Minimum Criteria to be Considered Quizbowl

[Everything in the Whole Wide World]

A series of interrelated questions has been coming up in my discussions with other quizbowlers recently in regards to getting a solid, unambiguous definition of what defines our game. I thought I'd throw them to the field and see what kind of consensus or lack thereof comes out.

1) What specifically defines quizbowl as opposed to other games in the academic competition family? Does it require a certain kind of distribution? Must it be a buzzer based activity (there are certainly some local formats near me that pit two teams against each other in an academic content context in what essentially amounts to a group oral exam- how would this fit)? Which philosophies we've adopted are musts and which are not?

2) If we accept "good quizbowl" requires pyramidal structure tossups, then by virtue of the very existence of the term "bad quizbowl", are we suggesting that pyramidal structure is not strictly required to call something quizbowl?

3) If we'd like the answer to #2 to be"no", should we perhaps replace the term "bad quizbowl" with some other term? Need we start to explicitly define non-pyramidal style questions as "not-quizbowl" instead of some inferior form of it?

[jonah]

In my opinion, the only essential features of quizbowl are buzzers (or equivalent devices that lock out all but the first player to signal, until reset), questions, synchronous competition (everyone hears the questions at effectively the same time), and being able to interrupt at least some types of questions to give an answer. I'm not even totally sure about the last of those, but my gut says "Jeopardy! isn't quizbowl." I would consider adding that the answers to the questions are intended to be short and unambiguous. I don't, however, think that this is the only correct answer, and alternative characterizations may be particularly useful when explaining the game to other people.

I don't think pyramidality is an essential feature of quizbowl in the definitional sense, though I certainly prefer it. (I also don't think "good quizbowl" versus "bad quizbowl" is a great way to frame the dichotomy; "pyramidal quizbowl" [though not precisely synonymous with what I consider to be good] versus "non-pyramidal quizbowl" is probably more effective when talking to people who may not agree with you.)

[alexdz]

I think Jonah's ideas give us a pretty good basis for distinguishing quizbowl from non-quizbowl. It seems almost tautologous to say that questions are necessary for quizbowl. A lockout mechanism seems necessary, as Trivial Pursuit would meet all the other criteria. (The presence of such a system seems to imply some level of synchronicity; otherwise, why would we need to distinguish who responded first? Perhaps it is not necessary to separately include synchronicity as a criterion.) And as Jonah said, interruptibility distinguishes quizbowl from Jeopardy! so it also seems necessary. The math competitions I am familiar with would not meet any of the criteria except having questions.

There are other categories or even just adjectives that people usually use to describe quizbowl which don't feel to me to be necessary aspects of the game. For instance, we often describe it as a team competition, but I don't think anyone feels that Scobol Solo is "not quizbowl." And mostly we describe it as having multiple academic categories, but most people in the community would consider a trash video-game packet as still falling under the general "quizbowl" umbrella. Same goes for single-subject academic competition.

[jonah]

It seems almost tautologous to say that questions are necessary for quizbowl.

I'm not sure that it's a tautology. It certainly seems obvious, and I think we would all be assuming it even if we didn't say it, but better yet to say it.

(There get to be some really silly issues here. Going back to a Jeopardy! comparison, if it were interruptible, would it be quizbowl? I would say it would feel a lot more like quizbowl, but it doesn't have questions, it has answers. Of course, quizbowl questions are often not phrased interrogatively! So I was using "questions" as shorthand for "entities designed to elicit a specific response or responses from players".)

A lockout mechanism seems necessary, as Trivial Pursuit would meet all the other criteria. (The presence of such a system seems to imply some level of synchronicity; otherwise, why would we need to distinguish who responded first? Perhaps it is not necessary to separately include synchronicity as a criterion.)

I thought about this and decided that synchronicity was necessary as a distinct criterion because otherwise, some trivia apps would qualify. I think the one I have in mind is called QuizUp, though I haven't played it in a long time — as I recall, you got additional points for answering the question earlier than your opponent, even though the games were "recorded" in a sense rather than the two people playing at the same time. In any event, even if I'm misremembering this, the general concept seems plausible.)

There are other categories or even just adjectives that people usually use to describe quizbowl which don't feel to me to be necessary aspects of the game. For instance, we often describe it as a team competition, but I don't think anyone feels that Scobol Solo is "not quizbowl." And mostly we describe it as having multiple academic categories, but most people in the community would consider a trash video-game packet as still falling under the general "quizbowl" umbrella. Same goes for single-subject academic competition.

Agreed entirely; I sought to include these under my definition, and I don't think that's terribly controversial.

[alexdz]

It seems almost tautologous to say that questions are necessary for quizbowl.

I'm not sure that it's a tautology. It certainly seems obvious, and I think we would all be assuming it even if we didn't say it, but better yet to say it.

I guess I was going for the fact that it is, after all, called QUIZ-bowl, and what is a quiz without a "question" (or piece-of-text-for-eliciting-response)?

I hadn't thought of QuizUp or even portions of Trivia Crack as being asynchronous yet also somehow "timing" the "buzz." Given that, I'd say you probably do need to include synchronicity then.