I’ve not had much time to pursue Bar stuff recently – I’m behind on a lot of things – mainly because in real life I work for a famous university in Cambridge and it’s exam season, which means I’m hammering the overtime as my department is open much later, so it’s leave work, get kebab, get home, catch up for about an hour, fall asleep.
One thing my colleagues and me have been doing to pass the time is play quiz show apps – recently the highly recommended Tenable one and the less highly recommended Who Wants To Be A Millionaire one from 2014. And it strikes me that most of these quiz show apps lack one important function – some sort of quizmaster mode.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if, if you choose to play these with other people, rather than pass the phone round one person will read out the questions to everybody else. The best apps (Barnstorm ones generally) nail the feel and format of a show but they still fall short in this regard. Some of them don’t need much tweaking – a button on the Tenable app for when someone suggests an answer that isn’t one of your possible options, for example. The Millionaire app is several years old (and can’t be expected to have Ask the Host in it, which I cleverly patched in) but I can’t vary the timing of the reveal and the question usually disappears before I’m able to build up tension.
A lot of quiz show apps are understandably a bit more difficult to adapt – the whole point of Tipping Point is the machine for example, but for shows that are a bit more pure quiz surely it shouldn’t be too hard to implement modes for social play.
I was going to facetiously ask “Which university in Cambridge?”, but then that brought to mind this epic quote from ‘Beg Borrow or Steal’:
Theako: Where do you think Cambridge University is?
Contestant: Geography isn’t my strong point.
Theako: There’s a clue in the title.
Contestant: Leicester?
Beg Borrow or Steal was a low-key comedy quiz classic. It’s one of the few quizzes some of us would talk about at work the next day.
Re-viewing it recently, I was surprised how good it was in terms of plotting. Though I wasn’t a fan of the awkward staging when they had to budge up on the same couch-type thing, and it’s a painfully slow watch if you know all four answers off the bat.
But worth it for Theako’s regular eyebrow raising to camera.
I wanted to make the same joke. :p
I play all my quiz games on my iPad, so what I sometimes do to increase tension is swipe up to the control centre, which pause the action, and allows you to then control exactly when the answer is revealed. Your example being WWTBAM, I would tap the answer, then swipe up. After sufficient time, I would then swipe down again to reveal the correct answer.