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.
Most of the stuff I worked on was "editing" -- making changes to the questions people submitted. This sounds lighter than it is. A good tossup needs of twelve or so clues, and all the clues should be meaningful and interesting, and all the clues need to fit the right difficulty for the tossup to work in game-play. So most of my "editing" jobs required dismantling and rebuilding the tossup. (This is kind of extreme, but it is basically the standard in quizbowl editing.)
Some tossups took about 10 minutes to write or edit, either because they didn't need much research ("Get Low," Robert Frost, Lincoln) or because I resigned myself to only making rough changes (Runescape, Animorphs, Sense and Sensibility). Sometimes I tried to be careful about doing extra research, so a single question would swallow an afternoon or two (Proust, Hindu temples, Brothers Karamazov).
One quizbowler writes here that when he edited the lit for a tournament, he went and read every book they had a tossup about -- presumably amounting to dozens of books. Most people can't do that, and Ottawa Hybrid is kind of a casual tournament, but researching tossups meant a lot of library trips for me this winter.
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| The top half of our question grid. Purples are my job. |
Why People Like Ottawa Hybrid
Ottawa Hybrid Tournament has gotten somewhat popular over the last five years or so. This year's tournament was played at four sites (Ottawa, Virginia, Washington state, and Indiana, I think), and lots of people made weekend trips to Ottawa so they could play in it.
I'd like to think that the popularity is because I'm so careful and thoughtful about my questions, but as we've discussed, I really only worked on 15% of the questions.
Hybrid is popular in part because it's a name brand. The U of Ottawa Trivia club has done a Hybrid tournament in 6 of the last 8 years, and regardless of how those turned out, everyone in college quizbowl now has a vague idea what Ottawa Hybrid is. Hybrid is almost certainly the most famous thing about the U of Ottawa Trivia Club.
Hybrid is also an event with crossover appeal. Pop culture questions are accessible to way more people than academic questions, but traditionally, pop culture quizbowl (or "trash") gets a bad reputation for being poorly-done and for being kind of pointless. So even though they should have a wide appeal, "trash tournaments" (tournaments on pop culture questions) run infrequently and don't pull get too much attendance. With Ottawa Hybrid, the pop culture side of the tournament is sort of "legitimized" by the presence of an academic side.
What People Want From Questions
A lot of the smalltalk at quizbowl tournaments is discussion of question quality. From experienced players, the most common complaint is that a question was unfair and that the clues didn't favour knowledge of the topic. For instance, if a tossup on Venice had clues about anagrams of the word "Venice," it wouldn't really be testing what people knew about Venice. For an experienced player who is trying to win a tournament, the most important thing is usually that the questions have good, meaningful clues.
From inexperienced players, the most common complaints are that the questions are too hard (framed as "that's too obscure" or "no one's ever heard of that") or that their submitted questions didn't get used. These are good enough reasons to be upset. If the questions are too hard, people don't get the satisfaction of answering them. If people's submissions get thrown out, then that's an insult and it means I wasted their time by requiring them to submit questions. New players, in particular, can often work hard on questions that end up not meeting the editors' standards.
One team submitted a question about the guitarist Johnny Marr, who played in the Smiths and Modest Mouse. I like those bands, and the other editors didn't know much about pop music, so I "claimed" this tossup (by colouring it purple on our shared spreadsheet). However, I thought Johnny Marr was too obscure to ask about, and that it would be frustrating for some players who knew the bands but didn't know the name of the guitarist.
I rewrote the question to just be about the Smiths, and to use some of the same clues from the original Johnny Marr question (certain songs, plus the clue that "this band's guitarist later joined Modest Mouse"). This way, someone could recognize a Smiths clue and buzz in even if they didn't know the name of the guitarist.
My edited version almost certainly worked better in the tournament and was more satisfying for the teams playing, but it might not really have made much difference -- probably a Smiths fan would know who Johnny Marr is and would just be able to buzz in anyway.
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| Rickenbacker, jangle-rock sound. |
What happened, of course, was that he heard my question get played in the tournament -- this is, he heard that the answer was changed and most of his clues were replaced. He had the experience of learning that his writing was rejected, and that I instead "published" my own writing into the tournament -- though I'm probably not as much of an expert on Johnny Marr's guitar-playing.
