“Where do you come up with this stuff?”

The design of a great trivia question

I design and then host a live trivia(ish) event four times every week. It’s a far cry from your typical corner-bar trivia. It’s called Jester and we take it to the moon.

Every seven days I create 20 questions from scratch. Starting with a completely blank document, the process usually happens over two days. If I absolutely have to I can squeeze it into one 10-hour day. It’s a somewhat fanatical amount of time to create 20 questions. But you get out what you put in. Fortunately, I love this stuff.

Before the how comes the what. You can’t create a mouth-watering burrito if you don’t know what a burrito is. What exactly is a great trivia question? A great trivia question is defined by it’s ability to command the attention of anybody and everybody. Like the Sirens of Greek lore you can’t turn away.

There are four traits to a truly good question. Ignoring the pillars is like building a house on sand.

Conversation

Make the question spark a conversation. Make it impossible for teams to refrain from talking, debating, and arguing.

To be able to hand a group of people something to talk about is a beautiful opportunity. If done right a question set will be the centerpiece of conversation for the 2 hours that a group of friends is hanging out. Here’s a perfect example of a conversation starter, and one of my all-time favorite questions:

There have been only four times in the history of the New York Times that the newspaper has used 96 point font size for the front page headline. This is the largest font size ever to be used for a New York Times headline. Two of the headlines are political, two are events. Name each of the four events.

Go ahead and send that around to your roommates or the office and see what people come up with. Imagine if you were sitting at a table in a bar, everyone has a beer, adios! That conversation is off like a runaway train.

What about Pearl Harbor? One might be the JFK Assassination. Someone will say that big headlines come from negative events not positive events. Another person might then try to parse what exactly a negative event is; was Sputnik a negative event? Can’t forget about the actual capabilities of a printing press. 96 point font is pretty big. Did they have that size back when Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic?

The conversation will go on and then the roar will happen once the answers are revealed. Which will spark another conversational round of “I told you so” and “How did we not think of that?”. Which leads right into the second pillar.

Inclusion

A bad trivia question asks something that a person either knows or doesn’t know.

There will be no thread to pull on. No logic to deduce. You either have the answer tucked away in your memory or you don’t. Most trivia should really be called memory. This is a bad question:

What is the title of Justin Bieber’s first album?

You either know it or you don’t. There’s nothing that will let you decipher your way to the answer. It excludes everyone that doesn’t have solid Justin Bieber facts tucked away.

This is the opposite of a conversation starter. It’s a conversation killer. Excluding people grinds the conversation to a halt. Not adhering to the pillar of inclusion has also broken the pillar of conversation.

Instead, a great question gives you a reasonable chance of teasing out the answer through logical thinking and team work. A person might know right away, but if they don’t their chance of getting to the correct answer isn’t nil. This a worthy question:

These are four major world cities as seen from the air. What four cities are you looking at?

The images in this question are not picked randomly. Each one has tell-tale clues embedded that can you lead you to the answer provided you know just a little about the major cities on this planet.

When that’s projected up on a series of screens the buzz in the room immediately goes up. Fingers start pointing, and the conversation amongst teams begins to whittle down the possibilities that each one could be. Every person on the team is involved.

“There’s a mountain behind Seattle. But where’s the Space Needle?”

“That looks a lot like a train station in the top left picture.”

“The Golden Gate Bridge is orange. That bridge is not orange.”

“Of course it’s in China. Look at that smog.”

What I want to avoid at all costs is completely stumping the audience. 95% of the U.S. population would get zero questions right if they were playing Jeopardy. 93% of the population wouldn’t even opt to be on the show.

Did you go to the internet for the answer to that question? The global cities question leads us right into our next pillar.

Prevention

It’s a fact of any game, people cheat. Some people live to cheat. Those people are the absolute worst.

I’ve never been able to eliminate cheating entirely. My eyes can’t be everywhere at once. That’s a fools errand. I’ve stumbled on people in the bathroom just standing there tapping away on Google. Come on, at least stand at the urinal and not in the bathroom limbo space between the stalls and the sinks. Absurd, but it absolutely happens.

“A-players want to work with other A-players” is something Steve Jobs repeated in a number of interviews. It’s the same with cheaters and non-cheaters. People who don’t cheat do not, and will not, play if cheaters go unchecked. It cheapens the game and squashes competition.

The players who don’t cheat are the life-blood of an event. Their energy radiates and attracts other people who are out for a good clean competition. Prowling for the win yet gracious enough to move-on if they don’t make it to the podium.

