Inspiration Turn 10 results and final wrapup!

[undyingking]

The final turn! The answer was Niggardly, and my question was "2,For using what word did David Howard lose his job as head of the Washington DC Office of Public Advocate?" Again I thought this was pretty obscure, but again I was wrong as there were two essentially similar questions, which were also counted as correct. Ah well, see below for thoughts about this sort of thing.

Correct guessers were:
brixtonbrood
jiggery_pokery
liriselei
thecesspit

The clear favourite was mooism's "6,What word is too stingy to mean black?" -- very neat, seemed to be the verdict.

Voted-for points went 1 to brixtonbrood and 3 each for bateleur (looks like your suggestion wasn't so bad after all!) and jiggery_pokery.

This leaves the final score table like this:

player	favourite	correct	voted-for	total	turns
mooism	3	4	11	18	9
bateleur	2	4	9	15	8
fractalgeek	0	2	10	12	7
jiggery_pokery	0	5	7	12	10
bibliogirl	0	4	7	11	7
brixtonbrood	0	7	3	10	7
dr_bob	0	3	7	10	8
liriselei	2	7	0	9	10
queenortart	0	2	6	8	8
cuthbertcross	0	3	4	7	7
nickeyb	0	1	3	4	4
wimble	1	1	2	4	5
thecesspit	0	3	0	3	5
al_fruitbat	0	1	0	1	1
ar_gemlad	0	1	0	1	1
jackfirecat	0	1	0	1	1
rotwang	0	1	0	1	1
cardinalsin	0	1	0	1	2
karohemd	0	0	0	0	1
verlaine	0	0	0	0	1

So there you have it -- a good push frombateleur at the end, but not enough to deny mooism's well-earned triumph. Hoorah!

(Interesting to note that liriselei and to a lesser extent brixtonbrood did very well on favourites and correctness, but were unable to get sufficient people to vote for their suggestions.)

Thanks all for taking part ( / putting up with it) -- I had fun, hope you did too!

I had some thoughts about what worked and what didn't. My principle when setting the answers and thus my own questions was for them to be independently verifiable (ie. no "What have I got in my pockets?"), and ideally with more than one non-trivial alternative (to allow for different right-looking alternatives) and a load of trivial ones (to allow for amusement value and for people who couldn't find a right-looking one). A few of them fell short of this ideal unfortunately, mostly because I was usually doing it in a bit of a rush. Ah well.

In one approach, I would have said from the beginning that no-one should use any form of reference either tocome up with questions or to check the accuracy of other people's suggestions. That would have made it more a contest in plausibilty a la Call My Bluff. However I thought that didn't really make sense for an online game -- looking things up could be a fun part of it (particularly as any bar would be unenforceable!) However if you know that people are going to be Googling stuff, it makes it a lot more difficult to come up with good answers -- because they need to be ones that are findable but which don't leap out.

Well, if anyone else wants to have a go at running the game some time in the future, I'm sure you'll be able to improve on this effort ;-) but for now that'll do I think!

Comments

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Huzzah! Last place with a bullet!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Very happy with second place there - mooism plays a tight game !

I tend to take the view that online references are fine, but that the question setter probably needs to check at least Google and Wikipedia to rule out any question with a single dominant answer.

Also, stuff like that Bible round needs to be avoided since the correct answer sticks out like a sore thumb !

Overall, though, a very successful game already - thanks for running it.

stuff like that Bible round needs to be avoided

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I think I misjudged the gap in neatness between my one and the ones people came up with. Although still only about half the guesses got it right, which isn't too bad I guess. Hmm, a moment for a bit of analysis:

Turn Correct questions Correct guesses
1 6/18 8/13 Gibbon
2 2/15 4/12 400
3 3/13 3/9 Tom Cruise
4 4/10 8/9 Silvester
5 1/12 1/11 Kent
6 1/10 5/11 The Fair
7 1/12 6/11 39, 27
8 3/7 7/10 A trapeze artist hanging by her teeth
9 3/11 5/10 Ernie Wise
10 3/7 4/7 Niggardly

so eg. on turn 1, 6 of the 18 questions set were "correct" (ie. mine or equivalent to it), and 8 of the 13 guesses chose one of those 6. Dunno what the optimum (from a "fun" pov) proportions to aim for would be, any theories?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Well ideally I'd be looking for 1/X for correct questions, but I'm not sure that's realistic. Proportion of correct answers is unimportant.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Proportion of correct answers is my measure of your "the correct answer sticks out like a sore thumb" factor. You seemed to be implying that if it's easy to spot the correct answer, that's less fun and so should be avoided?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Indeed, it's just that if I say "1/3" or whatever then I'm assuming things about how skilled the players are.

how skilled the players are

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, the question-setter has to gauge that as the game goes on and pitch obviousness accordingly. My own feeling is that if say 1/10 questions is correct, you'd want the correct one to be sufficiently neat that you expect around 2-4/10 guessers to spot it, but no more obvious than that.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

That does sound about right.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I think maybe you have to be a bit careful aiming for 1/X correct questions though -- it would be easy to pick something so obscure you could pretty much guarantee 1/X, but if it's apparent to the setters that they have no chance of "reading your mind", it might make that aspect less fun.

(Hmm, I'm not sure if I believe that now I've written it out, but I'll let it stand as a think-point anyway.)

[queenortart.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed it muchly despite missed deadlines twice cos I am a prat!

Ta for running it

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Very gld you enjoyed it, thanks for playing!

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

It struck me about half-way through that it would be possible to turn this into a version of QI with a single rule change: submitting the "right" answer (well, here, question) loses you a point (and sets off bells, klaxons and so forth). The aim would be to submit answers/questions that were as creative as possible, to earn points, without submitting the one you had in mind.

Thank you for running the game!

[liriselei.livejournal.com]

i like that suggestion a lot !
though i certainly enjoyed the game as is, and am very pleased with my score considering that i wasn't really trying to get people to vote for my question at any point (since i much preferred trying to come up with something creative and hopefully entertaining to trying to emulate undyingking's voice).

something creative and hopefully entertaining

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

You certainly managed that! ;-)

Re: something creative and hopefully entertaining

[liriselei.livejournal.com]

<bows>
whythankeryew

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting idea! Definitely worth trying out.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

Wheee!