In this way, I'm not sure I created much net happiness by improving the question. It's very possible that the questions I didn't get around to (including most of the bonuses in my categories) were just as satisfying for the players as the questions I really sculpted and polished.
Cricket Bats
There's a speech in a Tom Stoppard play where a man compares a good piece of writing to a cricket bat. A whole lot of engineering and precision goes into making a cricket bat, and a cricket bat is an absolutely perfect product, and it hits a cricket ball farther than anything else you could ever invent. But if you're bored on a Sunday with some friends, and you don't have a cricket bat, you could just play cricket with any block of wood. You'd still have a fun game, and you wouldn't care about your inferior tools.
In this way, you could have a fun trivia game with your friends using basically any set of questions that you pulled from a board game or Sporcle or whatever, and it would be like playing cricket with a block of wood. But a quizbowl tournament is like a test match or something, where some specialists are really trying to excel at what they do, and it's important that some amount of care and precision goes into the questions used for this kind of thing.
(Within the world of college quizbowl, Ottawa Hybrid is a casual tournament, and I'm a pretty low-level question editor. But speaking more generally, I am someone with special question-engineering skills, making questions for a special quizbowl event.)
Vanity
The Ottawa Hybrid tournament is five things. It's a Saturday of people playing quizbowl in Ottawa, three other Saturdays of people playing quizbowl in the States, and a zip file that gets posted online and (hopefully) played at trivia club meetings in lots of other places.
The tournament goes out under the names of the editors, which is me and some friends. There's a lot of pride that goes into this kind of thing. We put effort into making something big, so we want the final product to be nice.
Quizbowl is also like a lot of other communities and workplaces, where people come to take things very seriously and get emotional about their reputations within certain circles. I might be more insecure and obsessive than most people, or it might be completely normal, but I spend a lot of mental energy worrying what people think of me who hang out on the quizbowl forums or in this one chatroom I rarely visit. The Ottawa Hybrid questions are sent out with my name on them, and sometimes I think the quality of the questions is what will decide if I get respected or mocked.
Realistically, I almost certainly don't get talked about, and if I did, it wouldn't matter much. Obsessing over your reputation is kind of counter-productive.
What I Changed In Everyone's Questions
Here is a sketch of what my priorities were in editing questions.
1) Clue density. I want as many specific things as possible in a line. This often meant adjectives. Ex: Turning "a character in this work attends a dinner party" into "a socialist doctor in this work crashes a fondue party." More information makes the question more interesting and less confusing, and it makes players more likely to recognize things they know.
2) Difficulty. All writers and editors skew difficult, just by accident. Everyone has the same myopia of "I've heard of it, so it seems pretty famous," and they end up writing questions on obscure things they've heard about. I tried to make things a lot easier, but I still think I could have done more -- the scoring stats for this tournament were a little lower than I intended. I changed a lot of answer-lines to be more famous.
I also changed difficulty in the sense of putting the clues in order from most to least difficult (as is the convention for tossups). Here are some websites I used to measure fame or obscurity:
- Google (hit counts)
- Youtube (view counts)
- Goodreads, which gives counts of how many people say they've read any book
- IMDB, which counts "votes" for people who've rated a movie
- Last.fm, which tallies how many times a song gets played
So if a tossup was submitted on a novelist, I'd find the novelist's page on GoodReads to get an actual tally showing how commonly-read each of their books is. If a tossup was on a band, I'd check their Last.fm page to see which of their songs were the most popular.
3) Meaningful and specific. This is a bit fussy, but I tried to tune the clues to be somewhat close to what you'd actually learn by studying something. For instance, I tried to take out any clue about what something was named after, or to look up reviews of things to see what details were "important."
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| A really bad question: only the inventor names are specific, and no clues are meaningful. |
What Kind of Questions Everyone Sent Us
The most popular topics in this year's submissions were Kanye West and Parks and Recreation. I took out a lot of repeat questions about those topics, but I left some overlap in -- specifically, I kept two tossups about two different Kanye albums, which is something you're not supposed to have in a tournament.
