First of all, who here doesn’t like trivia? Go on, hands up. Did you put your hand up? If you did, you’d better go sit in the tub because your pants are on fire, you liar. You frickin’ frackin’ love it. Everybody does.
Sure sure, alright, maybe you don’t love organised trivia. Maybe you don’t actively seek it out. Perhaps you suck at general knowledge, but you’ve got a complete working map of the Motorways of Britain in your head. Maybe you leave the room when a quiz show comes on, but I’ll bet you still pipe up from the kitchen over the sound of clinking dishes: “It’s Harry S. Truman, you imbeciles!” Maybe you graduated high school with an F+ average, but you can rattle off everyone Mr Grey has ever done the nasty with in chronological order.
(For the record, I’m not well versed in motorways, baseball, or Fifty Shades. My specialty? The complete works of Dr Seuss. Go on, ask me what Mrs McCave wishes she’d named her 23 sons, or what eggs Peter T. Hooper thinks would taste simply super with those of a Ruffle-Necked Salamagoox. Bam! I’m in there like that. Shame that one never comes up on Jeopardy.)
Whether you think you like trivia or not, you love trivia. You may not be a fan of conventional Q&A multiple choice point scoring trivia, but nothing beats the warm, fuzzy feeling of one-upping your friends, whether on the subject of batting averages, identifying SUVs from across the parking lot, movies directed by John Hughes, or properties or post-soliton expansion following laser propagation through an underdense plasma – Zing! Pwned!
I recently had the opportunity to knock around some ideas with a UK pioneer games company about trivia… specifically, how to make a unique trivia app. ‘Unique’, as far as I’m concerned, is the key to trivia. Good questions are not enough to make a trivia game stand out; in fact, if all your trivia game has to offer is good questions, you’ve merely earned the rank of “not disappointing” (and so many trivia apps still fall well short of this low bar). Nice design is a bonus, and anything over and above that is a rarity.
So, in preparation for a boisterous afternoon of trivia brainstorming, I took the opportunity to dig around on the App Store for game shows and quizzes and other brain-bending distractions. As always, I found plenty of stonkers (as you do when digging through the free bin), but I did manage to unearth a few unique gems.
Not to double dip, but I figure why not pass them on to you too? Here’s my short stack of trivia apps that are just that little bit different. And for the bonus question… which one is my favourite? Is it:
A) That Ain’t It
B) SongPop
C) Logos Quiz
D) Sporcle
Let’s find out.
