A few things come to mind that could play some significant role in defining periods of the game’s history:
- career spans of specific dominant teams/players
- landmark or record-setting achievements
- personnel, organizational, and bureaucratic changes within the game’s major orgs
- shifts in what gets asked in-game and how, incl. “the canon” and editorial taste/judgment
- broader changes in technology, communication systems, and online spaces/resources
- major world events and societal shifts outside the game
Disclaimer: I’m focusing primarily on the collegiate game in the U.S., and on the national championships and top-tier competitive players within that. This is only because that’s what I’m most familiar with; I welcome people with other perspectives (different regions, countries, levels of competition) sharing the way they see things from their vantage point.
Tl;dr version
My sense is that periods/eras of quizbowl history tend to play out over about a ~4-5 year time span, with ~0-2 years of transitional time bridging eras. This makes some amount of intuitive sense, as it’s roughly the (normative) length of time it takes to complete a full-time undergraduate degree, and coincides with the amount of time an especially influential undergrad will be around. (It's not quite the typical length of time of a Ph.D program, which many other influential players continued on to pursue, though...)
Before I was around
I don't have a good sense of what the "natural breaking points" are for the eras before I was involved in quizbowl. (I first started playing in 2007, and most of the people I have the closest connections to started within a few years on either side of that.)
I would love it if people with direct experience of earlier periods of quizbowl history could share where they feel like the "era" boundaries were, both personally and for the game as a whole, and why.
So, the following is pretty conjectural:
???-1978: Prehistory
My impression is that there is a genuine “pre-history”/”Dark Ages,” in which the first radio quiz programs emerge around World War II, the televised GE College Bowl emerges out of that in the early 1950s, and game shows become a national craze. The idea of question-answering on school-based teams stays pretty limited for the next few years.
1978-1991 or so
CBI starts providing intramural and regional questions for off-air competitions in 1978, starts running its national championship tournament in 1979.
The non-CBI “NIT” is also a thing that happens at Emory; it is apparently packet sub. The first independent / housewritten events start to emerge. Discontent with CBI practices starts to grow, though the alternatives are few.
Of events people today would recognize or possibly play in, the first Terrapin was apparently in 1987, and the first Penn Bowl was held in 1991.
1991-1996 or so
ACF starts in 1991, hosts its first ACF Nationals, standardizes 20/20 as the length of non-CBI packets.
Big expansion of digital communications starts across the globe. An early dominant platform, Usenet, more or less breaks in 1992 (the full story involves a then-undergraduate Matt Bruce). Email and the World Wide Web start to become widespread.
Andrew Yaphe hits the college scene in 1994, quickly becomes dominant.
1996-2001 or so
NAQT starts in 1996, the first ICT is 1997.
“Virginia Open” (the precursor to Chicago Open) starts summer 1997
The quizbowl Yahoo Group becomes a main hub of discussion. That bright yellow “Maize Pages” website by Craig Barker is a major hub for info about the game.
Yaphe from UVA to Chicago starting with the 1998-99 competition year. What was a very good team beforehand keeps being very good.
Around 1999, Zeke Berdichevsky and Dave Hamilton at Maryland start an intense program of past packet study to systematically improve at and dominate the “canon,” one of the most successful early attempts to do so.
Through this and the next era, there aren’t enough top players and alums around for Nats to get edited without a very strong player choosing to sit out.
2001ish-2005
Title winners (NAQT/ACF): Chicago, Michigan, Berkeley
Influential editors include: Kelly Mackenzie, Andrew Yaphe, Zeke Berdichevsky, Subash Maddipotti
The landmark era-opening event here is probably the inaugural ACF Fall in 2001, which soon becomes the premier low-difficulty tournament. Also if this Matt Weiner post is to be believed, ACF Regionals 2001 was a trend-setting tournament for difficulty-controlled, pyramidal regular-season sets.
Subash Maddipotti takes the reins of CO from Yaphe; goes on his legendary 32,000-leadin study binge for 2003 ICT. Yaphe starts writing for ICT instead of playing it.
Hsquizbowl.org forums founded in 2003. SQBS stat-keeping software introduced. Stanford Packet Archive starts being the main reliable archive for online collegiate packets around this time, I think? (It was on its way out by the late aughts; not sure what its peak was.)
