Tom Scott’s Game Garage Series 2

By | August 22, 2019

This has taken me by surprise, although I knew they were coming out around this sort of time. Anyway, Tom and David are back to try out three new formats, the first one is Personal Best.

I wasn’t at the testing this time round so these are basically a mystery to me (although I’ve heard rough ideas, one of which is quite exciting because it’s an idea that’s been going round my head for a while. Try and guess which one it is!). New eps on Thursdays.

Series one is discussed here.

26 thoughts on “Tom Scott’s Game Garage Series 2

  1. Brandon

    This is interesting because you’ll all trying to do well so you get to play for the money, but you could use the tactic of not doing as well as you know could to make it easier to beat.

    Reply
  2. Brig Bother Post author

    This was qui-i-i-te interesting, I thought more of them would use the clever tactic of not hitting (nice buzzer system btw) until the last possible moment and then it didn’t happen. I quite like the push your luck element, although I think there is probably a more interesting way to do the clock so you can have a proper reveal (if you’re going to have REACTIVE YOUNG PEOPLE then they need something to REACT SURPRISED to).

    Also wondering what the ideal length of task would be, something where improvement is obvious, not something that sitting through 6×90 seconds is a bit dull (shoelaces and jigsaw not great in this regard). My gut says about a minute, although I thought the speed stacking was alright as a final game where it’s quite quick and tense as a do-or-die sort of thing, but does mean nobody is going to gamble when they are in a winning position (although to be fair this would probably be the same regardless of task length).

    It’s a clever idea, but for me I preferred Above Average in the Game Garage Task And Time Limit Genre.

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    1. David B

      I think people kind of know when they did it faster or not, so it’s quite hard to do the usual ”You did it… in…” reveal

      We knew the Jigsaw would run long but we kept it in to give someone to opportunity to have a ‘run’ at a few iterations. The others pretty much went to plan.

      Reply
  3. Steve

    One thing that wasn’t quite clear to me, could the players see the clock? It seemed like they couldn’t, based on how some of them counted a couple extra seconds before stopping it on their later runs, rather than confidently waiting for time-minus-one. But I also don’t remember if this was explicitly stated, and it took me a while to catch on.

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    1. David B

      No they couldn’t. The clock was facing the camera. They were allowed to ‘sandbag’ if they felt sure they were underrunning, but at their own risk.

      Reply
  4. CeleTheRef

    Countdown coming soon to Italy!
    Too bad it’s not the Channel 4 one 🙁
    It’s a totally brand new copy of L’Eredità: 5 contestants enter, one is given the boot after each round. The ultimate survivor wins a futile attempt at whatever is on the AUA! money clock.

    Reply
  5. Chris M. Dickson

    I was fortunate enough to take part in the testing in this, which was a lot of fun, but this one moved on quite a bit from the way it was at the testing day (coupled with a rather unfortunate playthrough in the test, where the first two trials both ended up with nobody getting a performance on the board due to trying to break their own personal best and failing). The biggest change from the testing, and the most pleasant surprise, was how strong an asset the atmosphere of the garage production was – the combination of the competition and support among the friend group. I miss quite a few shows these days, but I don’t remember seeing many shows where a group of friends compete against each other to determine who wins a single prize; the players you had here were a lot of fun to watch playing, quite possibly in a way that many groups wouldn’t be.

    I was definitely happy enough with the games in the context of a garage pilot. I don’t think they would fly in a real show, unless you were deliberately going for a Minute To Win It play-this-with-items-from-your-house vibe (which you could well do, but it has been done). I would have thought that a real show would use bigger-scale, quite physical games, so that people might also have to compete with increasing mild tiredness as they tried to improve upon their personal best. The games themselves aren’t actually the star here, surprisingly; the competition – the relationship between the contestants, gasp – and the gameplay is. This makes it feel very modern and relevant and actually quite ITV2, in not at all a bad way.

    The camerawork/direction/editing were excellent, and not just excellent for a garage pilot. Normally I would quibble at the edits and obvious jump cuts in the timer (remember how we moaned at S1E1 of the TCM revival in this regard…) but here it felt natural and that nothing was missed, as the emphasis was just different enough for it not to be a problem, especially as we saw the tasks several times.

    It’s good to see the reception on YouTube. I thought that people might struggle a bit to follow things and that the scripting wasn’t as clear as it could be – for instance, you don’t really explain the game in advance – but people do seem to be following it fine, so practice determines that the theory is wrong here. The graphic explaining the relative position of the players, who wears the crown (intuitive, thematic and super fun!) and exactly what needs to be done to take it is excellent.

