I’ve mentioned previously that back in the day, 1998-2005 to be precise, I ran an online trivia game by email. I would send out the questions Monday to Friday, people around the world would play, and they’d send me answers back by the end of the week. I’d mark everything, total up the scores, and post the answers and results each Sunday night. Then Monday morning, I’d start all over again.
It was, in some ways, the ultimate in choice. A reality that I chose to create surely out of stubbornness, determination, and time. Sometimes it overwhelmed me. And to be clear, we’re not talking an automated process with hundreds or thousands of players, it was just me sending email out to about 70-100 players depending on the week/month/year.
But I did it. Why? Because I wanted to. I liked running the game, coming up with questions. As I’ve blogged in recent weeks, I would love to put it on my website and run it again. The problem is simply one of time. I don’t have the time to devote to running an open game, and I’ve never really liked automated games that much. I’ve considered maybe someday creating an app to do it, but for now, I’m fine with what I have. Which is an option to put things on my website, a quiz page here or there.
Yet for fun, as part of a workplace charitable campaign, I relaunched email by trivia for three weeks. I only have about 15 players so far, easily managed, with the only wrinkle being that it has to be entirely bilingual for both language and content. PolyWogg Trivia rides again. And today was the first day.
Today I choose to relaunch a form of PolyWogg Trivia by email.
A few weeks ago, I called it “quits” on blogging daily about choices, my “today I choose” series. I felt that I had reached a good point where I was more aware of my conscious choices each day, a state of awareness where I could perhaps instead write once a week about various choices. Hoping, in part, that by writing once a week, my choices might seem more significant. That somewhere in a week, I would have made some, I don’t know, “larger” choice. Something worthy of a blog post.
Instead, I feel like Dory from Finding Nemo. I need to just keep swimming. Because for the last few weeks, I’ve been drowning.
I know the signs. I eat more crap food. I stay up late watching TV. I try to get by on several hours sleep so that when I do go to bed, I’m too tired to have my mind swirl around wondering “what if” or “what about” things that are bothering me. Some people choose booze or drugs to drown out the inner voice, I use TV, junk food, and sleep deprivation. It numbs me to the point where when I go to bed, I crash.
Last night was the “fall back” timeframe for daylight savings time, and I was binge-watching Lost. I had forgotten about the timeshift, so when my computer reset my clock back at 2:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m., I thought I had misjudged the time. When I went to bed at 5:00 a.m., for no good reason at all, Jacob was already awake. Me? I was well into my second wind and didn’t feel tired at all. I just went to bed because I knew I needed to sometime.
But honestly? It is just me self-sabotaging myself, putting myself down as far as I can go on the energy level, driving myself to create a challenge to overcome. A false sense of success that is reminiscent of all-nighters in high school and university. Cramming at the last minute after weeks of procrastination.
When I’m super tired, I run on about 70% energy reserves for the day. 70% efficient, or 70% of “normal” I guess. I can still function, I get my work done, but it isn’t exactly “living”. It’s more like surviving. There’s probably some metaphor in there about isolation, setbacks, watching Lost, Covid, etc.
I’ve got about 1000 things to do in November, things that NEED to get done. And I’ve been wallowing, procrastinating, avoiding. I’d like to say today, November 1st, I did something productive to overcome my inertia, but honestly, I didn’t, not really.
My main choice today, after sleeping in quite late after being up way too late, were first and foremost to have Andrea cut my hair and for me to cut Jacob’s. We’ve been debating, or rather I’ve been debating, whether people in salons have likely progressed far enough for it to be safe, given that we are officially in a high-risk household. We have eliminated almost all vectors in and out, so is this one that is REALLY worth risking? We had some decent options, and if we were medium-risk, I suspect I would have gone for it. But we’re not, and I didn’t. I just didn’t feel comfortable going for it. I feel like I made Jacob paranoid enough too that he wasn’t in favour, but there’s no way to know either way. I didn’t feel like it was an acceptable risk, so we did the home thing again.