Wikipedia and Google start to dominate the online information ecosystem, become go-to sources for question writing (displacing volumes like Benet’s, Masterplots, etc.)
The earliest single-subject academic side events still hosted on packet archives start to show up here: 2004 and 2005 Science Monstrosity, Pontormo Fine Arts, Teitler Myth, etc. (If you have a sense of what side event culture was like before this, please comment!)
A strong team forms at Berkeley, including some folks named Jeff Hoppes (formerly of Princeton), Selene Koo, Seth Teitler, and Jerry Vinokurov.
Period-ending milestones: Zeke Berdichevsky-led Michigan wins 2005 Triple Crown; Yaphe-edited ACF Nationals 2005 is “so hard it killed the Pope”, with no team >15ppb.
2005-06: transitional year?
Berkeley wins ICT while playing very little else all year, despite two of its players moving on to physics Ph.Ds elsewhere (Seth to Chicago, joining Selene who had been there; Jerry to Brown). Remnants of the post-Zeke Michigan squad lose Nats ‘06 to a Chris Romero-led Texas A&M.
Okay here’s where I start to be around as things actually happened and/or know people well who were:
2006?-2010: the “Teitler-Vinokurov” era (plus “Yaphe reprise”)
Title winners: Berkeley, Texas A&M, Chicago, Maryland, Stanford
Other dominant schools: Brown, Minnesota, Stanford, Illinois
Influential editors include: Seth Teitler, Jerry Vinokurov, Andrew Hart, Rob Carson, Chris Ray, Bruce Arthur, Matt Weiner, Eric Mukherjee, Ryan Westbrook
Canon changes:
- Science category "real"-ifies; named organic reactions in, taxonomy out.
- Wild excesses in question length and a profusion of tough regular-season tournaments lead to more efforts at length-capping and difficulty control, setting the norm that “regular difficulty” tossups are 6-8 lines and should have a “bell curve” of answer difficulties.
Organizational:
- CBI regional/national tournaments go on permanent hiatus in 2008.
- ACF ratifies a new Constitution in 2008, the base document which is still being amended today.
- ACF Nationals starts to be able to assemble majority-alum editing teams.
- Discontent rises with NAQT as it falls out of step with question quality improvements and canon trends on the circuit. A few things start to mitigate this discontent:
- Jeff Hoppes and Andrew Yaphe (both long-time acclaimed editors of circuit events) become NAQT members, adding to the company’s credibility with the collegiate circuit.
- Seth Teitler is brought on as a guest-editor for SCT 2009 and 2010, which are well-received.
- The opaque S-Value for ICT qualification is replaced by the more precise D-Value.
- Division I tossup length cap raised from 425 to 500 characters.
- Peak “high schoolers playing college tournaments” - e.g. Ike Jose, State College.
- Paul Litvak predicts that good quizbowl will die within 5 years. Gets many responses, including a prescient one from a first-year undergrad named Andrew Hart.
- Chicago Open editorship starts rotating to new team annually, with permission of previous year's editing team
Web/tech stuff:
- ACFDB becomes one of the earliest databases that allows typing a topic into a search bar and getting back questions on that topic (but just for ACF Fall, Regionals, and Nationals sets). Gyaankosh, a database run by Stanford player Arnav Mougdil, is briefly (~2008-10) a thing.
- Quizbowlpackets.com founded for high-quality high school packets; gets a collegiate section later.
- HSQuizbowl forums cement their dominance as the place of discourse.
- Peak usage of the quizbowl IRC channel.
Period-ending milestones:
- Seth Teitler, Jerry Vinokurov, Brendan Byrne, and Andrew Yaphe all played their last tournament in 2010. (Mike Sorice, the other dominant player of this era, played his last tournament a year later.)
- The final TRASHionals happens in 2010; the distinct calendar of pop culture-only tournaments starts to wither away.
2010-11 - transition year?
You could treat 2010-11 here as a transitional year, competitively speaking.
- It was the last year for a bunch of giants -- Mike Sorice at UIUC, Rob and Gautam at Minnesota, and Selene at Chicago -- and the new dynasties at Yale, UVA, Michigan, and Penn were still in early stages.
