So what I thought was a while ago, but looking back turns out to be 2.5 years ago, I wrote about Sporcle. Sporcle is a trivia and quizzing website that is sure to keep you occupied for longer than you planned. I've been on it for almost 3 years now (44 days to go, as the website tells me) and after being a passive user for most of that time, I decided I wanted to actually contribute my own quizzes to the website. Partly because I wanted to 'give something back', but mostly because designing quizzes is almost more fun than making them.
(Warning: the rest of this post will contain shameless self-quiz-promotion.)
My personal favourite category (apart from some random great quizzes like TripAdvisor reviews of Middle Earth or Llama or duck (check out the URL on that one)) are logic puzzles. So I decided to make one of those, and to my great surprise there wasn't a quiz version of one of my favourite games, Werewolves (or Mafia, as it is also known). So I decided to make that; I created a field of 5x5 squares, gave the boxes a name, made some of them into werewolves, and designed a path through the quiz so it could be solved. And then I tried whether it worked, and I published it. Fun fact: people do not all think the way you think. As a result, they will not interpret the clues the way you want them to. Also, they don't know things unless you tell them. So, apart from the technical creation part (which is pretty easy, really) this first quiz was also a lesson in quiz construction. I got a lot of helpful feedback, I improved the quiz based on that, and it works pretty well now.
Now with the werewolves quiz, a player doesn't know all the answers before they start to play. There could be 5 werewolves, or 8, or 10. This makes the quiz more difficult and also harder to create. So next I decided to make a more 'closed' logic puzzle, in which all answer options are given beforehand. Picking a topic close to my own interests, I made a farm animal quiz in which each square contains a chicken, horse, pig, or sheep. I thought keeping it down to four animals would make it pretty easy, but as it turns out, the fewer options you have, the harder it is to design the quiz. But I got there in the end. Also, I like to put in a couple of jokes to keep things light, which you can more easily do when players will not interpret them as possible clues. And then I did some beta-testing. I asked a friend to try out the puzzle for me, to see how she would solve it, and where she would get stuck, and which clues she would find ambiguous. And it was a revelation. Hints that seemed blatantly obvious turned out not to be so, and squares I thought would be solved second-to-last were suddenly solved much sooner because I'd overlooked a shortcut. So I improved the quiz based on that feedback, and after I published it I got zero commentary on the workings and a 5.00 out of 5.00 perfect user feedback score. Nice!
These first two puzzles being done, I decided to scout around for other topics of my interest, to see what subjects hadn't been made into puzzles yet. Sporcle doesn't mind multiple quizzes on the same subject (there are loads of Harry Potter and ISoIaF puzzles) as long as they aren't exactly the same, but I wanted to do something original. As it turned out, both Gilmore Girls characters and Disney animated films hadn't been made into logic puzzles, so I quickly created those two. I also started making walkthroughs, to show the players how they could solve my puzzles when they got stuck. Not surprisingly, they have been the most played puzzles I've created.
At a loss for new 'open' subjects, I created three more 'closed' puzzles based on my own interests; a cheesy logic puzzle (filled with cheesy puns), a school subject puzzle (my only 5x6 puzzle), and another farm animal puzzle (with cows, donkeys, goats, and turkeys). And then I was kind of stuck for subjects, until someone mentioned Shakespeare. There were some logic puzzles about Shakespearean characters, and some logic puzzles which featured his plays, but none that actually asked about only his plays (can you believe it?). So I made a Shakespeare's plays logic puzzle, and it got picked up by the Shakespeare curator, and after a couple of tweaks (and some more tweaks as the comments started to pour in) I actually got picked by that curator to feature on the Shakespeare page! Wooh!
Yes, it is a small and weird world, the world of Sporcle, and small things can make you happy.
What really does make me happy is seeing the number of people that play my quizzes. The number of plays per day varies wildly, as you can see below. The spike on March 5th was 200 plays of the What subject? quiz on the same day, no idea why that happened.
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| Number of plays March 1 to March 14. |
The popularity of my quizzes varies wildly, with the Gilmore Girls quiz being the absolute front runner at 2,300 plays. The Shakespeare quiz, despite the curator pick, remains the least played.
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| Total plays as of March 14th. |
I've been hunting for new subjects for a while, but I haven't written anything since the Shakespeare quiz, which in itself took me almost 3 weeks to make. It feels as if the first outpouring of creativity has dried up, and I'm looking for new ways to make these quizzes. I'm sure I will make some more in the future, but this is not something you can rush, as with all things that require inspiration.
End of the shameless self promotion. If you try out one or more of my quizzes, I hope you enjoy it!
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