Saturday, April 26, 2014

Report on Editing Ottawa Hybrid (2014)

When I count things up, 2014 Ottawa Hybrid was supposed to have 779 good questions -- 21 tossups and 20 bonuses per round, and 19 rounds written. When I count my own output (writing and editing), I think I tally 115 questions. I think I wrote good stuff, but even if I did, this comes in at under 15% of the tournament. I spent a lot of time and stress on the questions, but I fell way short of the 25% (195 questions) that a senior editor should have worked on.

I've now edited for three Ottawa Hybrid Tournaments, and I think all three of them were released "incomplete" -- this is, the edit crew didn't have everything done by the deadline, so we had to just shrug and print the tournament with whatever we had.


Explanation of Quizbowl Because My Parents Will See This Post

Quizbowl is a cool game where people with buzzers answer questions and score points. Quizbowl has probably been my "main hobby" for the last five or six years. One thing about quizbowl is that almost every tournament is played on original questions -- this is, every time there's a tournament, it means someone out there wrote a day's worth of quiz questions.

I wrote and edited questions for a quizbowl tournament called 2014 Ottawa Hybrid, "hybrid" because the questions are half about academic stuff and half about pop culture. The edit crew was me and five or six other people. Ottawa Hybrid was a "packet submission" tournament, meaning that all the competing teams sent some questions to the editors, and the bulk of the competition was played on our revised versions of what the teams sent us.

A "tossup" is a 6- or 7-line question designed to stump people at the beginning and then gradually become more obvious -- this is so experts could buzz in at the start, but many players could buzz in if it gets to the end. A "bonus" is a set of three short questions on the same topic.

What I Wrote for the Tournament

I worked on 102 tossups and 13 bonuses. I made a point of prioritizing the tossups, because I was a senior editor, and because I generally think good tossups are more difficult to make than good bonuses.

I wrote and edited a lot of questions about literature, art, pop music, and TV. I wrote a handful of questions in other subjects.