Saturday, May 22

Trivial Pursuit

This is for people who enjoy the game Trivial Pursuit.

Please rate how good you think you are at each category, or, maybe just how much you like them.

A. People and Places (Geography) - Usually Blue
B. Entertainment - Usually Pink
C. Science and Nature - Usually Green
D. History - Usually Yellow
E. Arts and Literature - Usually Brown
F. Sports and Leisure - Usually Orange

These are the "Genus" version categories, and the colors and category titles have changed slightly over the years, and from version to version.

Your choices of ratings are:

1 - I'm horrific
2 - I'm below average
3 - I'm average
4 - I'm above average
5 - I kick ass

I'm interested to see what categories people like and/or are skilled at! Don't be humble, call it like you really see it. And this would be compared to average (game-playing) people, not geniuses or children.

Well, rate yourself already! =)

19 comments:

Metamatician said...

I'll start!

People and Places : 5
Entertainment : 3
Science and Nature : 5
History : 4
Arts and Leisure : 1
Sports and Leisure : 4

Obviously I'm not gonna choose brown for my final question.

Metamatician said...

More correctly, everybody I play is GOING to pick brown for me once I reach the center with a full pie rack.

We used to play the "wrong" way but as adults play so that the opponent chooses the final category, which is the correct rule.

Metamatician said...

Ack, I meant "Literature" not "Leisure" after Arts in my first comment.

Anyway, I think they bring in specialists from some interplanetary institute to brainstorm the questions for that category.

You'd think I'd be pretty decent at "Arts and Literature" right? But the questions seem inordinately skewed toward little known children's tales from the 1800s or other subjects I find incredibly more difficult than some of the laughers in the other categories. Am I the only one who thinks brown is hard?

I might rate myself 1 or 2... Sometimes I get questions from works actually in the 20th century, and then I tend to do fine. But then I hit a stretch of unknown authors or obscure art and I waste an hour while everyone else catches up. DAMN BROWN!!

Thanks, had to get that off my chest. Maybe I just need to read 19th century English children's lit more...

Mandula said...

People and Places : 3
Entertainment : 4
Science and Nature : 4
History : 1
Arts and Leisure : 4
Sports and Leisure : 3

I think. :)

Metamatician said...

Not a big fan of history eh? Heh.

Mandula said...

Not really. :D

Unknown said...

People and Places: 4
Entertainment: 3
Science and Nature: 2
History: 4
Art and Literature: 3
Sports and Leisure: 1

I haven't played for ages but that's more or less how I used to do. I'd always go for blue if I could, followed by yellow and then brown. Orange was avoided at all costs, unless it was for a cheese,(or do you call them pieces of pie?).

Metamatician said...

I dunno if it's official Americanese or anything but my mom and I have always thought of them as pie slices.

So we have lemon meringue, key lime, pumpkin, blueberry, chocolate creme, and...hmm, bubblegum!

Cheese wedges sound yummy too, though it's harder to attach them directly to colors.

An Gabhar Ban said...

firstly, the pink pie slice would be strawberry bavarian, not bubblegum (eww!!)

secondly
People and Places - 4
Entertainment - 1
Science and Nature - 4
History - 3
Arts and Literature - 3
Sports and Leisure - 2

Unknown said...

I'm with AGB on the pink pie slice. All the rest sound good to me though. And since you've now actually likened them to real pie fillings I find myself much more enamoured with the pie idea, yum.

Metamatician said...

Well I'm not saying we actually called it bubblegum - I just drew a blank on a pink pie filling and threw that out there. Probably something like strawberry creme or cow's udder delight was more likely.

Unknown said...

I'll pass on the latter, if you don't mind (sorry Dennis).

Metamatician said...

}:8) "More for me!"

Metamatician said...

Know what's interesting about this survey? Well the sample size is WAY too small, but so far everybody has given themselves a '1' in some category, but I'm the only one with the stones to give myself a '5' in something.

Now, maybe it's down to the fact there's only 4 total responses. Can't really prove anything statistically with that. We'd need about 20-30 responses to even begin to show that any trends were meaningful.

But it's just interesting that there are so far plenty of '4's - in fact, there are 2, 3, 2, and 2 for a total of 9, or 2.25 per response, making it the most popular answer just ahead of '3'. Yet there are suddenly NO '5's.

I think people don't want to be perceived as conceited, or feel there's always room to improve (which is true) and that 5 represents complete mastery of a subject and so even if you're really good in a subject, better to answer 4 - more socially acceptable and leaves room for improvement.

I guess I'm conceited, but that's ok. I look at it like this: There are 5 levels of skill you can choose, and the instructions are ambiguous, so I just assume each one represents 20% of the TP-playing population. Bottom 20% all the way up to the top 20%, respectively.

Now, I feel like I'm almost surely in the top 1/5 of all the TP enthusiasts out there in blue and green. Which is not to say I'm perfect in those categories; in fact, conceivably if I thought of myself as "just barely a 5" (I didn't think about it, but let's play it out), claiming that score still leaves the possibility open that nearly 1 out of 5 of every person out there who own TP and enjoys playing it is actually better at these categories than I am. Claiming a '4' leaves the possibility open that 2 of 5 or nearly 40% - almost half - of all players are better.

