2022 ACF Regionals - General Discussion and Thanks

[TaylorH]

Hi everyone,

This is the general wrap-up thread for the 2022 ACF Regionals set. I hope that everyone who played, staffed, or otherwise interacted with the set yesterday had a great time. The set is now clear for discussion. Please feel free to give your general thoughts and impression of the set here.

The team of editors for the set was:

Head Editing: Taylor Harvey
American Literature: Chandler West
British and European Literature: Jaimie Carlson
World Literature: Alex Hardwick
American History: Arjun Nageswaran
European and Other History: Grant Peet
World History: Nick Jensen
Biology: Nick Jensen
Chemistry: Graham Reid
Physics and Other Science: Jonathen Settle
Painting and Sculpture: Chandler West
Classical Music: Taylor Harvey
Other Fine Arts: Ganon Evans (Visual), Taylor Harvey (Audio)
Religion and Philosophy: Taylor Harvey
Mythology: Annabelle Yang
Social Science: Alex Hardwick (Linguistics), Nick Jensen (everything else)
Other: Ganon Evans (Pop Culture, Other Academic, Geography), Jonathen Settle (Current Events)

This team of editors was an absolute pleasure to works with. All the people listed above consistently wrote and edited questions of the highest caliber in both their own and other categories, provided excellent feedback on others' questions, caught innumerable errors, and suggested many style changes that greatly improved the mechanics of the set. I would highly recommend any of the editors on this set for any future quiz bowl writing and editing projects. Apart from their technical prowess, this batch was great to work with because they are all smart, fun, and friendly people.

Second I'd like to thank Matt Bollinger for providing excellent general oversite, especially in the realms of difficulty and question length control. Matt's suggestions made the set much more player- and moderator-friendly than it was once shaping up to be.

I'd also like to thank our thorough and diligent proofreaders: Carsten Gehring, Theresa Nyowheoma, and Jonathan Magin. These three caught numerous grammatical and style errors, helped clean up answer lines, and greatly improved the clarity of the set's prose, all on quite short notice. I'd also like to thank Jordan Brownstein and JinAh Kim, who caught several errors and ambiguities for us in a more informal manner.

The set was also markedly improved by our group of playtesters. They were: Eric Mukherjee, John Lawrence, Matt Weiner, Mike Bentley, Sam Bailey, Aseem Keyal, Hasna Karim, Jacob O'Rourke, Olivia Murton, Paul Kasinski, Rahul Keyal, Rohith Nagari, Ryan Rosenberg, Stephen Eltinge, Tejas Raje, Erik Christensen, and, Andrew Wang. Their constructive criticism greatly improved clue placement/helpfulness, clarity, and difficulty.

Thanks as well to all the tournament directors and staffers at our sites yesterday. From what I observed and have heard, your hard work made the set enjoyable to play across all of our sites.

Finally, I want to thank the players, both for submitting many good questions and for of course deciding to play one of ACF's more difficult sets. The team genuinely hopes that you all found the set challenging, fun, and rewarding.

The editors will hold off on posting any sort of editing/writing theory posts for at least the next few days to allow folks to share their impressions without being biased by those.

Discuss away. There is a separate thread for discussion of individual questions.

Cheers y'all.

[Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone]

I'd like to open by praising this set - in the areas I pay close attention to (History, RMPSS and the like), it did a very good job of challenging both newer and more experienced players, delivered on the canon of quiz in 2022, and very rarely when pushing the boundaries did I feel 'Why on earth are they asking this?'. So a big thank you to the writers and editors.


When the set is posted I'll try to find the time to go through and pick out more specific examples to go beyond the vibes, but two minor quibbles with the style of the set struck me while playing:

1) there were a few easy parts that felt like they explained what they were looking for with cognate/variations of the actual term that teams were missing them because they were sure it couldn't just be that

2) some injudicious choices of referents - "this group" has stuck in my mind as a particularly vague one that I don't think should be used when covering things as different in size as a small military unit such as the Codetalkers through to entire ethnicities.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

Might have more detailed thoughts later, but I really liked the thought in this set especially the linguistics (every ling question was a hit of pure dopamine).

[cwasims]

This tournament was fun overall and I think served its purpose as a national qualifier well. That being said, a few things didn't go quite as well from my point of view.

