Advice appreciated - editing UK trash tournament

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maddeelay
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Advice appreciated - editing UK trash tournament

Post by maddeelay »

Hi all,
I'm editing Trashbowl 2022, a UK-based and focused trash tournament happening at some point later this year. Since trash tournaments don't seem to be nearly as much of A Thing over here as in the US, I was wondering if I could solicit some advice from any more experienced trash editors or writers? Obviously the content will be quite (but not entirely) different to a North American trash tournament, but if anyone could share any common pitfalls / tips and tricks I'd appreciate it a lot.
Maddie
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Madeleine Alice Lay
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Re: Advice appreciated - editing UK trash tournament

Post by Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!! »

Hey Maddie - glad to hear that this project is coming together! Here's some of the basic thoughts I have towards editing pop culture:

1. Have a variety of topics. Tournaments have distributions and subdistributions and so should pop culture events! For instance, ACRONYM this year sets aside 4/4 for movies, and then breaks that 4/4 down into more categories based on time. You want to be very diligent in making sure you cover a good breadth of stuff within subdistribution as well. For instance, if a tournament has 4/4 movies, not every movie question should be from a certain genre, time period, country, style, etc. It's good to have variation so you avoid overlap while at the same time appealing to the wide variety of interests people have.

2. Avoid biography/heavy name bowl without regard to importance or recognition. This is one mistake I made a lot when I started writing. For questions on actors, musicians, authors, etc, it's a lot more engaging and fun to clue recognizable things that aren't just "This person starred in X movie" or "Their song Y appears on album Z" (though those clues are important and should be incorporated into the clues. For instance, consider the following two equal length sentences, with the later appearing in ACF Regionals a few days ago:

"This artist appears on MUNA's song "Silk Chiffon" and also made the song "Dylan Thomas," though her other songs include "Motion Sickness" from the album Strangers in the Alps."

"This guest artist on MUNA’s track “Silk Chiffon,” intones “I'm strapped into a corset / Climbed into your corvette” on a duet with Conor Oberst inspired by the death of Dylan Thomas."

You have roughly the same number of clues there, but I believe the later sentence is more engaging across different areas of knowledge (collaborations, lyrics, collaborators, titles, etc) than the previous one, which almost all just titles.

3. Try and be as specific and unique as possible with clues. This just goes in general with question writing, but instead of telling the listeners that someone is famous, you should show them by describing their important works. A lot of the time, early trash writers will fixate on clues like "This person won an Oscar in [insert year]" which are hard to pin down and less interesting clues than pointing at specific works. For instance, a tossup on Mahershala Ali would get more buzzes from clues describing roles he's performed, not just "he won an Oscar in this year."

To be clear, I'm not "don't clue awards," but rather "clue awards in a unique way." If someone was a pioneer for winning the first award with regards to something, that may be something to investigate "why?" Did something unique happen at the awards presentation?

ACRONYM does a good job with respect to sports on this. Instead of all clues of just "this person got a lot of home runs" or something, they clue events or coincidences that people distinctly remember and can tie down better than just memorizing records.

4. Know your audience and control difficulty as so. If a writer is excited about a topic, they may do a really deep dive that is easy to them, but hard for people playing the set. This comes true a lot in pop culture: I'd be delighted to write a question about my favorite World of Warcraft dungeon of Zul'Farrak, but it may not play well if it's being read to a general audience and not other WoW players. Likewise, be sure that your questions across the set vary from stuff anyone can buzz on to perhaps a question or two that really reward specialists.

I hope this was a good intro - I'd be happy to answer any more questions either here or by message. Good luck!
Ganon Evans
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Re: Advice appreciated - editing UK trash tournament

Post by ErikC »

Ganon's made some great points in question writing so I'll make some other points based on my own experience with playing, writing, and editing trash.

Every trash tournament has a certain feel to it left by its biggest contributors and editors. Making sure your writing and editing team isn't just white straight dudes of the same age goes a long way, as does having different people involved in each category. Trash doesn't have the same sort of large volume of yearly tournaments (or the same sort of reliable canon) so it's hard to find an exact model, but Acronym does a pretty good job of covering bases (or wickets?). I'll also shamelessly plug my own tournament No Banter Please for this balance, though that set isn't quite up to the standards I set now.

I don't know what the audience is for this, but the British scene seems to have a fair bit of older players. While you should definitely have some old stuff, there's a common issue I've seen with tournaments making these questions harder then they need to be; don't ask for a secondary character on the old TV show like you might do for the Office or Parks & Community.

How hard to make the tournament is another thing to keep in mind. The only tournaments regularly produced are Acronym, the difficult Super Acronym, and the quite challenging CO Trash, three sets with a huge space between them difficulty wise that I'd suggest as a target for a set intended for university or older players.

Hope this is the feedback you had in mind - I could expand on any of these points if that would help. Also out of self-interest please keep us posted when the set is written, the demand is there for a Britrash set (in Canada at least).
Erik Christensen
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Re: Advice appreciated - editing UK trash tournament

Post by Cheynem »

Is the Parks and Community the show where Leslie Knope teaches at a local college but runs afoul of Dean Pelton?

