Virtual trivia night

I'm not attending a trivia night this library and information week. But some of my twitter buddies have signed off and headed out to one in Perth.

I asked if participation via twitter was allowed as a joke, but we figured that it would be dastardly. But it got me thinking about what web tools and apps could be used to host a distributed trivia night.

If teams were involved, they could meet in person and participate with just one online connection, or team members could be in different locations and have to use Meebo Rooms to collaborate on answers.

Or a Skype conference call would work too. Teams could plan what tools are best for them and then write up how successful their choices were.

Questions could be presented as blog posts, with teams submitting answers via moderated comments. All comments on a post would be approved en masse once the question time was finished, or all teams had entered their answers. Comments could be closed to lock out answers if there was a time limit.

There'd have to be a time limit and really hard questions as players would have access to the internet. A feature in the blog engine to publish posts at set times could allow organisers to prepare questions at any time and have them released to teams at intervals to help make this a challenge.

Quickly figuring out who was winning would be a challenge... but there must be something to help with that too.

Or maybe there's a service already that does all this - called triviR perhaps:-)

Comments

Anonymous said…
Well, I took my eeePC and mobile broadband modem with me, but they stayed INSIDE my bag. ..which probably explains why we came 4th :)

A quiz night event is regularly done on ABC Island in Second Life. It's called "RockIT" and run by Wolfie Rankin, in a way similar to Rockwiz.

The first round involves questions to the audience, with people who get these right forming the two teams that play for the night. Text chat is used rather than voice. Speed of broadband/system is sometimes an issue, as I have seen people's answers appear before I've seen the question from the quizmaster avatar.

It's strangely enjoyable...
Peta said…
Second Life has lots of features for doing this, but you're right the broadband issue could be a pain, and there are all those SL avoiders out there too.