    “Time starts when I hit this button” is not a good catchphrase; it would be more natural just to say “You have ((e.g. 21.72 seconds)) to beat your personal best”, then build up the tension with a three-second countdown and a clear go signal. On a tiny point, the money tree probably should be £1 – £5 – £10 – £20 – £40 – £100 with a £40 step rather than a £50; while there isn’t such a thing as a £40 note (and did Tom really have a £50 in his pocket, or would it have been two twenties and a ten, as in season one?) it would seem likely that people would stop at £50 in the current tree, whereas gambling £40 to win £100 offers dramatic odds worth trying for.

    This show has the potential to have rather variable episode lengths – for instance, imagine a game where someone pushes game one to £20 with three personal best attempts, games two onwards are similarly successful and you might have the original four game tries and a dozen or more personal best attempts. That’s quite a long show. On the other hand, you could have an episode with the original four game tries and only 3-6 personal best attempts if people either play conservatively or flame out on their personal best attempts. Is that a problem for a show which has to fit into a fixed episode length (i.e. a TV schedule rather than a web video) or do you think the editing of both games and contestant chat could be sufficiently flexible in practice to cope?

    Very good stuff. Looking forward to the two coming Thursdays… and I predict that Nick’s back-of-the-head idea is the one coming up next week. Hey, it’s a 50:50 shot at worst!

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  6. David B

    1) The crown is something we literally made one hour before the shoot when we realised there wasn’t room for players to move to some kind of ‘throne’.
    2) We kept the tree to follow real bank note values, just for simplicity.
    3) Yes, I guess stretch and squeeze would be an issue, but – in extremis – you could do the “we play new games until the hooter goes” and then it turns into the ‘last gasp’ game (or someone’s confirmed as the winner). But usually with formats such as these, there are ways of cutting the chat fairly liberally around the action. And the games in the real thing would probably be a mite shorter.

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      1. Brig Bother Post author

        This was qui-i-te interesting.

        When thinking about the Outrun Quiz format, the absolute minimum baseline, the hook, would be the music – if anything’s going to suit something like Sonic drowning, or a flatlining heart monitor jumping back to life as someone “gets” a checkpoint it is absolutely this, but for that to work I think the quiz element needs to be fast but slower, three right answers to a checkpoint with no extra time in between, say.

        But enough about how I envisioned the Outrun Quiz format, I thought this was fun, not much wrong with the game, scratches a similar itch to 1000 Heartbeats. But like 1KHB, I think the production would need to sell it.

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        1. Chris M. Dickson

          I’m with Nick on this one. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here, but it’s not all pointing in the same direction. You’ve got two-thirds of a good (if short) show and about two-fifths of a <i<different good show mixed together, and while the result does work, it doesn’t feel as checkpoint-y as I would like it to. The final version is, again, considerably better than the version I saw in testing, but I should stop being surprised by that and should just start expecting that to be the case.

          The endgame is great, and really captures the checkpoint motif well. The main game feels like it does so less well. When you’re playing a driving game, getting to a checkpoint is a moderate chunk of achievement; answering a single question to reach a checkpoint doesn’t feel like it captures the spirit nearly so well.

          If there were three relatively simple, relatively quick questions to get from one check point in the main round to the next, then the concept would flow very naturally and neatly – and the gameplay concept evolution from the main game (“one of you answers three questions to reach a checkpoint”) to the endgame (“the team answers three questions to reach a checkpoint… but they’re three-part shared questions”) would be intuitive and would flow neatly. Making the distance in driving games isn’t normally the challenge, it’s making the distance within the time limit, so moderately quick, relatively easy questions would seem to fit the bill. I suppose the analogy (which you might well illustrate graphically, were it not a garage pilot) would be that answering a question correctly was analogous to overtaking cars while turning sharp corners, but answering a question incorrectly was analogous to crashing. This show needs to be quick, quick, quick; it needs to go from nought to quizzy in two and a half seconds. (You can have that one!) I did enjoy the question formats you used, and I did giggle at the “quick maths” round title, Roadman Shaq, but I’m not sure they’re right for this show.

          For what it’s worth: in testing, the team I was on totally, totally blew the endgame. We kept getting two of the three parts correct and missing the third, or passing on it, and quite often that was down to me. I think we would have lost during the £10 stage by these rules. (The other team who gave it a try – made up of brilliant science communicators! – were much better at it than us!)

