List of wits and wagers questions full#

If there’s a television quiz show with which I can make some measure of peace it’s perhaps ITV’s Pointless. What if though a game approached this in a slightly different way? Trivia games, for all their pomp, glamour and circumstances, are funerals for knowledge.

They act as if the facts were what made a topic actually interesting, rather than the context in which those facts are situated. Even ‘high end’ trivia shows like Mastermind or University Challenge expect nothing more than the dull recitation of dead facts linked to a specialist subject area. To become good at trivia games means to become good at trivia – it’s an act of study with none of the real lasting benefits that learning should bring. You want to dial up the odds of the question on the card matching an answer in your head.

List of wits and wagers questions full#

You can just fill your head full of random nonsense in the hope that you increase the chances of juxtaposition. You can’t really get better at a trivia game. The fundamental flaw in a trivia game is that if you don’t know the answer to whatever tedious irrelevance is slung your way, there’s nowhere to go. Sometimes genuine knowledge is a terrible barrier to trivia effectiveness.Īs a result, trivia games tend to be as interesting as their source material permits them to be – which is to say, ‘not very’. ‘I don’t know – from when are you drawing your figures? The record changed a couple of weeks ago – are you confident in the time-frame of the answer?’ ‘What is the world record for attaching clothes pegs to a face?’ It’s clear no genuine knowledge is being requested when the questioner is asked to clarify the meaning of the inquiry. It becomes obvious that the only relationship the asker has to the question is as a medium through which it passes. Do those asking want the right answer, or the answer that someone that doesn’t know much about the topic might think is the right answer? When they ask how many megabytes would fit into a ten-gigabyte hard-drive do they mean megabytes as defined by hard-drive manufacturers (1,000,000 bytes) or how they’re defined by much of the rest of the computing world (1,048,576 byes)? The entire process can be shown to be farcical merely through the act of requesting important context. Experts often know more than the question setter and as a consequence each question becomes a riddle. In the case of those with genuine deep understanding of a topic, trivia can occasionally be frustrating. By their very nature trivia questions need to be boring, because the deeper inquiries into meaning don’t fit well into a question card. When do they get asked for the data? 95% of the time it’s as part of a trivia question. People feed their brains with ephemera for the rare circumstance that someone asks them a question for which they are uniquely prepared. Games that reward players for their broad command of truly useless nuggets of pointless facts. You can imagine then how I feel about games like Trivial Pursuits where the name alone is a damning indictment of the activity. I’m saying that up front because otherwise the first half of this entire thing is just a repeat of the story ‘ old man yells at cloud‘. Today’s review is about Wits and Wagers – Family Edition. Humanity is obsolete and soon to be destroyed by the AI that has been birthed our own unconscionable arrogance. Information becomes knowledge only through praxis – without application and context you have little more than an assemblage of data. We know many more things, but we can situate very few of them within genuine meaning. I think our cultural fetish of trivia is genuinely wicked because it makes us all seem smarter while encouraging us to become dumber. Mostly it’s tongue in check but not so with trivia. I’m an old curmudgeon and as such I spend a lot of my time railing against the evils of modern society. It’s a focus on the inconsequential and memetic rather than on anything as gauche or sordid as genuine understanding. The popularity of trivia games and game shows seems like a constant rejection of the true importance of knowledge. I have a kind of seething resentment for the enduring affection people have for of trivia in popular culture.