Equally, Jacob and Andrea made a stab at normalcy yesterday. Even though we weren’t doing Hallowe’en for either going out or giving out candies, Jacob and Andrea wanted to do a pumpkin carving. I just assumed we wouldn’t bother, and so I had made zero effort to even plan for it as a possibility. But Saturday came, and we went to the one we always go to and picked up two pumpkins. Today, Jacob and Andrea did the scooping, and then we took a design that Jacob hand-drew of an outline of a penguin and he and I then carved it. The other was a bit soft and we just wrote on it. Pretty simple, and Jacob could do more of the carving this year than usual.
Later, I opted for pizza for dinner and let Jacob choose Pizza Hut, as he likes to do. To be honest, it was more opting for him to choose, than Pizza Hut, just wanting him to make a choice and enjoy the power of doing so. He is always so happy to choose it. And then we just sat and watched two episodes of Knight Rider from Season 01. I find it amusing that he talks to the TV while the episode is unfolding. Like he’s telling them what to do or not. I know in part that it is his anxiety playing out, and talking it out lets him release some of it, but I find it amusing. At least, I do so far.
I then binged the rest of S04 tonight of Lost, and I’m headed to bed.
While all of those choices had their conscious components, I realized that the daily posting was keeping me grounded and giving me some momentum. I need it again, particularly this month. I probably can’t keep it up every day but at least I’ll be able to do it some or hopefully most days. I need to do it to stay sane.
Today I choose to restart blogging about my conscious daily choices.
So, I am on iteration “f” of my series of posts about the choices I make each day, having broken my “Seinfeld” chain on five previous occasions to go from a through b, c, d and e to get to f. And overall, I’m on 68 days of noting how I’m doing on making conscious choices.
Yet I find myself struggling to find a topic some nights. Often I had a good day, I did make choices, but in some cases it might have been the same choice I made last week that is starting to be part of my routine. Or it was all relatively simple choices, and not really worthy of a post.
A couple of those “breaks” in series were more technical in nature, where I was unable to post for a few days and so I “broke” the chain. I didn’t break the chain of choices, I just broke the chain of writing about it.
And so, I think I’m going to step back from daily blogs about the choices. It met part of its goal, to make me conscious of my decisions, and things are working well. But I think I’m going to switch the series from TIC to “This week I chose” (TWIC, I guess).
The real trick for me though is to see if only writing about it weekly means I stop keeping track so that maybe 9 days from now when I do the first TWIC post, I may not remember what I did during the week. So I’ll have to keep track in a little notebook by the computer. And then pick one of them to write about in detail for the TWIC posts.
Today I choose to change how I write about choice. What choices are you making today?
For those reading the post yesterday about my love of trivia, you already know that I am helping out with a trivia game for our Charitable Campaign at work. The exact FORMAT of that trivia game is still to be determined.
I have a few options, and a number of variables that complicate the game. First and foremost, it has to be fully bilingual. We’re a bilingual workforce, anglophone and francophone players may both want to play, and I need to have a game (*) available they both (*) can play. I put asterisks in that sentence because one of the variables is that I could simply run a game in English for anglophones and a separate game in French for francophones.
Second, since we can’t do the game in-person, I need an online option. That basically divides itself into three options:
By email like I used to do — people would get the questions by email, they could respond, and I would score them…heck I think I even still have the scoring spreadsheet that helped me format things!;
On a website — I can run it like an online quiz, people click on the link, go through the questions, it totals up their answers, and sends me the results;
Live — I can use something like Kahoot to run the game live, people get the questions while looking at a screen, tap to choose their answer, and voila, scores are counted immediately.
The first two are easy, free and totally adjustable for time. Anyone can play as long as they have a computer link AND they can do it anytime of the day. I can also make it completely bilingual, no problem.
The last one is the preferred option as I can have people chatting while we do it, all good. Much more social, great. There’s a small cost involved, sure, but not exorbitant.
The bigger challenge is the degree of bilingualism. The apps are almost all American and while I can make all the questions bilingual, the transition screens and menus are NOT. So for example, in between Q1 and Q2, when it is giving the scores, it says “Poly takes the lead!” or “Jane253 has answered 1 in a row!”. At the end, when giving results, it’s automated, and it will say “Poly got 3/10 right in 90s Music”. It’s not egregious, those prompts being all in English, but it’s not ideal either.