Cheaters are sullen and sink into their surroundings to try and hide. Cheaters are an energy suck. Some cheater out there reading this is smirking right now. Keep smirking champ. The zombie apocalypse is the great equalizer. When you can’t Google “How to fight zombies” the rest of us will lead your ass to safety. We won’t be happy about it but we’ll do it. You are the worst.

So how do you combat it? Design questions around people that cheat so that trying to look up an answer becomes cumbersome and inefficient. The goal is to marginalize those that have to rely on cheating to win. By doing that you can shrink cheating down to a level that becomes a non-factor.

Think about the above question, what would you search for? Smog city? Mountain behind city? Bridge over bay in city? To look up 1/4 of that question your eyes would have to be glued to a screen for far too long to remain covert. At best, you might snag an answer to one of them. Here’s a perfect example of a question that follows the third pillar:

Each of these rectangles represents a different athletic playing surface, field, area, court, etc. They are all scaled proportional to one another. Which sport belongs to which color?

Searching for the answers to this on the internet would be time consuming. You need at least 3 separate searches to have a shot at getting just two of the answers correct. This is a great question. It has depth, eye-catching visuals, and it checks off each of the four pillars.

**Sidenote on cheating: On top of engineered questions we’ve been able to seriously quell the ability to cheat by incorporating hands-on tasks and challenges. Challenges were a huge breakthrough and they make Jester what it is. They’re amazingly fun, interesting, and impossible to cheat. I’ll be writing about the creation and purpose of challenges in another post. In the meantime here’s a little teaser on challenges:

That’s the kind of thing that makes me wish I got to be a player instead of the host from time to time. But I digress, back to questions.

Form

The world is drowning in multiple choice.

There are so many forms a question can take yet in live trivia settings you’ll rarely hear more than two types being asked, multiple choice and open-ended. In mobile games everything is multiple choice. Everything.

By opening up the form of questions it’s possible to turn a question that would stump someone into a question that includes them. Take for example these three questions:

- Order up. Put things in the correct order.

As if you were ordering off of Amazon and you have an Amazon Prime membership, put these in order from most expensive to least expensive.

- Multiple Answer. More than one possible answer.

Who are the three people you hear in this clip?

- Price Is Right. Comes closest to the correct answer without going over.

According to data from Weddington Way and David’s bridal, on average and including all bridesmaids expenses, everything from hair to bachelorette party to shoes, how much does it cost to be a bridesmaid in today’s weddings?

Few people will be able to get all of the answers. But just about anyone can contribute some knowledge or experience and participate.

The form list goes on and on. Experimenting with new forms is critical. You have to expand the comfort zone by stepping outside of it. I try to put in a new form, even if it’s just a minor variation of a classic, once every two weeks.

That’s how you begin to write a great trivia question. Sink the four pillars deep into the ground and then lay the topic on top. If written correctly the actual topic of the question becomes much less important. Part two of this post will be out soon. I’ll get into the “how”, which includes topic, now that we’ve satisfied the “what”.

I highly recommend coming to check out Jester if you’re in the Delaware Valley. Between the 100% organic, grass-fed questions and the mouth dropping challenges it’s unlike anything you’ve seen before.

If you don’t live in the area but would love to play a beautifully engineered trivia game, Itch To Scratch is for you. Designed from the ground up using the principles outlined in this post I went out and built a much better one. Forget topics and categories, a great mobile trivia game should be built on the same four pillars outlined in this post.

It’s what a trivia game should be given the technology we have these days. Simple and uncluttered, yet deep and challenging, this is the first mobile game designed by someone who makes a living designing and presenting games for a live crowd.

It’s a challenging business. I love it, and I hope you enjoy the games as much as I enjoy getting them out there for you.

Stay tuned. There are a few more brain shaking games coming out of the forge that is Jester. In the meantime I’ll be looking to improve on Itch To Scratch and Jester. If you have comments or suggestions you can find me on Twitter and here on Medium. You can find Jester on Facebook. And you can find Itch To Scratch in the App Store.

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Part two of this post is out now. I get into the “how” now that we’ve satisfied the what.

The four New York Times Headlines

The four global cities
A - Rome (The Colosseum is at the top)
B - Tokyo (That's Mt. Fuji)
C - Hong Kong (Dense, Populated, Water, Smog)
D - San Francisco (That's the Bay Bridge you see)

The Presidential Mix brings us Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and Howard Dean.

On average a bridesmaid in the U.S. spends $1,324 on a wedding.

Originally published at philandrews.io.