More generally, I thought some of the bonus easy parts were extremely easy for this difficulty. There seemed to be a lot of parts that just required capital city-country matching or some similarly very basic information. While those easy parts are likely fine at something like ACF Fall, by ACF Regionals difficulty I think there's little justification for this sort of writing since it's essentially certain that there will be 100% conversion in the absence of mis-hearing or mis-parsing. And from a gameplay point of view, a bonus part with 100% conversion across the entire field serves no purpose in differentiating between teams. Obviously this does tie into some of the theoretical discussion on bonuses that's been happening on this forum but I thought this tournament had very easy easy parts to a higher degree than many others of its difficulty.

Although I probably shouldn't complain too much since I did well on it, I didn't think the classical music in this set was great for several reasons. Probably my biggest complaint was that a number of the bonuses that were primarily about Western classical music had hard or medium parts that asked for things that were either non-classical or world music (the hard parts on the Andes and DRC, the medium on Nintendo). While I can understand that it may be fun to write about connections like this, as a specialist in the category I found it frustrating that I wasn't able to 30 bonuses because of a (sub)category switch partway through the question.

Although opinions may vary on this (and it's probably clear from the past two ACF Winters where I stand on this issue) I think this tournament overall lacked "score clues" in the broad sense of the word. Even tossups like Mahler 2 that ostensibly had clues about the score framed them largely as quotations of other pieces (if memory serves) which is not terribly helpful if you know the piece but aren't aware of those associations. I don't recall almost any note sequences apart from one in the Sibelius 2 bonus and although that's by no means the only type of score clue I'm skeptical that you can properly reward knowledge gained by listening to classical music without virtually any of them.

Finally, I think there were a few issues more with individual questions or distributional choices. In particular, I found there was an overabundance of questions on contemporary (often American) classical music - I think we heard three tossups on this, which seems like too many given its relative importance and the frequency with which it's appeared in the past. Although contemporary stuff should come up sometimes, it is pretty clearly less engaged with in the classical music world than contemporary visual art is in the art world, for instance.

Similarly, there were some questions that I found a bit uninspired, like the tossup on "A" in music theory - I'm really not a fan of these questions in part because they're entirely generic: you can literally switch the note values each clue and make the tossup on a completely different answer line. The recurring problem in music theory is also that a huge number of the clues are of essentially equal difficulty or are on things that I think are of dubious real-world significance (Neo-Riemannian theory). I don't really have a solution for how to ask good music theory: I think the "seven" tossup I wrote for 2020 ACF Winter covered a lot of theory stuff in a fairly good way, but I essentially didn't include a music theory tossup in this pasts year's iteration for largely these reasons.

Much more subjectively, I wasn't a huge fan of the complete lack of theming on the bassoon tossup - I would encourage writers to at least try to focus on a single era of music in common links like this unless it's really impossible to do so. I will also note the Schumann question, while a good idea, got fairly transparent after "non-Wagner music critic" but maybe that's fine for a tournament at this difficulty.

Apologies for the lengthy criticism - I know how much work it is to produce a set like this and how much of the feedback people get is biased toward the negative side of things. Overall, I don't think that these issues I mentioned really detracted from whether the questions served their purpose for determining qualification for a national tournament. I should add the caveat that I of course didn't play all the packets of the tournament and it's possible some of my concerns would be alleviated with the full tournament's worth of questions in mind.

[TaylorH]

The packets have been uploaded to the archive and are pending approval.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I thought this set had one of the most expansive and (to me, at least engaging) sets of philosophy questions at three-star difficulty that I've seen in recent memory. This included both interesting experiments, such as the question on the Scotland cluing the No True Scotsman fallacy, questions touching on interesting philosophy problems not covered by older questions, such as Laplace's sunrise problem, and questions like double blending various thinkers' approach to the idea of a "having two minds/consciences/etc." I think it's very good to see this category take a non-parochial approach; we shouldn't stuff things into Other Academic just because they don't always fit traditional conceptions of categories.

EDIT: The same for science and music too; for the former, it's great to see more "applied science/engineering" crop up in regular tournaments, like power plants; for the latter, the few dips into "music composition outside the Classical Canon, but adjacent to it" were appreciated. For future tournaments, I would strongly encourage that ACF change the 1/1 "Classical Music" category to encompass opera as well, at least for Winter and higher difficulties; opera is indisputably part of the Western classical music tradition and I think this will serve to continue pushing opera questions towards having more clues blended in about the music itself. I would also encourage ACF to say that this this "Classical Music" category can (and should) include some small number of questions on non-Western "classical" or other highly formalized/academic music traditions, such as Chinese classical music and gamelan orchestras.

