Take literature as an example, since I edited the category at this year's nationals. There is a minimum threshold of usability: if a team submits a bunch of one sentence tossups, or something that is otherwise uneditable, we have to discard it and focus our energies on the usable packets. Within that scope, though, if a team writes well-structured tossups that are all at the outer edges of acceptable obscurity, there's not much we can do to simplify the tournament. A substantial portion of our editing time is devoted, not to making the tournament more diabolically impossible, but to rendering it more accessible. For instance, ACF nationals would have been even more obscure than it was, if I had left in submitted tossups on such notables as Vargas Llosa's novel "The Green House" or Anthony Hecht's poem "More Light! More Light!," instead of replacing them with tossups on the likes of Oscar Wilde and Andrew Marvell. If teams were to expend their ingenuity finding more obscure leadins to gettable works and authors, rather than asking whole questions on obscurities only a handful of people can be expected to know, the game would be better off. But we editors simply lack the time to convert every tossup on "The Tragic Muse" into a pyramidally structured question on Henry James. The other part of the "it's too hard" complaint goes like this: New players go to ACF tournaments, get the crap beaten out of them on questions to which they've never even heard of the answers, and never want to come back. Thus, ACF is often asked to do more to ease people into the game, with Div II tournaments or whatever. It seems to be generally assumed that Div II tournaments are like marijuana -- once you get hooked, you're bound to go on to the harder stuff. I have yet to see any evidence that this argument is more true for quiz bowl than for crack. That is, it seems just as likely that, having been coddled, players who aren't really committed to the game just drift away at a later date than they would have otherwise. But back to the complaint. It does seem to be true that the only introduction to ACF is a rude one. But everybody faces this. At my first ACF nationals, my team snuck into the playoffs only to lose almost every game, mostly by embarassing margins, and I found most of the questions completely inaccessible. Rather than driving me away, it inspired me to study. I think most of the people involved with ACF were drawn to the game for similar reasons: because we saw all the questions about which we were clueless as an incentive to learn. Having seen the circle of young ACF players that has sprung up at Michigan, I'm convinced that there are still people out there who respond to ACF's difficulty as a challenge, not a turnoff. I think one of the reasons discussions about ACF so rapidly degenerate into shouting matches is that fans of the format want to get something different out of the game than do its cultured despisers. It's not entirely a coincidence, I think, that most of the obsessive interest in statistics and records to be found on the circuit comes from players and organizations that aren't strongly committed to ACF. Discussion at non-ACF tournaments often centers on jockeying for playoff position or checking the individual leaderboard. That happens at ACF tournaments also, of course, but at the latter you're also likely to hear people excitedly remarking on a new fact about Theodore Dreiser or an interesting bonus on minor Impressionists. I would venture to say that, as much as we ACFers like to win, we equally enjoy learning new things and stretching the boundaries of our knowledge. I certainly wouldn't say that about CBI, and I don't think it's true of NAQT either. (message continued in next post)
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