What Makes Good Trivia

This post contains some example questions which you can attempt here before I discuss the answers later on.

As a crossword enjoyer, washed-up high school quizbowl player, and member of LearnedLeague (the snobby (in a self aware way, I tell myself), invite-only, online trivia club) since 2018, I figured that once I got to drinking age, pub trivia would play a big role in my social life. Though I didn’t factor in a global pandemic I’m pleased to report that I’m back on track and making a dent in the considerable Seattle scene. And while I haven’t racked up the wins I’d have hoped to at this point, I have accumulated some opinions about what makes trivia fun.

To be clear, I will be using that pretentious trivia background as a touchstone which is an unfair standard for pub trivia. There are aspects of those formats you couldn’t (or wouldn’t want to) recreate in a more alcoholic milieu. For instance, my first pub trivia experience (in format, not venue) was a Knights of Columbus fundraiser at our local church with my parents’ friends. I remember being disappointed at how much slower the pace was than quizbowl (and that our prize was a case of wine).

I’m also aware that it’s not the critic who counts. It’s much harder to write good trivia than recognize it, as I’ve confirmed by trying to write example questions for this post. Kudos to anyone doing it at any level especially week after week.

Based on attendance at every trivia night I’ve been to, it’s a significant source of revenue for Seattle bars. I would never want to hurt anyone’s business by trashing them in my popular and influential blog, so the only bad example I’ll use is from Octopus Bar which has a new trivia organizer since the first time I went there.

There are a few necessities for a legitimate trivia question. It needs to be factual. As in Truth or Dare, the answer should be correct. It should also be unambiguous. That is, you can’t just ask for an airport code in Madagascar with a death-related code because weirdly it’s home to both DIE and DOA. (This actually did come up once, and the team that guessed the unintended answer did get credit). These are all table stakes. If the organizer isn’t asking fact-based questions, you may have wandered into an open mic by mistake.

The key to well-written trivia is that it encourages educated guessing. It’s no fun when you don’t know anything (like me during a music round). When you’re losing, you might wish you knew everything, but that’s no fun either. The first time at Octopus Bar, there was a Historical Figures round where the questions sounded like they’d been pulled from the first lines of Wikipedia articles. I just happened to know all of them (aside from Katherine Hepburn), and it was boring.

It was boring because there was nothing to discuss with my team. We couldn’t confer to get closer to the answer. We couldn’t even really argue because we all mostly agreed. Sure there’s nothing like that smug feeling you get when you’re the only one who knows an answer and you get to snatch the answer sheet and feel like you’re finally pulling your weight.

If multiple people are in the ballpark, then you can discuss, confer, and argue, and maybe if you’re lucky, the small parts that each person knows can sum up to the correct answer. Maybe some people can just have a normal conversation, but they can have the bars the other 6 nights of the week.

When you’re guessing, you’re playing with the house’s money. Guessing wrong is no problem, but guessing right feels so much better than just knowing.

I don’t want to lose that “educated” part either. With enough optimism, it’s possible to guess any question, but it’s not as rewarding if you don’t do a little work to get close to the answer. If you’re able to make an educated guess, you’re more likely to remember what the actual answer was. Or it will at least feel relevant to something else you know. The thing about most people who know lots of trivia is that they actually enjoy learning it and not just leveraging it to show off, and it’s easier to learn and retain when it’s connected to something you already know, however small.

The most straightforward way to make your questions guessable is to write a range of difficulties. Even with a big crowd, there will likely be questions at the right level for each team. This has the added benefit of spreading out the final scores and giving each team a taste of smugness and humility.

It’s also probably the hardest part of writing good trivia because it demands real knowledge from the writer, not just of trivia, but of which knowledge is more or less obscure. Without this, you get rounds like the Anime-themed Players’ Choice round at Octopus Bar by the organizer who copped to not really knowing anything about Anime, which became apparent from the questions, half of which were about Fullmetal Alchemist. One was, “What is the fish-girl’s name in Ponyo?” which still makes me mad. The final question was, “Describe how to Naruto run.” (Again, there’s a new organizer there now).