I was surprised that no one wrote questions about Lorde, Taylor Swift, or Alice Munro this year. Alice Munro in particular is someone who "should" be in quizbowl a lot, but it's hard to clue her because her fame is pretty evenly distributed across like 200 stories. Only one team sent us a Rob Ford question; no teams sent us questions about Stephen Harper or his cabinet.
Of the stuff I edited, the best submissions were usually the TV questions. People had good ideas for questions and wrote good clues for them. There were a lot of TV questions that I approved for the tournament without making many changes.
The worst questions I worked on were the philosophy and "trash lit" questions. Philosophy questions are generally hard to write, because philosophy is hard to read and understand. For "trash lit," a disproportionate number of teams just wrote about kids' books.
Why I Didn't Get All My Questions Done
My friends and I all did a bad job scheduling our work for the tournament.
I always tell people not to go over half an hour spent writing any given tossup. If you took the time I spent on the tournament and divided it by half an hour, you'd probably have more than enough time for me to get my share of work done -- 195 questions, 25% of Ottawa Hybrid.
I mentioned above that some tossups took an afternoon or two. I kind of liked going overboard on research and being extra precise about some things, but it was a terrible way to get things done.
My general rule is that bonuses and trash questions can be written quickly, but academic tossups always take a while. My count says that of the 115 questions I worked on, 56 of them were academic tossups, and probably 80% of the time I spent on questions was for those 56 tossups. The idea was that if those were the hard part of my job, I'd get them out of the way, and this sort of worked and sort of didn't work.
Generally, the Ottawa Hybrid editors work independent of each other. Everyone has specialties they can work on, and everyone assigns themselves questions using a shared spreadsheet to map out all the rounds. I am more uptight than most other editors.
Sometimes I am too lazy. I would leave a comment below a question saying, "We should change the first line," or, "Maybe there should be a clue about cannons," and then I would keep checking back to see if other editors replied to my comment. The better thing would have been to just work on the question, and then maybe add a comment saying, "I changed the first line," or, "I added a clue about cannons."
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| John Dryden also made up the "don't end sentences with prepositions" rule. |
Sometimes I got intimidated by the size of the project. I could have looked at a calendar 15 weeks before the tournament, divided 195 by 15, and decided to write 13 questions a week. I did not work according to this kind of plan. Every night, I would think about how much work there was and how determined I was to make the questions nice, and then I would check the documents to see if anyone replied to my comments, or I would read another chapter of The Red and the Black, or I would give up and watch TV.
The weekend after Ottawa Hybrid, I got to play Huma's tournament, the Mavis Gallant Memorial. Huma wrote 80 good lit tossups, and she said it took her about two months. Her process may or may not have been as exhausting as mine, but it was done much faster and with a greater output, and it sounds like it took just as much research.
19 Rounds
When it was clear that the tournament was behind schedule, and that we would have to write 19 rounds (which is more than usual), I asked about making the tournament smaller -- either writing only 17.5 rounds, or reducing the rounds from 41 to 37 questions (20-tossup rounds, requiring 21/20, would become 18-tossup rounds, requiring 19/18). Other people thought these ideas would create a bunch of new problems.
Generally, 19 rounds is a very big tournament, and none of the sites played more than 13 rounds. There are logistical reasons why we needed more than 13 rounds of questions, but it was insane to expect or intend for a 19-round tournament to be done well. I like to think that we could have taken all our work and made an excellent 14-round tournament, for instance.
Other Editors
Of course, I am only responsible for 115 completed questions (15%) and 80 unedited questions (10%) of the Ottawa Hybrid Tournament. The other questions that were written, edited, or not edited for the tournament came from a crew of several other nice people.
Jordan was the head editor of Ottawa Hybrid. He did some regular editing work, but he also did a scan through the whole question set in the week or so before printing, and he wrote two of the editors' packets by himself. I edited some of Jordan's questions and he edited some of mine. Jordan might have been the only person who cross-checked the work of the other editors. Jordan also made all the announcements and directed the tournament in Ottawa.
