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Trivia
Mar 27, 2008 9:12:50 GMT -5
Post by Nerissa on Mar 27, 2008 9:12:50 GMT -5
Since we've mostly gotten this planned out, here's a thread to discuss the remaining design and implementation.
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Trivia
Mar 30, 2008 18:37:55 GMT -5
Post by Nerissa on Mar 30, 2008 18:37:55 GMT -5
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Old 03-25-2008, 04:27 PM | Technicality wrote: View Post============
Nerissa wrote: View Post===============
Technicality wrote: View Post============
Nerissa wrote: View Post===============
I also think a trivia game of some sort would be cool, but someone(s) would be stuck researching and typing in all of the questions & answers, and I'm not sure if anyone would be up for such a tedious job. Maybe we could make that a forum-wide challenge? Provide a form and require anyone who uses the server to provide at least 5 (or some other reasonable number) trivia questions & answers when they register, with the option of providing more at any time. Then all we would just need someone to check them over for typos, maybe clean up the grammar / wording, make sure they're in the correct category, and authorize them to be included. =================== The elegant way to do it would be to make inputting questions fun and part of the game. A bit like the way the 20 questions things online improve themselves the more they are played. =================== Hmm.... you mean something like this?
I set up a game vs 2 other people. On my turn, I pick a category and type in a question and the correct answer, and the first of them to answer gets a point. If nobody gets it right, I get 2 points (since I'm playing against 2 people). Turns could pass in one of two ways... it could either be strictly round-robin, or the person who answered correctly could get to ask the next question (if nobody gets it right, the same person asks another). ================= I'd say it would make more sense if it was something like the asker only gets a point if a proportion of the others get the question right (eg. half of them/at least one). Then if your question is too hard you don't score points, but if its too easy you give away lots of points to the other players. Then you are rewarded for coming up with hard but not impossible questions. Other than that it sounds like a fun system though. ================ That sounds good... I was thinking of more of a "buzz in" type of thing, but there's no reason to not let everyone have a chance at every question, it's not like hearing someone else answer is going to give it away to everyone else. Maybe after a set amount of time, everyone's answer (plus the correct one) gets revealed and then points are awarded.
Your way kinda changes the strategy for a 2-player game, though, because the asker would never get points. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, it just means that play style would be different in a 2-player game than a 3+ player game.
One thing to consider, though, is spelling / typos... it really sucks to know the answer and get it wrong due to a typo, or because you can't spell for shit. On the other hand, solely multiple-guess trivia games are sorta lame. Would it be reasonable for the asker to have the ability to say "close enough" in case of a misspelled answer? Or maybe let all players vote on which answers get points? | Nerissa Gone Crazy, Back Later Nerissa's Avatar Location: Xanth
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Old 03-25-2008, 04:45 PM | Richy wrote: View Post======= Nerissa wrote: View Post========== One thing to consider, though, is spelling / typos... it really sucks to know the answer and get it wrong due to a typo, or because you can't spell for shit. On the other hand, solely multiple-guess trivia games are sorta lame. Would it be reasonable for the asker to have the ability to say "close enough" in case of a misspelled answer? Or maybe let all players vote on which answers get points? =================== That would mean that the asker receives and reviews all the answers, rather than writes the Q/A ahead of time and stores it in the DB (which is what I thought your game would be).
Another option would be to have multiple answers for a question, so the question writer would try to anticipate all possible variations of the answer. Say it's a question about JFK, the answers would include JFK, Kennedy, Kenedy, John F Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, etc. ==================== The one thing I have learned in my programming career... you will never anticipate all of the different ways a user can mangle even the shortest words. Not that your idea isn't good, and I think that we do need to have some provision for that, I just wonder if there isn't some way to make it even more spelling-tolerant. Unfortunately, that's one of those judgment things that computers aren't really good at. Of course, these days there's no excuse to be running a browser w/o a spell checker, so maybe it's less of an issue than I'm making it out to be. | Oboro lungfish comet Oboro's Avatar Location: Mamaroneck, NY
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Old 03-25-2008, 04:48 PM |
You can use a bubble sort to check for misspellings!
:rotten fruit thrown at stage:
EDIT: But really, I can envision an algorithm that could generate a "splash" of answers from the one correctly-spelled answer. Mangling the spelling of a word may make it tiresome to grok for a human, but very rarely will it transform it into a different word. So, because of this, it's linguistically safe to use a very broad scatter of transformations of the answer. You can have the routine run as part of the answer-check, so that we don't need to use database space to store all of the permutations. | Andrew_Jay Rover, Seldom Sober Andrew_Jay's Avatar Location: TO via NL
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Old 03-25-2008, 11:20 PM |
Richy wrote: View Post Nerissa wrote: View Post One thing to consider, though, is spelling / typos... it really sucks to know the answer and get it wrong due to a typo, or because you can't spell for shit. On the other hand, solely multiple-guess trivia games are sorta lame. Would it be reasonable for the asker to have the ability to say "close enough" in case of a misspelled answer? Or maybe let all players vote on which answers get points? That would mean that the asker receives and reviews all the answers, rather than writes the Q/A ahead of time and stores it in the DB (which is what I thought your game would be). Sounds like you could do both:
They would write the question and supply a correct answer . . .
Asker: "Q: What is the capital of Nepal? A: Kathmandu"
[question posed to players, question and answer both go into database]
Answerers then make their attempt to answer . . .
Player 1: "Cincinnati" Player 2: "Catmando" Player 3: "Boddah"
[all four answers, these three and the correct one, are then revealed]
Asker could then select which ones were correct (and this wouldn't affect the "correct" answer already submitted to the database). I guess the only problem is that the Asker needs to be honest/reasonably forgiving. | LaOs Office Square LaOs's Avatar Location: Saskatoon
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Old 03-25-2008, 11:31 PM |
The answers could be presented to the Questioner randomly, so the Questioner doesn't know who submitted which answers.
The game could automatically recognise "exact match" answers that match the Answer the Questioner put in when creating the Q/A and then all the others that don't "exact match" can be manually evaluated when presented to the Questioner.
So, I suppose the Questioner could choose to not accept the incorrectly spelled answer... if they were a hard ass. But at least they couldn't screw someone out of an actual right answer.
[Edit] The answers are presented anonymously so that the Questioner can't play favourites. | | | | | | |
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