          No spoilers, but I’m really looking forward to next week’s show now…

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          1. Matt Clemson

            I think the thing that threw me off a bit was the very first round; the thing about driving games of that nature is that they’re about completing a fixed task as rapidly as possible, so you’re always progressing *towards* the goal even if you (for instance) don’t execute a corner as well as you might, whereas the structure the questions was very much fundamentally all-or-nothing; effectively, if you get a question wrong you (effectively) get dumped back at the start of the stage while the clock keeps ticking.

            I wonder if it might help perception of the game a little if the rounds were reversed, so the slower round establishes the premise more readily and then it gets more quickfire as they ramp up… but then it does mean you can’t easily make strategic decisions on who should play the quizzier questions! Would it perhaps help if the fastest, quizziest round still came first but was a team one? Have just one answer from the team crossing the checkpoint making it distinct from the finale, but at least you’ve got multiple brains contributing as a warm-up.

        2. Steve

          Would Hardball be considered an Outrun Quiz? I’ve thought about checkpoint quizzes in the past, and it was the closest thing to come to it in my mind (maybe parts of Rebound do too), but I think I’d prefer this cooperative format more. That said, I also think it needs the faster/slower tweak to it.

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        3. David B

          Thanks for your comments. I think, if we had room, we would do the real show with some kind of actual mini-track that you had to physically traverse on the floor. That way, you could do laps of 3 questions, say, rather than every question being time added back. Getting the right calibration on the questions was tricky – you wanted to feel like they were slowly drowning, without losing too early if they got the first one wrong, but equally you need the clock to dip below 10 seconds every so often to add tension.

          Reply
    1. Brig Bother Post author

      If I’m honest this didn’t work for me, it’s a round of a show rather than a show in itself and even then only the final round really.

      I liked the increase in usefulness of the tools as the rounds progressed (and the way it fed into the endgame), and presumably it would be something much larger scale based on the idea for television. The head to head element didn’t really work I don’t think – having the pressure quiz element is OK, but really this is a game of accumulation, but it’s only going to feel like accumulation if one player completely stuffs up. And if they do that then it means a less exciting later round, whether decider or final. I think it needs a better reason to keep playing when one can’t win (and if you have to suddenly introduce a new rule…).

      In some ways it’s handy to have a blowout like that because it gives a better chance to finesse for when situations come up again and hopefully improve the game as a whole, so not a catastrophe but for me in the bottom quartile of Game Garages.

      Of the three I think Checkpoint has the most potential.

      Reply
      1. Chris M. Dickson

        u ok hun?

        Fast quiz, tricky questions, mild physicality and silliness are all factors predisposing me towards liking something; not sure whether this was the only reason why, but I thought this was a stone cold ready-to-roll winner and maybe the best Game Garage game yet. It has something of a Joe Lycett, The Time It Takes feel to me.

        There were a couple of improvement via improper gameplay gags on the testing day which I’m going to share:

        1) we didn’t have the other player closing the box but instead Tom Scott pulling the box away, so it was possible for someone very naughty to play the game properly and then, at the crucial moment, grab the box and run away with it before Tom could, liberally making it rain with the magic dollars. (“You’ll never take me alive!”)

        2) there was a great gag where, in the grand final, after the contestant had answered the three questions correctly and was retrieving money by hand, Tom would keep asking questions even though further correct answers had no reward, just because it was funny.

        Reply
        1. Brig Bother Post author

          I stand by it, as a viewer I don’t think there are many ways the game plays out which isn’t slightly irritating.

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      2. Steve

        Yeah, this didn’t work for me either. It was a bit of a bummer to introduce the show with a shutout (not that you can choose the outcomes), although I super appreciated how there was still an incentive for the losing player to keep pushing in the final round. If I had to recycle this format, I’d say you could still have a shootout to start the round, but give both players a chance to grab at the money, with the winner of the shootout having an advantage in the grabbing stage (say, having to answer only 3 questions to stop their opponent instead of 4 or 5).

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        1. Brig Bother Post author

          This is it, I think at least in the final round both contestants need to have a go, at the very least.

          Kind of amazed for a backdoor pilot they didn’t fiddle the outcome tbh.

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          1. Matt Clemson

            When the premise was outlined before play actually started I thought that we’d have a situation that when the second player gets three questions correct they just swap in and get to start gathering money for themselves and in turn keep swapping like that.

            While the aesthetics of gathering money are appealing – and allows for the existence of big-money notes – I wonder if something along the lines of making the box full of sand, having the swapping I mentioned above, and ending the round when a certain amount of sand has come out of the box (maybe through placing the box on a scale?) might work a bit better. That would also allow for some more variation on implements. And, of course, for a more slapstick approach water also could be pretty effective.

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