Joe is a hero. Joe was specifically editing science and classical music for this tournament, and he got all his questions done very early. (He was not confident in the quality, but he got them all done on time -- this is a good way to work). Joe is uptight like me, so he was a great friend when I wanted someone on Facebook-chat who could freak out about not having many questions done.
Ben is a hero. Ben repeatedly refused to edit for Hybrid, but for whatever reason, he was willing to compromise this when I asked him nicely. Ben wrote or edited most of the movie questions for Ottawa Hybrid.
Shelby, Dennis, and Radu are good people who all did editing for Ottawa Hybrid. Their jobs were basically the same as my job, and their outputs probably averaged to about the same as my output.
Oscar is a good person. Oscar plays some quizbowl but was not confident about editing question content. He ended up with some particular jobs (including a lot of copy-editing and trimming questions for length) which he performed quite thoroughly.
Players who wrote submissions are probably all good people. A lot of teams submitted for the early deadline (which is enormously helpful), and some senior players worked on submission packets for more than one team.
Some hero-editor shuffled all the packs into proper random-question, 1-to-20 order in the days before the tournament. I never figured out who did this, but it was very, very good that someone did this.
Some Regrets
The process of being on an edit team was very frustrating. I often got upset about other editors not doing their jobs, but at the same time, I was not really doing my job. The other editors were all very busy people, and I wish I'd made more of an effort to meet with them and collaborate on more questions.
I am very proud of the questions I worked on. I think I am a pretty good quizbowl writer, and I think I did a careful and thoughtful job of choosing good clues. I especially liked finding factual errors in the submitted questions -- this gave me kind of a power-trip on my own depth of research and attention to detail.
I still think my work on 2014 Ottawa Hybrid scores overall as a failure, since I badly missed my deadline and we ended up with half my job unfinished.
If I edit anything else in the future, I should map out my work at the start, and I should probably be aggressive about mapping everyone else's work out at the start. I always know to do this kind of thing, but I usually still don't do it. For a project like editing a quizbowl tournament, it is crazy to start without some kind of managerial plan.
A Thing I Don't Regret
Algonquin is a trade college, so the coursework is lighter than in universities, but it's heavier than people think. I've "upgraded" my accounting program a few times, so my present courses could be all transferred in for credits at most universities.
I also got an actual job this winter. After some years either as a full-time student or as a full-time nothing, I finally registered to work as a tutor at my school. This probably compromised my quizbowl editing (and my actual schoolwork) a little, but I just feel stronger and healthier to have responsibilities and a schedule every day.
While editing Ottawa Hybrid, I was genuinely a "busy person" who was editing quiz questions off the side of his desk. I'm quite proud that, even though I didn't hit my targets for question-writing, I had lots of other priorities that I was delivering on during the same period.
Tossup Submissions I Liked
- Jordan's tossup on Measure for Measure
- Jordan's tossup on centers for the Lakers
- Colonel By's tossup on Public Enemy
- McGill's tossup on babies
- Waterloo's tossup on Jamie Salé
- Waterloo's tossup on Slapshot
- Waterloo's tossup on the South Park movie
- Carleton's tossup on "Get Low"
- Carleton's tossup on The Night Watch
- Carleton's tossup on Enlightened
- Carleton's tossup on Michael Ondaatje
- Penn's tossup on Gone Girl
- Michigan State's tossup on NBC
- Ottawa's tossup on The Golden Girls
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| Now that's paper! |
- McMaster's tossup on Arcadia
- Ottawa's tossup on The Edible Woman
- Boise's tossup on David Copperfield
Tossups I'm Proud of Writing
- Agamemnon
- Shakespeare
- Nova Scotia (lit)
- personal identity
- Tahiti (art)
- Kobe Bryant
- "Cups"
- Hedley
My favourite questions to write are often gimmick questions that get flagged by other editors as needing to be changed. There was a tossup in the set about dogs in literature, and to make it not transparent (because dogs are the most obvious domestic animal), I changed all the clues to say "these people" instead of "these animals." I was politely informed that this brilliant idea would cause trouble. I advise other people not write gimmick questions, because some crank out there will hate hate hate your gimmick question, even if it's really awesome.