[Inscrutable Fox]

I want to thank the editing team for welcoming me onto the set late and making it a wonderful experience. I especially appreciated Nick’s wide-ranging and deep expertise in mythology. His suggestions have improved the myth in the set and helped me grow as an editor. Jonathan, Chandler, and Alex also provided lots of thoughtful feedback. It was so much fun to work on another set with Grant, who answered my myth-related historical inquiries and is generally great moral support.

In addition, I’m grateful to Nick, Taylor, Ganon, and Alex for writing really fun questions for me - you have them to thank for ingenious questions like pomegranates and woodcutters. Many thanks as well to Eric, Andrew, Tejas, and Hasna for all their constructive critiques.

Mythology is the category closest to my heart - it inspires wonder and the desire to learn more. I hope that the myth questions we’ve produced spark as much joy in players as the category does for me.

Some submissions I particularly enjoyed, with those used in some form in the set bolded:

Everyone who submitted on the number nine in Norse myth (and Penn State A’s entire tu on nine) and the Korean Ungnyeo myth
MIT A’s Santa Claus tu and Minnesota A’s Christmas bonus
Cornell A’s Colombia tu
USC A’s gleipnir tu
Berkeley A’s Ptolemaic myth bonus
UNC A’s Chilean warlock bonus
UNC B’s tu on axes
Amherst’s tu on mythological lookalikes
Kenyon’s tu on harps
Georgia Tech B’s tu on the Mesoamerican ballgame
Columbia A’s tu on the Greek underworld

EDIT: added specific packet sub shoutouts

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

I wanted to thank ACF and thank Taylor for the opportunity to work on Regionals this year! It's been a pleasure to work with the team and I had a ton of fun in doing so. A special thanks for the playtesters, proofers, and hosts for making this set happen.

Taylor is a machine - from editing the most subcategories of anyone, plugging holes everywhere, to overseeing set production with great poise and professionalism, he is a great leader who made this project really come through. This set really wouldn't have taken form without Nick either, who meticulously added comments, contributed engaging questions, and proofed the entire set multiple times over - it's always an honor and a pleasure to work with him. Jonathen was a great partner to split Other with and approached CE from a meaningful way that rewarded knowledge the big concepts and ideas that the category should be about. As a non-science player, I though Jon, Nick, and Graham all did an excellent job of branching hard concepts in science with more accessible content (specifically, easy's that a non-science team could get to see that 90% conversion number).

Arjun did a splendid job with an American History and provided a very engaging look across all facets of the category. Specifically, you could tell there was a commitment to including diverse people and ideas while simultaneously providing deep cuts on core content. I'm very thankful for Annabelle's expertise on the set and for her expansive takes on myth which include less traditional, but very important ideas (Santa Claus was a site favorite for this reason). She's a pleasure to work with. Alex also was someone who used a few of my submissions and was a very fun editor to work with. There were a few questions across the board in linguistics or a chess bonus that we passed the editing onto Alex for and he completed the task with great skill.

Some of Jaimie's ideas were my favorites of the set - her bonus on Henry VIII's wives in pop culture went through a few transformations before it became an OFA TU for me, but I've seen lots of good feedback on that. The lit was expansive while at the same time having a sly humor to some of the clues which made it a fun read. A big thanks to Chandler for working with me to turn many of my ideas to the set while at the same time coming with a great variety of question ideas that presented old topics in new ways or introduced many new, important writers to the set. They always do a wonderful job.

I didn't like Grant.

(Kidding - Grant was fun and encouraging with a great sense of humor that always made me laugh. His questions were, in one word, fun, with clues ranging from flyswatter scandals and dances for executions.)

My philosophy towards OFA was to try and write questions that were rewarded engagement with the topics mentioned rather than just "Name the work" bowl. I specifically tried to include a lot of clues around cinematography, art styles, designs, craft, technique, and more that are core to the art itself.

