Writing Biases

[Mike Bentley]

I tried very hard not to fall in the trap of “writing about my youth” that I’ve criticized older trash writers from doing, but I’m not sure how thoroughly I succeeded in this area. I think one of the problems here was the subdistribution I ended up using, especially in the Movies and TV category. For this tournament, I pretty much weighted the ‘90s and the ‘00s evenly. In retrospect, I should have weighted questions a bit more towards the ‘00s, at the expense of the early ‘90s and ‘80s. This would have leveled the age curve a bit more and helped make sure what I was asking about was culturally significant rather than just “remember that crap no one cares about now”?

I think videogames are probably another area where I need to rethink question difficulty and accessibility to newer players. I think there were more questions in this category that fell into the trap of “you had to grow up in the ‘90s to be aware of this thing” than in any other category (Game Gear, Virtual Boy, the Hockey question, etc. all come to mind). Perhaps this is because nostalgia is such a big aspect of the videogame medium—games actively play on this and series are revived and see new installments endlessly. However, this doesn’t take the blame off of me for writing too many non-accessible questions in this category. Perhaps focusing on individual games rather than series/systems and making a larger push towards writing on modern topics would be a way to do this.

There are a few other areas I’d like to rebalance now that I look back at the set. The comic strip questions were probably too numerous and a bit too difficult. I think things would have gone over better if I was able to incorporate a bit more Internet trash into the set, as this stuff is much more popular, even among the target audience, than the limited appeal of comic strips. I suspect that people found the hockey a little (or maybe a lot) harder than the rest of the set. This was the only category in the tournament pretty much exclusively written by someone else (Chris Greenwood, who I’m very grateful volunteered to write a good batch of questions for the tournament). I should have done a better job communicating with Chris on exactly what the target difficulty was and spent some more time editing them myself to make them interface with the rest of the set a bit better.

[silverscreentest]

In terms of time bias, I write Silver Screen Test and the Balticon science fiction trivia contest with a sort of logarithmic time scale. This year gets a weight of 1, last year a weight of .5, two years ago a weight of 1/3 going all the way back to 1900. Actually I weigh this year a little less than 1 since it hasn't finished yet. So since Balticon was held in May I weighed 2010 1/3. Anyway, YMMV. So I'm allocating questions by years, rather than decades.

I'm worthless on videogame questions, but if you think if you have a bias, Mike, figure out what that "other" category is. "Casual" games? And farm that out to someone who knows it and or make an effort to write them yourself.

I realize there's a difficult balance between accessibility, time frame, interesting clues, challenging questions, getable answers, etc. Like with sports, sometimes you have to give up the ideal characteristics just because people expect sports in a pop culture tournament. In the games I write, I just hope I don't have hoses on toss-ups.:)