In seriousness: One question I have is what difficulty and audience this tournament is intended for. The suggestions are very good so far.
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Re: Advice appreciated - editing UK trash tournament

Post by maddeelay »

Hi everyone,
Lovely to have so much feedback so soon! To answer some common questions:

The distribution is currently set at
3/3 Music (split into Pre-1990, 1990-2005, and 2005-Present)
4/4 Film (split into Pre-1990, 1990-2010, 2010-Present, and Science Fiction & Fantasy)
2/2 Television (split into British and Overseas)
2/2 Video Games
2/2 Sport (split into Individual and Team)
2/2 Books
1/1 Internet Culture
1/1 Current Affairs
2/2 the ever-nebulous Other
and 1/1 Academic.

The tournament will ostensibly be Open-level, although our target audience is mostly current or recent university students - calibrating difficulty is one of the things that we're finding the hardest, since there isn't a defined canon for trash like there is for academic qb. Obviously something of myself will creep into the packet - trash will be, by its nature, always a little idiosyncratic - but since we have (currently) six writers with a relatively wide age and background spread, hopefully there's, as the cliche goes, a little something for everyone.

Thank you all very much for your helpful advice - as a relatively inexperienced writer (and an entirely inexperienced headitor) - hearing from quiz doyennes is very nice. I'll post on the forum when the set is done, just in case for some unknown reason any North American teams have any interest in playing a tournament of brit-trash. (The tournament will almost certainly take place on Zoom, so taking part from overseas is entirely possible).
Maddie
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Re: Advice appreciated - editing UK trash tournament

Post by JA01 »

I feel like a lot of trash writers try to be cutesy with their trash questions. Examples being references to the quiz bowl community or meta references to the writers. I find these questions a bit annoying, especially when you feel [cheated] out of points because the writers were trying to make a funny.

Edited for offensive language --Mgmt.
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Re: Advice appreciated - editing UK trash tournament

Post by Gene Harrogate »

JA01 wrote: Tue Feb 01, 2022 6:30 pm I feel like a lot of trash writers try to be cutesy with their trash questions. Examples being references to the quiz bowl community or meta references to the writers. I find these questions a bit annoying, especially when you feel [cheated] out of points because the writers were trying to make a funny.
Are these that prominent any more? Also, definitely a poor choice of words.
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Re: Advice appreciated - editing UK trash tournament

Post by JA01 »

Gene Harrogate wrote: Tue Feb 01, 2022 7:42 pm
JA01 wrote: Tue Feb 01, 2022 6:30 pm I feel like a lot of trash writers try to be cutesy with their trash questions. Examples being references to the quiz bowl community or meta references to the writers. I find these questions a bit annoying, especially when you feel [cheated] out of points because the writers were trying to make a funny.
Are these that prominent any more? Also, definitely a poor choice of words.
I sincerely apologize for the offensive phrase. I honestly was not aware of its racist background, but I am dedicated to correcting my behavior
Jade Anderson
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Re: Advice appreciated - editing UK trash tournament

Post by maddeelay »

JA01 wrote: Tue Feb 01, 2022 6:30 pm Examples being references to the quiz bowl community or meta references to the writers. I find these questions a bit annoying
Rest assured that I find this kind of question pretty unbearably cringe - (not least because they don't age well at all) - and don't intend to include any.
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Re: Advice appreciated - editing UK trash tournament

Post by liondog »

Hi Maddie

I co-edited (with Theo Howe) what I think was the most recent "trash" tournament in the UK, LoCo 2018 - https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/5002/
This was an open packet-submission tournament, although me and Theo wrote a number of sets between us. Our intended audience was very broad in age (both current university teams and teams from the UK quiz circuit/quiz leagues), but we got positive feedback for the breadth of topics covered (although I'm sure it wasn't to everyone's tastes!)

It's great to see you're organising another one - I have a few comments from what you've written, based on my experience:
- I know the quizbowl community call these types of tournament "trash", but that is pretty derogatory and I know annoys a lot of people (mainly non-university quizzers, but even so). The Pop Culture Challenge organised by the Online Quiz League feels a more inclusive name - https://www.facebook.com/groups/802212317289685 - so maybe something along these lines.
- 2/2 Sport is very light. It's a broad topic (especially if you include games) and will be popular with a lot of people - we had 3/3 which worked fine.
- 2/2 TV also feels very low given the huge amount of content now available through Netflix, Prime, etc. Again, we had 3/3.
- The Music split looks good but a genre-specific category for Film feels too narrow. There's plenty of scope to write a lot of Sci-fi/Fantasy Film questions without enforcing it.
- 2/2 Books feels too high - all distributions I've seen would have max 1/1 here.
- 1/1 Internet culture feels very narrow. This could be expanded to include celebrities or broader lifestyle, the latter of which is lacking from the distribution entirely (things like Food and Drink for example).
- While it can be effective to weave academic clues into the questions, I don't think splitting it out into a separate category fits with this type of tournament.

Hope at least some of that is useful and good luck with the tournament!
Bob De Caux
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