Likewise, for the "Other" categories I edited, I wanted to reward a lot of knowledge that I believe that people have, but isn't really in the canon (I guess that's why they call it Other Academic lol). For instance, the "Unabomber's Cabin" TU was one of my favorites because I think it's a deep cut that's a new way of asking about something or someone people know pretty well but from a different angle that rewards different knowledge. When I think of the Unabomber, I think of my mom saying "Ted's Red Shed" as a news headline she saw in the 90's when he was caught with a big picture of the cabin on there.

I think Other Academic is good for rewarding new approaches to knowledge like this while also being a means for a lot of cross-category knowledge to come up. I may work on a full set on this premise in the future, but not now.

I'd be happy to give specific feedback to submissions in my categories. Just DM me and I'd be happy to send back my thoughts and tips. I hope you all enjoyed the set!

[SortesVirgilianae]

I had the pleasure of editing world literature and linguistics (within SS) for this tournament. Being a British (ex-Oxford) Quizbowl player means that I have occasional blind spots with core US-canonical subjects, as well as a high probability of being tactically asleep during crises due to being in a different time zone. I am grateful to the entire editorial team for their generosity both with feedback and with scheduling flexibility, as well as for being such a wonderful and good-humoured group to work with.

In particular, I am grateful to Ganon Evans for writing some lovely questions for my section (you have him to thank for the creative TU on Scheherazade and the bonuses on Vietnamese/US Vietnam War novels). I also guest-wrote some Greco-Roman questions for Myth and a handful of Other and European Literature questions: my thanks to Annabelle Yang, Jaimie Charlson and Ganon Evans for editing my work in their sections.

My approach with world literature was, primarily, to emphasise diversity (both geographical and of historically under-represented groups) while keeping questions firmly playable and accessible at all levels. I also tried to avoid the danger of world literature becoming heavy on 20th-century novels, so I tried to dip into 21st-century literature as well as older (in some cases, much older) literature where possible. In the end, the world literature section was a bit more canonical than I would have otherwise liked: very few of my early TU clues or hard bonus parts can truly be called extra-canonical. However, I hope that even my more canon-heavy questions aimed to approach topics in a relatively fresh way (e.g. Vikram Seth's sexuality).

My favourite part of working on a set like this is team submissions, which teach me about the delightful variety of literature which players enjoy, study, or are desperate not to hear in a crucial match situation! I received many enjoyable submissions, which often found accessible ways to clue extracanonical content or approached canonical material in innovative, fresh ways. I welcome any teams getting in touch with me to seek feedback on their world literature/linguistics submissions - I'm also very happy for people to let me know what they thought of my questions!

Some remarks on submissions I received:

1) In general, submitted bonus sets in my areas (especially submissions by more experienced teams) tended to be too difficult more often than they were too easy.

2) Relatively few submissions included linguistics in their social science, but those that did often wrote interesting and high-quality content. I especially enjoyed McGill A's counting systems bonuses, Duke A's Sprachbund bonuses, and NYU B's TU on creoles. Florida A wrote a wonderful bonus set on abecedaries, which didn't count as linguistics under the editorial team's agreed definitions, but I warmly recommended it to the European history editor.

3) If you want your world literature question to make it into the set, don't write about Japanese literature! I received a vast quantity of Japanese literature submissions, so either all the players adore it or can't bear to play questions on it. The second-most popular world literature submission topic was Argentinian literature (of which the majority was Borges), and the third-most popular was Nigerian literature, mostly cluing Adichie and/or Achebe.

4) Duke B managed to spoil Liu Cixin's novel The Dark Forest for me - future editors, make sure you finish that gripping novel before you start work on a new set.

5) I would like to thank the following teams for the following submissions, which I especially enjoyed (* marks those which made it into the set):

*Aztec TU (Stanford A)
*Caribbean authors in London bonuses (Cornell A)
Mexican poets called Rosario bonuses (Penn State A)
*Havana TU (Cambridge A)
Georgian and Persian quatrains bonuses (South Carolina A)
Bolivar TU (McGill A)
César Vallejo’s death bonuses (Johns Hopkins A)
*peaches in Chinese literature TU (McGill B)
Chushingura TU (Gettysburg A)
Georgette Vallejo bonuses (UNF A)
*Heinemann's African Writers Series bonuses (Ohio State)
Ryu Murakami bonuses (Edinburgh A)
Azaleas in East Asian literature bonuses (Columbia B)
Iraq War TU (Carleton A)
Roman satires bonuses (Columbia A)

