As an attendant and question editor of this particular quiz I feel I can shed a bit of light on that. The problem was not that it was themed, it was that the questions did not appeal to a wide enough audience and some of them were a little too cryptic. They were perfect questions for a themed pub quiz where time is given for conferring and deliberation within a team but not so great as quick-fires to sole participants whose knowledge on films (particularly those created before they were born!) is sketchy at best. I actually have them on file, so here they are for reference:
I remember the Stuart Little one taking noticeably long for people to figure out. Great question though! Like you said, this was your first quiz. You didn't know the format and you ran with it anyway - this is something that needs to be rectified for future hosts as Ozzinator suggested and better guidelines on hosting need to be given.
Those topics are all quite specific, I agree, but there are ways around specificity by writing questions that are quite tenuously linked to the topic that might otherwise fall under another category. As an example, back in 2012 when Shockwave and I hosted an Olympics themed quiz we had questions like the chemical symbols for gold and silver, the capital of Qatar, and how many years there are in an Olympiad -- all Olympic themed in some way but not requiring in-depth knowledge of the subject. The problem of harder or more specific questions can be easily tackled by carrying the theme over a whole week rather than just twenty minutes so that it is in participants' minds and they might pick up some of the answers along the way. Holiday-themed quizzes are an example of how this works.Then with the examples you put, I lit would know the answers to 1 of those examples. Not everyone likes the same thing so it's very unfair and I think people would complain more than they do now. Then you have to think of the hosts. What if one person only likes one thing? Like just take me for example. I like what, nothing really. I like Disney things and documentaries and that's pretty much it with me so one week I do a Disney quiz (which you do as an event so really, there is no point in us doing one) then the next week I do a boring as hell documentary quiz. That's me done. Can't do anymore now because I don't know anymore themes and I don't want to host it if I don't know the topic myself because how am I supposed to write questions? Get them from Google? Boring... We do that already.
And just to add something to the discussion on additional events, there was an idea floating around last year about a mario kart/race that could begin in hxhd and change weekly that might fill up the rest of the time. A lot like the weekly race Inkwell had, except vetted more heavily to make it much fairer. Wired is very useful these days and there are lots of randomizers (banzais and random teleports) that could be put into place to ensure that first in =/= first out.







Reply With Quote