-Also, a bunch of things made the titles that year unusually inconclusive (UVA's science player, Will Butler, was unexpectedly unable to play either national; I absolutely believe they would have been in the picture if he had. Eric Mukherjee was also absent for both nationals. Andy Watkins being a cheater ruined the entire order of finish at ICT. The sky-high difficulty and double record-wiping schedule of Nats 2011 scrambled a lot of people's predictions. etc...)
2010/11-2015 or so: the “War of the Matts”
Title winners: Minnesota, Yale, UVA, Illinois, Penn
Other dominant schools: Penn, Maryland, Michigan
Influential editors include: Ted Gioia, John Lawrence, Chris Ray, Matt Jackson, Matt Bollinger, Eric Mukherjee, Ike Jose, Auroni Gupta, Jerry Vinokurov, Evan Adams, Mike Bentley
Canon changes:
- Auditory fine arts category "real-ifies" with pressure and guidance from specialists.
- New Oberhausen film manifesto changes how film questions are written.
- Social science starts to shift from “dusty old” theorists to concepts.
- VCU Open 2011 discussion thread produces heated discussion and signals a shift to greater acceptance of “creative” answerlines.
- "Audio tournaments" (e.g. Imaginary Landscape) and "visual tournaments" (e.g. Eyes That Do Not See) become semi-regular fixtures of the side event schedule. There is much more of a consistent side event schedule, including summer "side event weekends" in several circuits.
Web/tech stuff:
- Stanford Packet archive gives way to collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com.
- The quizbowlpackets domains and a central stats repository get integrated into HSQuizbowl as the Quizbowl Resource Database.
- ACFDB and Gyaankosh fade; Torrey Pines DB arises as the new searchable database, which then becomes Quinterest.
- ProtoBowl founded ~2013.
- Early “Skype tournaments” by Mike Bentley and others demonstrate that a truly online quizbowl experience might be possible.
- Mnemosyne and Anki become more widespread as apps for digital flashcarding.
Broader world stuff:
- Effects of 2008 recession and 2010 “red wave” in U.S. state legislative control begin a trend toward sharp funding cuts and enrollment declines in many university programs, particularly in non-STEM fields.
Organizational:
- NHBB founded; runs primarily on the labor of experienced (and already-busy) quizbowl writers for its first few years.
- Seth Teitler becomes Chief Editor of NAQT.
- NAQT discovers evidence that several players, including Andy Watkins of Harvard and Josh Alman of MIT, cheated by improperly accessing future question sets.
Period-ending milestones:
- Matt Bollinger does his extra year and then finishes at UVA. Eric Mukherjee wins his long-awaited title with Penn at ACF Nationals 2015.
- Matt Weiner multi-resignation + attendant handoffs of duties, including 5th of March Incident / NHBBblitz.
2015-2020 or so: [i don’t have a catchy name for this, suggestions welcome]
[in part because I was mostly not around for this era]
Title winners: Chicago, Michigan, Maryland, Yale, Columbia
Other dominant schools: Penn, Stanford, Berkeley
Influential editors include: Jakob Myers, Jacob R, Jordan Brownstein, Will Alston, Auroni Gupta, Adam Silverman, Billy Busse, Will Nediger, Ike Jose, Caleb Kendrick
Canon changes:
- Notion of "regular difficulty" becomes deprecated, with more deliberate distinction between "two-dot" and "three-dot" difficulties.
- Packet sub tournaments dwindle outside of the official ACF events and CO. By the tail end of this era, packet sub is entirely gone aside from those events.
- Shift toward greater emphasis on “tightly themed” questions, even/especially for answerlines that allow a wide range of clues.
- Some experimentation with distribution tweaks, such as expanded notions of "Belief", "Thought", "Legends", and "Modern World", continues from tail end of prior era.
- De-emphasis on "eponymous things", especially in science clues and history answer lines.
- “Note-spelling” clues become de rigueur in music questions.
- Increaed focus on diversity and representation.
Organizational:
- ACF Nationals expands to ~48 teams, institutes A-Value qualification system to handle massive demand.
- ACF formalizes more of its procedures, continues to shift officer roles and responsibilities from active players to alumni; formally bans high school teams from competing at its collegiate tournaments.
- Misconduct procedures formalize across multiple organizations, amid conversations about reducing toxicity and harassment in quizbowl. Matt Bruce removed from NAQT membership. Chloe Levine essay on gender in quizbowl posted.