Free and fully bilingual but not as social vs. small cost and social but not fully bilingual. Decisions, decisions. I’ll talk to some French executives at work and see what they advise, see if it is “good enough”. I can do a separate “social” one for just francophones, preferably with a different host than ME hurting their ears, but I can’t edit the app.
I also wish it wasn’t a separate computer, but there is no way to avoid it, not really. You still need a tool to do the trivia scoring and entry and one that is hosting the video. They’re not integrated, so it is either two computers or at least two apps running at the same time.
I also started going down the rabbit hole of choosing a trivia plugin for my site before I managed to stop myself. The to-do list for my site is already long enough. I do want it SOMETIME, just not sure NOW is the right time to do that. Sure would be sweet though, given the number of people in lockdown looking for some activities to do online occasionally.
I confess, my title went for a small play on words. I also confess that I love trivia games. Ever since I was about 13 years old, and we got the original Trivial Pursuit, I have played trivia games out the wazoo. I don’t care if it is done competitively or cooperatively or even solely, I like the Q&A formats.
I liked watching Jeopardy, particularly as it has lots of questions in a row, but it is almost too fast at times. In a few cases, I’d like to think about the answer for a couple of seconds to talk myself out of some stupid random guess. Alternatively, a lot of online trivia and even the pub offerings by Buzz are the opposite problem — too much delay in between rounds and questions.
Flash forward to the late 1990s
A little over 20 years ago, I was doing a lot of stuff by email list. Movie reviews, humour, book reviews even. But I was also running a weekly trivia game. I ran it on and off for about 4 years in total, spread over 5 years, and it varied in format a bit. Sometimes it was 10 questions, all week to answer. Other times I tried 5 questions a day, different categories. And the format that worked the best for me was three questions a day. People were encouraged NOT to Google answers. Or Babelfish / Alta Vista answers since Google didn’t exist. But I was averaging about 60 players a week, most of whom I had never met.
From time to time, I would get overwhelmed with life and think, “Why am I doing this?” It was fun, but it was taking too much time. Even with a lot of workflow automation, I still had to mark scores relatively manually. And one day I got a thank you note from one of my players that I had never met.
She and her husband had low vision. And so they loved getting the trivia questions by email rather than off a website. They could use their assisted reading devices to print out the emails on a braille printer, and then they would sit down for breakfast. They would discuss the questions, estimate what they thought the answers were together, and then, after breakfast was over, they would try to confirm or refute their guesses. Using encyclopedias that were printed in Braille. She said that sometimes it would take them half a day. Going from topic to topic, getting distracted by other interesting info that would lead them somewhere else in their search. They didn’t care if they got the right answer, they just cared that they could do it together and it was FUN trying to figure it out.
I saved that email for a long time so that any time I felt like it was taking too much time to run the game (20-30 minutes some days, maybe 2 hours on weekends to wrap up the scores), I could have a reality check that here were people spending 3+ hours per day just PLAYING by game, searching and learning and having a grand old time. It was like they had a joint puzzle to solve, just like you see people working on crossword or jigsaw puzzles together.
Am I bringing back PolyWogg Trivia? Or it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Super Quiz(let)?
Eventually, life intervened. I have always wanted to get my trivia game going again on my website and have people come on the site, play questions, get scores, etc. Of course, on a website, you need to alter the format probably to multiple choice, otherwise I’m back to the same issue of having to mark stuff manually. Several times in the last 15 years, I’ve played with formats to try to get it working on my site, but never quite found my solution. Maybe it’s an app instead of a website, I’m not sure. My favorite part of the game was when I introduced a feature I called Quizlet. Five clues to name a person, place or thing, with clue one on Monday, clue two on Tuesday, etc. Each day, the value of the Quizlet dropped. It was VERY hard for anyone to Google those answers, you either had to be inspired somehow or you’d likely NEVER guess it in the first couple of days. Usually Wednesday was the tipping point. It was great and I enjoyed it WAY more than the regular trivia game. Some players HATED it because they couldn’t get perfect every week.