[mico]

It was a blast to interact with everyone on the editing team this year, even if I didn’t really comment on many questions outside of the history subcategories. This was my second time working with Taylor and Jonathen. The first time was my first writing experience, so I didn’t appreciate the effort both of them put in. This time, I realized how difficult it is to do what Taylor does with ease, write and edit ungodly amounts of seemingly any humanities category. With Jon’s ability to cover various sciences, they make a great team on any set. On the topic of ungodly amounts of questions, I am incredibly grateful for the work Nick put into this set. He writes, comments on, and offers clues for a wide range of categories at a high level. I can’t thank him enough for pitching in other and European history questions when needed and suggesting answerlines and clues when I was stuck. Nick is a great asset for any set and one of the few people who can react to his own discord messages without it being weird. I loved the dynamics Ganon and Chandler brought to the set, both in their questions and their insults of mine. I will continue to shill Annabelle as the premier myth editor in the current scene and I am incredibly grateful to have her to turn to when I need any sort of encouragement or Good Takes.

I’d reference ARCADIA as a basis for what I wanted the European history in this set to resemble, but it’s not clear yet so the resemblance will have to wait. What I will add is that I sought to form answerlines around, instead of physical/political locations, either social/political movements, or specific rulers. Lots of contemporary countries, or physical locations, in Europe did not constitute a shared identity for the people living within them throughout various periods of European history. Often in Quizbowl writing, identities that did not exist at the times of the clues are forced into a modern framework; I tried to avoid that when possible, although the packet sub nature of this tournament complicated those ideals at times. I was comparatively much less familiar with ancient history and archaeology, so there was less of an overarching theme to the category. I instead tried to include Good Questions, a novel goal. To this extent, I would like to thank Nick again for acting as my reference for judging the difficulties of certain clues in preliminary stages.

People are free to message me here or on discord for more feedback about submissions, but I would like to highlight a few that I enjoyed reading. The ones used in the set are in bold.

French Algeria bonus (NCF A)
WWII Tobruk bonus (Cornell A)
Charles V AND Suleiman I (MIT B)
Bruce family (Harvard A)
History of racism in Vancouver bonus (Harvard A)
cricket/Windrush/Lawrence (PSU A)
Norwegian resistance (MIT A)
Roman agriculture bonus (Yale A)
Denmark TU (UBC A)
Historical memory bonus (Indiana A)
Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries bonus (Minnesota B)
Richard III (Florida B)
Netherlands TU (Kenyon A)

[Berniecrat]

I edited the American History for this tournament. Going into the set I was a little bit nervous (this was my first time ever writing at this difficulty, let alone editing), but I want to thank Taylor and the other editors for helping me feel comfortable and getting over any imposter syndrome I felt.

All the editors were really kind and helpful throughout the set process, but I wanted to "shout out" two editors in particular. Ganon not only wrote super cool content for his categories, but also wrote in many of the other editors' categories (including the Muir and Navajo code talkers TUs and the electric chairs bonus in US History, which were some of my favorite questions in the set). I really admire his constant ability to write on super wild interesting ideas that would never have occurred to me (like an OAc bonus part on "licking a stamp"!) He is also just a very fun person to be around, probably the funniest person in the quizbowl community I've met. In addition to editing his own categories, Nick provided a lot of helpful feedback (whether it be proof checking for grammar, helping make sentences more concise, suggesting additional clues, helping expand the answerlines, and more) for all of the other categories, making the set a lot more polished thanks to his help. I really hope that I can work on a set with him again sometime in the future.

As to the American History, my primary goal was to encourage diverse representation and voices throughout the set, while still keeping answerlines mostly tame and not departing too far from the canon.

Some submissions which I really enjoyed included:
Stanford A's TU on California cluing on treatment of indigenous peoples (this had to be placed in the extras packet because of too many other California tossups, but I really liked it)
McGill B's TU on the Hays Code in Packet I (this was used with very little changes from the original submission)
Yale A's TU on gold rushes in Packet G cluing the role of and impacts on indigenous people

Honorable mention for MIT A's submission on Pigasus using the indicator "this politician" which I really wish I could have used...silly tournament having to be "serious"...

I hope everyone enjoyed the American History! I know it sometimes has a reputation of being very dull and dusty, but hopefully this set changed some people's minds