TIME DISTRIBUTION AND UNDERGRADUATE FOCUS:
- All categories will feature explicit time quotas designed to counter the bias towards people in the 25–40 age range that has characterized nearly all trash tournaments written to this point. There will be greater amounts of content that current undergraduates of typical age could have plausibly experienced firsthand than is normal in trash. For example, a minimum of 50% of all the music and sports questions will be about music and sports since 2010. A minimum of 50% of all the TV questions will be about TV since 2015. 100% of the video games questions will be on broadly popular games since 2010 (there will be no "classic gaming" or niche JRPG content in this tournament).
- Questions from before 2010 will be significantly skewed towards pre-1990 content that is equally accessible to anyone under age 40 who has sought it out or learned about it in a book and will be approached from a perspective of what is culturally important. The 1990–2010 period which heavily rewards the experiences of the 25–40 age group will be de-emphasized and will receive no more than 3/3 total questions in any given packet.
- "Culturally important" should not be taken as a synonym for "academic"—this is a trash tournament and it very well may have questions on Charlie's Angels or The Commodores, because those things were large presences in American popular culture even though they would not come up at ACF Nationals. It is unlikely to have many questions rewarding deep knowledge of Fairfield Parlour or Butt-Ugly Martians as those fall into the categories of "old things that, despite being highly regarded by critics, only dedicated historians of music know about" and "ephemeral nostalgia from the '90s and '00s that didn't have any prominence in the culture as a whole," which will be heavily de-emphasized in this packet set.
- In the film category only, there will be an allotment for critically lauded film regardless of popularity, but effort will still be made to keep questions answerable.
- The set is intended for use at open-eligibility trash tournaments, though we are not opposed to negotiating specific mirrors that choose to use more restrictive entrance criteria.
- This tournament will feature 1/1 women's sports in every packet and will also require certain amounts of film by women, film by minorities, fashion, and popular literature of appeal to women across the packet set.
- There will be 1 question per packet in the category of "Southern, rural, or blue-collar interest" designed to include topics that the traditional quizbowl demographic - especially the traditional open trash tournament demographic - does not necessarily prioritize when writing tournaments.
- There is no "Internet memes" or "Twitter" category in this tournament, and in general the tournament will not include any questions catering to Extremely Online interests. In categories where undesirable trends are difficult to counter with numerical quotas, we will still eyeball the progress of the set to try to minimize bias as much as possible (e.g. we will keep the "recent rock music" category from being entirely overrun by "indie bands from Brooklyn," and so forth.)
- We would like a minimum of two more writers to collaborate on this set. We are specifically looking for writers who can provide a current undergraduate's perspective on contemporary popular music and on questions that appeal to women playing the tournament, though if you prefer to work in other categories we are also interested in hearing from you. This means that if you are an undergraduate and/or a woman, then we are very much looking forward to your application for the writing team. If you are interested, please contact me, Naveed Chowdhury, at [email protected].
- There will be a minimum of four total writers on the set, and possibly more. That means that each writer will be responsible for approximately 75 tossups and 75 bonuses, or less if we have more than four people on the team, and will receive an appropriate share of the tournament profits with specifics to be discussed. We would like to have the set done by January 2021 but are willing to extend the production schedule to accommodate the need to get the right people on the writing team, and we will be writing under the low-pressure model of "not announcing any specific times at which the tournament will be held until the set is actually complete." Of course, the evolving situation with distance learning and bans on gatherings in light of public health will also influence whether we attempt to actually hold this tournament in spring 2021 or hold on to the set for a later time.