- NAQT begins partnership with LetterOne. R. Robert Hentzel steps down as President, replaced by Seth Teitler.
- HSAPQ ceases independent operations.
- British, Canadian circuits get more serious about competing at high-level academic quizbowl.
- Efforts at mentorship and question feedback become more pronounced, including 2014 PADAWAN and 2020 WORKSHOP at the set level.
- CO moves location to Northwestern in 2018.
- Erik Nelson-led ACRONYM pop culture tournament expands and becomes a community institution.
Web/tech stuff:
- IRC diminishes as a live chat platform, gives way to Discord.
- "Illinois Quizbowl Memes for Quizbowl Teens" Facebook group founded.
- Quinterest gives way to QuizDB (edit: and AseemsDB)
- Advances in statkeeping:
- Neg5 stats program becomes the first major SQBS alternative to stick, though some users have issues with it.
- YellowFruit starts being a thing.
- Dream of “advanced stats” starts to become a viable reality, with several tournaments using “Ophir stats” to gather conversion data.
- Anderson Officiator becomes the dominant buzzer system, with almost other brands sharply dwindling in prevalence or disappearing outright.
Period-ending milestones:
- COVID pandemic cancels end of 2019-2020 competition year.
March 2020-spring 2021: mega-transition year / "Online Era"
Title winners: Columbia, Florida
Other dominant schools: Chicago, Illinois
Influential editors include: Taylor Harvey, Jonathen Settle, Will Alston, Matt Bollinger, Caroline Mao
The Alston/Krichevsky lineup at Columbia and Lawrence/Reed/Lehmann/Fine lineup at Chicago, two incredibly strong teams that were the favorites to win nationals in 2020, do not get to face off. Meanwhile, like a crocodile under the surface, Florida keeps swimming ever forward.
Broader world stuff:
- COVID pushes many formerly in-person events online, including many schools and white-collar jobs. In tandem, tournaments figure out how to operate online.
Web:
- Fragmentation of online discourse across multiple regional and age-level Discords.
- HSQuizbowl forums become less rancorous, also less important.
- NAQT launches Buzzword. Other asynchronous tournaments also run online.
- TJSheets become a common option for fully digital scorekeeping.
Organizational:
- ACF Winter revived as a "two-dot" tournament.
- Greater cross-pollination of quizbowl with other “trivia” spaces such as Online Quiz League USA, WikiQuiz, Mimir’s Well.
- Jacob R ends his quizbowl career in response to serious misconduct allegations.
- ACF Nationals gets shiny well-graphic-designed program brochures courtesy of Caroline Mao.
Period-ending milestones: ACF Nationals in August marks triumphant return of in-person quizbowl, first title for Florida.
Fall 2021-present: "post-COVID" era
Title winners: Stanford, Cornell, Georgia Tech
Other dominant schools: Chicago, Harvard, WUSTL, Ohio State
Influential editors include: Grant Peet + the ARCADIA crew, Caroline Mao, Taylor Harvey, Nick Jensen, Will Alston, Hari Parameswaran, Tim Morrison, John Marvin, Kevin Wang, Amogh Kulkarni, Justine French
Matt Bollinger returns to school for a computer-oriented grad program. A year later, I return to school for a computer-oriented grad program.
Canon changes:
- Interest in contemporary literature expands, arguably starts to push out other eras.
- Cards cement themselves as the dominant/sole study method (or at least, people become much more open about doing it).
Web/tech stuff:
- MODAQ becomes new normal for scorekeeping without paper scoresheets.
- QuizDB sunsetted; replaced by a database add-on to QBReader.
Organizational:
- In-person tournaments return.
- R. Robert Hentzel retires from NAQT.
- IQBT starts the Undergraduate Championship.
- Continuing a trend, writing/editing teams tend to grow in size relative to prior eras, with smaller category loads per editor.
Broader world trends:
- ChatGPT releases to the public. Initial attempts to write questions with it prove unfruitful.
- COVID-exacerbated cuts to many academic fields and programs continue, and enrollment in humanities majors continues to decline sharply across universities. We don't have good longitudinal data going backward for this, but at least anecdotally my sense is this is true of quizbowl players as well.
Thoughts?