I know there are excellent players out there, real ringers who could kick my butt even in my best subjects. But for every ringer it seems to me you have 5 people who barely know anything (in that category). Maybe that sounds cynical but spending a lot of time on Facebook and the Interwebs and seeing the number of people who can't even spell or use proper grammar doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the population as a whole. The GAMING population is smarter, to be sure, but I wonder by how much...

(continued)

Metamatician said...

In short, if I were to chose 1000 TP players at random (and there would be far more casual players in there than tournament-level players), and then played against each of them, I just have trouble that I would be in the top 20% in my two best categories. Not the top overall, not even necessarily in the top 10% (an "A" on an American report card), but just the top one-fifth.

When looked at like that, I don't think it's conceited at all. Having played all sorts of quiz games from board games to online games to in-flight entertainment on my flights to and from New York (where you play trivia against everyone else on the plane who decides to; it's free and there are usually a decent number of people playing on a full flight), I'm pretty comfortable saying that in a random sampling of fans of the game (not all fanatics, mind you, just people who like to play), I'd finish solidly in that top fifth of players in both geography and science.

In fact, I may actually have rated myself too LOW on history and sports, but even I worry about being conceited, believe it or not.

I think some of you may have sold yourselves a bit short in the interest of modesty!

On the other hand, it's interesting that we all gave ourselves exactly one '1'. One scenario other than chance why this might prove common even among a larger sample size is that people always have a least-favorite category, their own personal bugaboo that they dread. I think psychologically we automatically set this as '1' - because we don't like it, because we don't want to want to appear conceited by listing several high scores and NOT including a '1' in there to balance things out for appearances sake, and maybe for a bunch of other reasons.

But we also don't want to indicate we're thick, so we only use '1' once, for our worst subject. Probably if there enough responses a bell curve would form with 1s and 5s scarce, and the middle scores much more common, perhaps peaking at 3 or possibly 3.5 (people who play games or do other things they enjoy tend to think they're slightly better than average, studies have shown - I remember this from university psych classes, but don't ask me for references...

The result shouldn't be a bell curve, it should more and more show a flat 'curve' with roughly 20% of each person choosing each score for each category - that would reflect the reality of the situation. But the perception of reality and social pressure (IMO only) would produce a bell curve, as people don't like to give themselves 1s out of pride but also are reluctant to give themselves 5s out of modesty. They feel safer in the middle numbers, which still provide a way to indicate that they feel they're below average, average, or above average. That seems to be enough granularity for most people.

People shy away from extremes, in other words.

Except me. In fact, I should have chosen 5, 4, 5, 5, 3, 4 the more I think about it and looking back at all the games I've played against various people!

But even I have the conceit taboo ;-)

Just some thoughts on the subject of self-grading, which is a fascinating psychological/sociologial subject. Kinda like people who see themselves as fat and ugly in the mirror more often than slim and attractive; there are cultural biases build into anything subjective, and this post was just one way of (unscientifically) showing that. It's too bad my blog doesn't have an audience of hundreds so we could do REAL experiments.

Then again, can you imagine the number of comments one would have to read through for every post? :-O

I'll stick with you guys :-)

Unknown said...

OK, that makes sense, but really, I'm absolutely shite at Sport & Leisure and stick by my 1. Maybe I could up my Art and Literature to a 4 though.

And I know you're not conceited, just rather smart. I'm still giving you a brown question a the end if we ever play though.

Metamatician said...

And well you should. I've lost many a game for want of that slice or that final question.

It's not bad form either since it's right in the rules and everyone does it (asks a final question from the player's weakest subject). Just the nature of the game.

*I* just need to get stronger at brown, though I think it may be too late for me at this point. There are an awful lot of old English children's tales and obscure things for a grown man in California to easily learn.

Maybe more adult literature will compensate. Fiction always has been something I've only barely kept up with, never excelled at outside the SF&F genre. Plus I read too much nonfiction to have the time to bother.

Hans said...

Depends on which TP game. I like the one where there's a wild card question. Forget what edition.

People and places - 3
Entertainment - 3
Science and Nature - 5 (ok, it's a 4)
History - horrid, 1 or 2
Arts and Lit - 3
Sports and Leisure - 1-2

Pink is (fresh) strawberry pie.

Not bad for a Ragdoll?

Metamatician said...

Yeah, some of the editions have WC - Wildcard but I always think "water closet" in my mind, hehe. I'm not exactly sure which version use which colors and categories. The game's been through several changes of hand due to legal cases and such, plus there are a ton of "themed" versions as everyone knows, most of which aren't very fun. (Although if they ever make a Lord of the Rings editions based on the books, I'll sell a kidney to get it, even if no one would play with me).

Hans, that's excellent for a ragdoll but if you're standing in got your mom here I have to say you're full of beans!

Mom, I'd rate you like this:

People and places - 3
Entertainment - 4
Science and Nature - 5
History - 3
Arts and Lit - 4
Sports and Leisure - 2

You've been overruled!

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