After returning from the NSIT quiz (about which I have blogged here ), I came across Ankur’s post where he presented his case:
I’ve noticed one thing about ‘general’ quizzes in general: they go into excruciating details of lots of things ranging from literature, movies, music, pop culture, history, mythology and whatnot – but computers and technology is something which gets just a passing mention at best or nothing at all at worst.
He further cites an example saying,
Even at Mahaquizzer there are hardly any questions on tech. (Asking who’s the founder of Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg – in a quiz of Mahaquizzer’s level where the other questions are so good is laughable. And not many were aware of this!).
And finally comes around to make his point.
Does computers and technology deserve to be treated as a pariah in quizzes. Most definitely not! Given its ubiquity in the current century it deserves more coverage in quizzes. Given the granularity of trivia asked in other topics, technology deserves at least some mention.
But the point I am trying to address is a much larger one. And Skimpy nails it in this post of his:
Different quizmasters have different interests. However, there are a few things that a large number of quizmasters are interested in, and these form a dominant portion of most quizzes. There is some sort of a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop at play here.
And if you don’t share these “special interests”, then your average performance automatically gets capped.
Of course, this doesn’t apply in case you force yourself to develop new interests just for the sake of quizzing, but that, I think, defeats the whole purpose
Not getting what I’m hinting at? Try to go back and recollect the number of times Asterix was the answer to a Long Visual Connect.
But I digress, what I mean to say that though most quizzes claim to be a “general” quiz. There is nothing “general” about them. Somehow it’s just assumed that every quizzer just has to be well versed with “certain” topics. After having interacted with a lot of people I realised that some of my friends didn’t fare that well (some even disliked) in a quiz because they found it catered only to an audience with a niche set of interests and that bringing somethng new to the table wasn’t rewarding enough.
At BITS, I know people who have a huge knowledge base in a lot of interesting topics however I also know that they can never qualify for a quiz for their knowledge will never be tested. I suppose that’s the reason while BITS does exceedingly well in Entertainment, we get pwned in Business Quizzing. At the same time quizzing in other topics isn’t really encouraged either.
I always used to think that Business Quizzing was useless and that there were no “fundas” to be cracked there since you either knew the answer of not. But then can’t the same be said about H2G2 or The Watchmen? And as I spend more and more time reading for the Crucible finals, I realise the questions can be quite workoutable in Biz Quizzes also.