And with all the work I’ve done on my site in recent months, you might think this was leading to some big announcement that PolyWogg Trivia Is Back, Baby! But it’s not. I’m really just talking about the role Trivia has played in my life for a long time.
I’m still the 13-year-old kid sitting at the trailer out at the lake, reading card after card by myself because nobody wanted to play anywhere near as often as I did. Later, when we were a bit older, we bought Super Quiz. Kind of pitched at times as “trivia for regular people, not Einsteins”. The benefit of Super Quiz was that there was no board, so you got points for each right answer (not wedges just on specific spots on the board) AND you had a choice of level of question — level 1 was supposed to be undergraduate level; level 2 was supposed to be graduate level; level 3 was supposed to be Ph.D. And the harder the question, the more points you could get. You had to get at least 3 points in each of 6 categories and 35 overall to win, with no more than 10 in any one category. But there also came SQ II and SQ III, and we had all of them in one box. So when we played as a family, we could choose 6 categories out of 18 possible ones, and we didn’t have to play the same ones. For example, there was one we called “Movies – Green” because it was in a green box, and had movies from the 80s and onward, so it was good for me. “Movies – Pink” were about older movies, often pre-1970 and often 1940s and 50s, and so was good for my Mom and Dad.
We relied on the honour system that we wouldn’t choose 6 easy categories. Usually we figured that 2 had to be harder for you. My wife would have loved the format as she is good in Geography, and we had a Geography Category (from Super Quiz I), Worldwide (from Super Quiz II), and Travel and Leisure (from Super Quiz III).
One other difference from Trivial Pursuit was that some categories had built-in clues…so if you took Famous People (SQ1) or Celebrities (SQII), it would give you the first letter of the last name of the answer. So maybe you would try for a higher-level question.
We also implemented a rule we called “drop-down” to encourage ourselves to go above only Level 1 questions. If you choose any of the three levels and got it right, you got the points and could go again. However, for drop-down, if you chose a level three question, and got it WRONG, you could try for level two. If you got IT right, you would get your two points but you couldn’t go again. Sometimes we played that you could drop down again to Level 1, but sometimes we thought that was too many chances and only did one drop down level. Usually we would divvy up the various boxes amongst all the players so we all had 3-4 categories to read. If we had one of the categories we wanted to answer at some point, we would just swap boxes with someone when we got to that category.
Did I already confess that I loved trivia?
Researching trivia options for work
And so, as part of our workplace charitable campaign, it seems only natural that I am organizing a trivia game for our branch. I had only done one virtual game recently, so I went looking for others online. Andrea knows of one that a friend runs, and I’ll hopefully be able to check that out one night. In the meantime, a friend invited me to join one run by a guy in the U.S. who used to run bar trivia in a pub and now offers it online with weekly games.
I played tonight on my friend’s team, and it was a lot of fun. We were considering having the guy run a game for us, but alas, the cost is too high and we’ll have to do it ourselves, plus I’ll need the Qs to be bilingual. We’ll work on the format over the next week or so and beta test some options, but I’ll try to keep it simple.
Yet even with tonight, I’m already seeing some of the challenges. The game tonight was six rounds, and each round was about 10 questions with 8 minutes to respond to them all. The guy uses a Google doc to share the Qs and track / score the results, and while it isn’t “pretty”, it functions just fine. For me, the real challenge was the eight-minute limit. It practically invites you to Google answers. Which is not really trivia, more like puzzle-solving. Which is fun too. But it often is what turns me off in online games. Too much time between questions and/or rounds.
I also noticed that even between Canada and US, and all of it in English, there were a few cultural centricities that will only be amplified when it comes to all players being Canadian but the game needing to be bilingual. Certainly there are pop-culture questions that would work just fine for the anglophones that would leave the francophones scratching their heads, and some easy ones for francophones that anglophones would have no chance at answering without Alexa or Siri on their team.
Jacob and I played on the team for the first hour or so and then he went off to bed, and I continued for another hour. Plus lots of opportunities to just chat between rounds. Almost too much in a normal world, but in a COVID world? A great way to spend the night. Definitely outside my limited bubble of late.
Today I choose to embrace the trivial, and play virtual trivia with a friend.
