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In Mathy's AMA, he brought that he plays Quiz Bowl, which is a buzzer-based academic competition on general knowledge (somewhat analogous to Jeopardy). This led me to think about perhaps playing Protobowl, a rather fun little game that puts quiz bowl packets into an online multiplayer setting, with my fellow Wintreans.

No sign-in or anything required, so feel free to hop in and try it out, either in the public rooms or in the Wintreath room below:
http://protobowl.com/wintreath

It is generally far less fun singleplayer, though, so hopefully we can get multiple people online at the same time.

Thoughts?

Might join if there is a way to lower the difficulty... had to go through like 30 questions before getting lucky because I know what a Gordian Knot is from my rope tying experience. Otherwise I think my strategy will be to join and do nothing, remaining at 0 points while everyone else goes negative.

Also got points for guessing "Leonardo" when the answer was "Leonard Bernstein". Even though I meant Leonardo Da Vinci. Which was before remembering that Leonardo was the one ninja turtle that wasn't based on an artist person, rather an inventor. So that was interesting.

Interface is sort of confusing. I spent a good 2 minutes trying to type my answer into the name box before figuring out I was an idiot. Having the directions at the top instead of in a sidebar would probably be helpful, especially since I was wondering if there was a chat function for a while only to discover, on reflection, that there was.
Additionally, I wish it would give the whole question instead of spitting it out slowly, since I assumed it wanted the name of a play, instead of its author.
Although I can see how that might be intended to avoid people googling, and hew more closely to the quiz bowl format of someone reading out the answers.

amusingly the last one i did was asking about heimdall, and i blanked out and tried to put in 'idris elba'

I've come to realize that I don't know an awful lot by going through these questions.

I have no idea what to do.

We could change the difficulty to Middle School if you want. Those are generally more accessible to a general audience.

But in general, for keyboard controls:
space to buzz
j to go on to next question

That's pretty much all I know. Oh and the website is quite difficult to manage on mobile, and the app isn't very good.

Aw, why do they have to call it that... almost seems insulting... they couldn't have just called it level 1, 2, etc... nvm, I'd like to rephrase my post to "I'll never be on Jeopardy, so I'll just skip this".

It's because they use actual middle school tossups used in middle school tournaments...

(The problem is that Protobowl doesn't have a lot of middle school tossups, so you start getting repeats rather quickly.)

Do they have an "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?" level?

I have actually been able to understand a few of the questions on this website but not always very well.  This is definitely some hard trivia, unless I figure out how to change my name I am Spurious Gnu.

You have been passed Doc.

You have been passed Doc.

That's not that hard when you're playing singleplayer with as much time as you want lol

You have been passed Doc.

That's not that hard when you're playing singleplayer with as much time as you want lol

Maybe someone should join then.

Heh, and then I did lol.

Well that was fun (especially the part where Aethelia learned about the Rwandan Genocide).

That... why didn't I know about that. Or the other one you mentioned that I was going to look into but I closed the window already.
I'm sure a lot of things... but not any of the things in the Protobowl. I'm still not part of the "dumb blonde" stereotype.
Well at least is was amusing to guess "John" and have it say, "Correct, it is Peter" on that first pope question... I really want to know how the algorithm looked at that and thought it was close enough, even if it was nice to jump back up to -10 points.