep getting harder and more obscure to the point that no one at all knows the answers; I'm saying that the way the questions are set up now, the only people who can reasonably be expected to answer a lot of the questions are people that have hung around quizbowl for several years. I think it would be better if answers themselves were more accessible and actually represented what is actually learned in academic settings; a well-written, pyramidal question should still be able to differentiate between a knowledgable team and a non-knowledgeable team even on a fairly common subject. Now, I know that question writers aren't lazy, they put a ton of time and effort into their questions, but I think that the old axiom holds true: it's easier to write a hard question than it is an easy one. There are ways to make this game more accessible to all players while still maintaining a high level of competition, it just takes more work.
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