Firstly the next Bother’s Bar Poker Open is TONIGHT at 8:30pm – I’ve tried moving it to Thursday to see if we can increase footfall as turnout for the last few has been a bit disappointing. Come and join us!
Then TOMORROW at 4:00pm join UsvsTh3m ironist in chief Tom Scott for brand new Youtube quiz First Person:
This is the series of the pilot tried out a little while ago. The actual live stream will at this link from Friday 4pm.
Finally this morning there’s a new Vernon Kay quiz called 1000 Heartbeats in the offing and you can apply here.
It’s certainly not the first quiz based around trying to beat your pulse rate – there was of course The Chair, but even closer than that was an Endemol show called Heartbeat almost ten years ago which has a very similar premise (if a different format), in that you had to answer rounds of questions within 500 heartbeats for cash. It was on in The Netherlands and, of course, India.
When can those of us who didn’t catch First Person live view it?
Good question, I’ve asked Tom.
Quick response:
“When YouTube’s encoded it and I’ve trimmed it, yes!”
So soon-ish I’d have thought, although I think it can sometimes take a few hours to finish PVR mode as we learnt from Schlag den Brig.
But that was 5 hours rather than 30 minutes. YouTube is quite quick at calculating the low-res video but fairly slow at the hi-res, and today’s recording was in 720p, but I’d have thought there would have been something to see by the end of the night.
It’s up right now in fact.
Super fun idea but quite a lot of dead air, which might happen quite a lot when minds go blank.
Should also add that devising a format around the broadcast delay actually works quite well, and it’s a shame you can’t know exactly how long it is because you could put a great The Wall off of Gladiators style musical bed. Or even the timer turning on 5MtaF.
We will be tweaking a few things over the short run. The delay tends to be 30 seconds although Tom thinks it can vary depending on server load.
There’s a great tradition of “hurry up” video game cues – I love the dum-diddle-DAAA-dum from Bubble Bobble, though the diddleuh-diddleuh-diddleuh-DADAAA from Super Mario Brothers is probably more widely known, and there must surely be plenty of other good ones. The 5MtaF Jaws tribute as the timer turns definitely follows in that tradition as well. Lots of fun, would be a great addition if you could time it at all right – and I reckon you might be able to work out how far behind YouTube is, in real time, during the preamble at the start of the show, then take that as calibrated for the episode.
Wasn’t able to watch this live although I’ve just watched it now. Really like the core concept of the game although like Brig said, it does seem like the problem of dead air can’t easily be solved as once you’ve run out of ideas, that’s pretty much it. If you wanted to skew the balance in favour of the contestant getting more answers you could reveal the initial letters of each answer when there’s less than 30 seconds to go so the clues don’t help the internet although I suspect that would likely sway the balance too far in favour of the live player.
I’d suggest the opposite, kind of: part of me thinks that giving the internet 30 seconds (or an appropriate amount based on the delay) longer might work to avoid that final section where internet answers simply won’t arrive before the clock expires, so you’ve got a tense period with the contestant seeing if the Internet can catch up.
I liked First Person an awful lot. Wasn’t so hot on the pilot, which felt a bit Quiz Call; the race structure makes it feel much more like Talk About – and, perhaps, the dead air could be minimised by encouraging people to talk about the topic as happened on the so-named show, rather than trying to find the phrases that pay (so to speak) from out of nowhere. Basically you’ve cracked the format, though.
Tom has a lot to do, and I have a suspicion that this might well be a format which benefits from having Tom being the host and having a Pointless Friend, which might thematically be a Second Person in this show, to do the more intricate mechanics of the gameplay, especially if Tom plus co-host had good chemistry. (Like C2H5OH. That’s good chemistry.) A co-host might also be well-placed to pick out, and promote, any particularly entertaining incorrect answers received over Twitter if the host were too busy, er, hosting.
To be fair to Tom, what you call the ‘pilot’ was only a technical test. It was never meant to be played like that.
The Second Person is listening intently to the player and pressing the buttons as well as changing camera shots so, unless we get yet a Third Person in the room, we can’t do niceties like funny replies, good idea though that is.