Commentary

Is Live The New Live?

HQ Trivia, a wildly popular app, seems to be an anachronism, going backwards against new technology trends. It tethers us to a schedule. It’s essentially a live game-show broadcast (when everything works as it should, which is far from a sure bet) on a tiny screen.

It also gets about a million players every time it plays, which is usually only twice a day.

My question is: Why the hell is it so popular?

 Maybe it’s the Trivia Itself…

(Trivial Interlude: the word trivia comes from the Latin for the place where three roads come together, originally used to refer to the three foundations of basic education: grammar, logic and rhetoric. The modern usage came from a book by Logan Pearsall Smith in 1902m “Trivialities, bits of information of little consequence.” The singular of trivia is trivium.)

 s a spermologist (that’s a person who loves trivia -- seriously. Apparently the “sperm” part has something to do with “seeds of knowledge”) I love a trivia contest. It’s one thing I’m pretty good at – knowing a little about a lot of things that have absolutely no importance.

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And if you too fancy yourself a spermologist (which, by the way, is how you should introduce yourself at social gatherings) you know that we always want to prove we’re the smartest people in the room. In HQ Trivia’s case, that room usually holds about a million people. So the odds of being the smartest person is the room is, well, about one in a million. And a spermologist just can’t resist those odds.

But I don’t think HQ’s popularity is based on some alpha-spermology complex. A simple list of rankings would take care of that. No, there must be more to it. Let’s dig deeper.

 Maybe it’s the Simoleons…

(Trivial Interlude: Simoleons is sometimes used as slang for American dollars, as Jimmy Stewart did in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The word could be a portmanteau of “simon” and “Napoleon,” which was a 20 franc coin issued in France. The term seems to have originated in New Orleans, where French currency was in common use at the turn of the last century.)

HQ Trivia does offer up cash for smarts. Each contest has a prize, which is usually $5,000. But even if you make it through all 12 questions and win, by the time the prize is divvied up among the survivors, you’ll probably walk away with barely enough money to buy a beer. Maybe two. So I don’t think it’s the prize money that accounts for the popularity of HQ Trivia.

 Maybe It’s Because it’s Live...

(Trivial Interlude: As a Canadian, Trivia is near and dear to my heart. America’s favorite trivia quiz master, Alex Trebek, is Canadian, born in Sudbury, Ontario. Alex is actually his middle name. George is his first name. He is 77 years old.

And Trivial Pursuit, the game that made trivia a household name in the '80s, was invented by two Canadians, Chris Haney and Scott Abbott. It was created after the pair wanted to play Scrabble but found their game was missing some tiles. So they decided to create their own game. In 1984, more than 20 million copies of the game were sold.)

There is just something about reality in real time. Somehow, subconsciously, it makes us feel connected to something that is bigger than ourselves. And we like that. In fact, one of the other etymological roots of the word “trivia” itself is a “public place.”

 The Hotchkiss Movie Choir Effect

If you want to choke up a Hotchkiss (or at least the ones I’m personally familiar with) just show us a movie where people spontaneously start singing together. I don’t care if it’s "Pitch Perfect Twelve and a Half,"  we’ll still mist up. I never understood why, but I think it has to do with the same underlying appeal of connection.

Dan Levitin, author of “This is Your Brain on Music,” explained what happens in our brain when we sing as part of a group in a recent interview on NPR: “We've got to pay attention to what someone else is doing, coordinate our actions with theirs, and it really does pull us out of ourselves. And all of that activates a part of the frontal cortex that's responsible for how you see yourself in the world, and whether you see yourself as part of a group or alone. And this is a powerful effect.”

The same thing goes for flash mobs. I’m thinking there has to be some type of psychological common denominator that HQ Trivia has somehow tapped into. It’s like a trivia-based flash mob. Even when things go wrong, which they do quite frequently, we feel that we’re going through it together. Host Scott Rogowsky embraces the glitchiness of the platform and commiserates with us. Misery -- even when it’s trivial -- loves company.

Whatever the reason for its popularity, HQ Trivia seems to be moving forward by taking us back to a time when we all managed to play nicely together.

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