Players’ Choice rounds are especially difficult to write because the category can be so niche, but Head in the Clouds (who run many nights including at Reuben’s in Ballard which I’ve been to) very consistently includes at least one question that every team has a chance at and one that even the team that chose the category would struggle with.

A good way to modulate question difficulty is to include multiple bits of information (rather than one fun fact). This way there are multiple things that might lead you to the answer. Even if you don’t know any individual clue, you can get it through the gestalt. An added benefit is that even if you know the answer from one clue, it’s possible to learn something from another part of the question.

Take a a random day of LearnedLeague questions from the most recent season as an example.

The first question only offers one piece of information. Scott Kelly endured some place for a year. There aren’t even that many places you’d guess and the Antarctic expedition named Endurance happened a long time before 2017.

Question 2 gives lots of movies, but I could only think of the leads in The Theory of Everything (and a couple of Monty Python), and Jones seemed more likely than Redmayne. There are a lot of different ways you could know the answer, but you still have to know about movies.

I thought I had an ok guess for Question 3 because I know the few island nations in that area, but it turned out to be Zanzibar which I guess I knew wasn’t invented by Dr Suess, but I didn’t exactly know where it was or that there was an island there. Good learning moment.

I didn’t know the exact origin of Manifest Destiny, but it was gettable from the question. Another learning moment except where I got the question right. Even better!

Question 5 seems hard if you don’t know what an apiary is. Maybe some people are more familiar with the term Hymenoptera. Still you can guess some animal. Maybe the fact that there are thousands of species would lead you toward an insect.

Question 6 is really the only one that’s impossible to guess if you don’t know what it is. And I was quite upset that I put Tortured Poets Club. But still, given that this had just happened, you’d expect it to be an easy question. These are not hard-and-fast rules, and you can see a good fraction of people did get it.

I would consider these all to be well-written, and that’s just an average day of LearnedLeague.

There are also ways to change the format to make questions more guessable. In quizbowl, the questions are paragraph-length and read-aloud. They’re written to start with the most obscure details and end with basically a giveaway. You can buzz in and guess whenever you think you know it, so you’re sort of always playing at the margin of your expertise (or realistically the margin of the quickest player). Crossword clues become intelligible as soon as you have enough intersecting answers filled in.

Pub trivia can achieve something similar with themes. Again, Head in the Clouds is particularly good at this. They have a “hidden connection” round where, although the questions are unrelated, the answers are all part of some other category. (Example: If the answers were American Pie, String Theory, The GOAT, and Navy Blue, but you couldn’t remember who played Captain Marvel, you could recognize that the connection is Types of Cheese and that would help you get to Brie Larson).

I also generally dislike music rounds because I apparently don’t know any music, but they always have a theme like songs with numbers or directions or keyboard keys in the titles. Also, awarding points for artist and title separately helps because it’s easier to guess an artist based on their sound than a particular song.

Still it’s important to have an educated element to the guessing. True or False questions are the most guessable. Even if you know nothing, you have a 50/50 shot. That’s part of the reason they’re not fun. It’s not that fun to guess them right. But they also seem hard to write. Usually, the answer feels obviously True, but maybe through some technicality, it’s actually False, and then you’ll do worse than someone who had no idea and flipped a coin.

For some people, there’s more to a trivia night than the quality of questions. Fair enough. I have opinions about that too. I don’t prefer trivia where you enter the answers on your phone. Sure, it’s more convenient for scoring and affords you some new formats (like submitting answers earlier for more points). You’re going to be hunched over something whether it’s a phone or paper, but trivia is one time you’re allowed to scowl at anyone on their phone, and you can’t do that if that’s where you’re supposed to be entering answers.

I’m also afraid of sounding too much like an advertisement for Head in the Clouds and LearnedLeague. In Seattle, I also enjoy trivia at Kangaroo and Kiwi and Whit’s End. Kangaroo and Kiwi has a no-nonsense, Aussie host who ends with five signature Family Feud style questions from people he surveys at such places as SeaTac and Mariners games (supposedly).

Whit’s End trivia is the Nick and Liz Quiz, a couple of teachers who write their own trivia and a theme song. The questions skew towards the 90s, but they are really lovely.