TRIVIAL PURSUIT!

 INTENSE TRIVIA GAME AT SHS SPARKS CONTROVERSY 

By: Grace McDonough 

SHS class of 2024 hosted Sparta’s very first annual trivia game night on March 11th at 7:00 p.m. 

Students gathered in the Sparta High School cafeteria for a night of competitive fun. Each team fought valiantly for the prize: a $100 Amazon gift card! To participate, there was a $20 fee per team, and teams were only allowed five members respectively. As promised on the flier, there were snacks and drinks for sale, however the pizza that was promised never made an appearance…

Some of the teams included: 

Never Gonna Quiz You Up

The Untouchables

The Lone Ginger

The Brainy Baddies

Quiz Pro Quo

E=mc Hammer

There were four rounds in all, each consisting of five trivia questions. As the questions were asked, students hushed and listened closely, hurriedly jotted their answers down on a slip of paper, and quickly turned it in to be judged. The points were tallied on a wager system: based on the confidence your team had in the answer, a value between 1 and 8 could be wagered. Getting the question right awarded the points to the team, but getting it wrong could not deduct points. Each numerical wager could only be used once, so the teams had to choose wisely and trust in their knowledge of each category. And of course, no cheating would be tolerated, so phones were silenced and placed in the middle of the tables to ensure that no googling occurred. 

All seemed to be going smoothly until controversy arose. The last question of the entire game was a bonus round. Each team was allowed to wager 1 to 30 points and if they answered incorrectly, their wager would be deducted from their points. The announcer asked the final question which read, verbatim, “Which United States state contains the name of another U.S. state within its name?”

Unlike other rounds, the teams had only 60 seconds to answer and turn in their slips. The winning team for instance, The Brainy Baddies, wagered all 30 points on the answer “West Virginia.” However, the answer “Arkansas” was announced.  You might be thinking, based on how the question was phrased, both answers were fully correct, which have been confirmed by websites such as funtrivia.com. However before any contentions could be heard, the prize was awarded to the winning team, Never Gonna Quiz You Up. 

Though it was fun, there could be improvements for next year. This upset definitely left a poor taste in some of the player’s mouths, especially when other questions during the game were remedied when there was more than one correct answer. For example, when the question “where is the tallest building in the world located?” the game makers failed to specify what they meant by “where.” Both “The United Arab Emirates” and “Dubai” were accepted as answers and teams with those answers were awarded their points, despite the fact that they were specifically looking for the first answer. When this exception was made, players questioned why the same exception could not be made during the final round, when they should have specified that they wanted a one word state.