[KLUG Members] GJ followup (was Meeting Notes)

[Peter Buxton]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 10:20:19AM -0500, Adam Williams was only escaped
   alone to tell thee:

> > The greater the risk the greater the reward, but the chance of
> > answering disappeared about half-way up the scale.  Movie release
> > dates in Poland? 
> 
> That one was a lemon question,  I don't even remember my rationale for
> it being in there.  Cinema was the last category completed so I must
> have been really bleary.  Otherwise I thought the Cinema category was
> pretty good,  a variety of people were able to answer questions.
> 
> The top point questions are supposed to be REALLY hard, since
> answering ONE would pretty much secure the game for the team.

Unfortunately, that's why people didn't actually touch their buttons on
those questions. They can also LOSE the game for the team. Some people
had some good guesses (The MS patent question -- Bill said MS, and I
thought so too, but I wasn't willing to risk our un-lead on a guess at
that point) but couldn't try them on the high ranges. It's all
risk/reward equations, and the anecdotal evidence seems to indicate a
steep climb.

Football, baseball and basketball would all be boring games (in my
personal opinion, this means more boring than they are now) if they had
odd rules that stopped the game and made a winner in the 2nd quarter or
5th inning. They should be allowed to play through to a predetermined
end. In Jeopardy, the hard questions shouldn't get much less action than
the easy ones.

Some people get antsy during Bruce and John's horizontal play, though
it's not a real problem for me (and it does give me something to razz
them about. ;-) The problem is that their foray through the 2048 and
1024 questions are one big empty. That is also how they keep board
control.  If those questions were easier, or cheaper to make a good
guess at, that couldn't happen.

See, it's a balance between geekiness and gameplay, unfortunately. The
powers of 2 as points is neat, however, it also preserves the "-4" issue
no matter how many rows you have:

4 - 8 = -4
4 + 8 - 16 = -4
4 + 8 + 16 - 32 = -4

ad infinitum. (That's in Double Jeopardy. In Single, the value is -2.)
On the other hand, as I recall, the 512 questions did generate a number
of correct answers, so setting a limit to the number of rows might
produce higher scores and more answer attempts. On the other hand, the
way this deck is dealt, the risk may always outweigh the reward. That's
why people noted that not answering ANY questions would result in a win.
Gameplay, like user interfaces, can not be dismissed as a bunch of
mumbo-jumbo; it is a science and an art that that, used correctly, can
be valuable.

Or this: does the first question of each catagory have to be "What does
this column's acronym spell?" (For 2 or 4 points.)

Another idea is that the hard questions are easier when grouped in
certain categories. For instance:

TLA: The answers to these questions are two- or three-letter acronyms,
or are about TLA's. What is the question to "Wrote awk with with Aho and
Kernighan." That might be a toughy.

Book Colors: "The bible of Perl." "What is the Camel Book?" "What was
revised in '88 on the completion of the ANSI standard?" "What is the
White Book (K&R's C manual)?" Or, "Prompted the 1988 revision of the
White Book." "What is the ANSI C Standard?"

Two Authors: Any number of books have two authors. For extra hardness,
you could quote something from the book, without mentioning the authors,
and expect people to wrack their brains for the two-author book that
contains that quote.

As a person who's finished two NY Times Sunday crossword puzzles (and is
looking for a book collection of them (unfinished, natch)), I can say
that these internal hints can be quite helpful and troublesome.

Finally, I would like to say that the game as it is is quite enjoyable.
I think we enjoy picking on Adam's questions, and bemaoning our lousy
scores, almost as much, if not more so, than we would enjoy a
restructured game. So all these things are suggestions only, at the
moment, and we should go over them sometime after some meeting.

I would also like to volunteer in advance to paste GJ notices up around
WMU and K College, to get some outside participation. GJ could be quite
enjoyable for them and also be good publicity.

-- 
It's like looking at your past crimes at a parole
hearing. -- John Waters rewatches _Pink_Flamingos_