Ryan Veeder's Trivia Night: A Sort-of Review

[healyg]

Ryan Veeder, an IF author whom you may know as the guy behind Taco Fiction, The Statue Got Me High, and Cragne Manor, among others, helps host a trivia night for a local charity each year, and last Sunday, he invited some friends of his, including me, to test it. It was a fun night, with plenty of the Veeder-esque humor that is his trademark among the IF community, and a good time was had by all, etc., etc. HOWEVER, the thing that interested most that evening was one particular trivia segment, in which both teams had to answer a set of questions based on limited information. More details under the cut!

Okay, so how it worked was, Ryan gave each team two different documents about a gaming club, then two different sets of questions, some of which were only solvable using the other team's documents. The goal, then, was to try to trade answers with the other team without giving them too much in return. Or, well, that was how it was supposed to go down. Apparently this segment was more balanced towards four teams; our team's documents gave us the answers to at two questions, and more could be inferred from that. We managed to win the round through tricking the other team into giving up the answer for one question we needed*, then stonewalling them for the rest.

Now, you might think this would be a bit of a disappointment, what with things not working out as intended and all, but as it turns out, I live for shit like this. Working out relationships and events from incomplete information is a lot of fun for me. (For instance, I managed to guess the answer to one question thanks to the fact that a member was listed as "in bad standing" in one of the documents.) It make me wonder if there's any possible way to expand this kind of thing into a game of its own. I mean, I think part of the success of this segment is that it was a short segment in something bigger; if it were any longer, the documents' dryness might have overpowered the sense of discovery.

But I do think it's possible, maybe, to spin this into its own thing. Earlier last year I was researching an old fandom wank with an eye towards writing a Charlotte Lennox/MsScribe style expose on it, and this scratched some of the same itches. I think if you put in some personal documents, maybe a diary or two, you could make a pretty cool game about researching the dissolution of a club.

*Well, "accidentally guilted the other team's leader into giving us a real bylaw" would be a more accurate description, based on what Ryan said to me later.