Anatomy of a Trivia Question

I've been sweating a lot lately. In part because I'm slightly out of shape and perhaps have a hormone imbalance. But mostly because this thing we call Ringorang is finally coming alive. All the designing and redesigning and nitpicking over navigation tabs and color gradients have begun to come to fruition. Suddenly the engine works... and we didn't have trivia questions.

Our first mini-game, the Olympic-themed Ringolympics, had one question an hour, 24 hours per day. We wrote 192 questions for the days we actually had real players.

Next was the Great Gridiron Challenge, which we launched in conjunction with the beginning of the NFL season. 12 days, 288 questions.

Some of them were fantastic nuggets of information. Others, well... I'll be honest, I loaded up NFL.com, closed my eyes, and pointed to random facts.

My boss and Vergence Entertainment CEO Robert J. Feeney (it's company mandate that he's always referred to by his full name) once introduced me as someone with a screenwriting background who was now doing "extremely short-form content" for Ringorang. And well, that's true. The best type of trivia question tells a story.

Obviously, we're not talking about summer tentpole FX extravaganza-type storytelling. But there's a definite line between that which is trivia and that which is cold, hard, boring fact.

For example, did you know the theme to Monday Night Football is named "Heavy Action?" And that it was composed for a British sports competition involving former Olympic decathletes? It's an indelible song ingrained into the consciousness of every red-blooded American who associates Hail Mary's with pads and pigskin, not church. That little "bah-bah-bah-BAAAAA!" says so much with so little to fans of the gridiron... and it was originally composed for some pasty Englishmen running around a track.

Not to pat myself on the back, but I thought it was a great bit of trivia. So much so that I squeezed two questions out of it. Very early on in the development of Ringorang, we leaned mightily on Paul Paquet, who runs the Trivia Hall of Fame and writes trivia questions. He wrote a very illuminating piece about what makes a good trivia question, and I've appropriated part of it as my litmus test:

For us, the perfect trivia question gets one of these responses:

• I know this!
• I used to know this, but let’s see if I can remember it now.
• I don’t know this, but I think I can figure it out.
• I didn’t know that, but that sure is interesting.
• I didn’t know that, but you know … I really should have known it.

I bolded the fourth point because, personally, I'm happy getting a question wrong if I learned something cool. Like, say, the fact that the Monday Night Fooball music was composed by someone who probably has uttered the phrase "God save the Queen" more than once.

Of course, one of the killer things about Ringorang will be our ability to send out timely, topical questions. As in, five minutes ago topical. But that part of the house is still under construction.

In the meantime, I hope everyone enjoys random facts. Or would you rather get "What color is the sky?" so you can rack up the points and win?