I'll Have Three Trivias to Go, With a Side of Fries

(Pictures were taken at the Metal Shop on vampire night during Billy2Times Krams's trivia.)

Chaddington Boomhauer

Some people recently received an unsolicited group invitation that read as follows:

Phenicia Gravois has invited you to join a group. You will have to pay a signup fee of L$500. Trivia Anytime Anywhere: We are currently building up our membership. We will start playing trivia once we have reached 22 members. For those of you who love trivia but don't like to hang around at a venue for questions to be asked. We will ask at least 3 questions per day via group notices. The 1st person to answer correctly via group IM will receive at least 50L. At times when group funds are low we will ask less q's [sic] or pay less, but we do not expect this to happen often.

There has been some discussion of this since the invitations went out (I should mention that I did not receive one, but the bulk of this text is also in the Group Charter), mostly negative, though one person has been to the owner's live trivia and gives it high marks. It has also been noted that charging a group fee, while practically unknown among trivia groups, is not unheard of elsewhere in SL.

The most frequent objection is that if you're not online at the time a question is asked, then you're out of luck. I haven't yet heard anyone say they would give this group a second thought. Because I'm all about the sociocultural, I've been thinking about what kind positionality or social location some people who do trivia in SL have compared with those who identify with the "trivia community."

For instance, it is difficult for me to imagine that any host I know would have thought of a group of this sort. It simply wouldn't have occurred to them (or if it would, then I don't know them as well as I think). The reason is in the group description: "For those of you who love trivia but don't like to hang around at a venue for questions to be asked." Although most of us engage in things besides trivia while we're in-world (at the very least to buy clothing and costumes for themed events), this blog and others like it exist largely because the venues provide centers of social activity for us, even for those who don't go to them often or who don't go as often as they used to.

Nelly Swindlehurst

The venues are what define us as a community and have allowed us to build friendships and other social relationships with each other. It doesn't mean that we wouldn't enjoy trivia without the social context. Certainly, very few of us had the social context before we started coming to the trivia events. Some of us play along withJeopardy! at home. Some of us sit around a Gogomodo board and zone out on our own. But if you are reading this blog, then chances are, you are part of a community of trivia players who have been influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by the existence of trivia venues, the way that events are run there, and the fact that they are capable of drawing together our odd mishmash of personalities.

I'm imagining what my day would be like as a member of the Trivia Anytime Anywhere (TAA) group. I go about my gridwide hunts, my unpacking of prizes, I might do some 7Seas fishing or simply hanging out by a Lucky Chair while getting RL work done. I chat with friends, occasionally seek out new places to shop or explore. During all of this, would it be kind of nice for a random trivia question to come through in a notice, with the chance for winning L$50? Of course! I can even see standing in front of an outfit at a store, wondering if I'd be able to afford it, when voila! In come the fifty lindens more that make it a done deal. But would I pay a L$500 membership fee in order to make this happen? Pretty much no.

It's not because I'm inherently cheap: if Marine Park, with its L$100-L$800 questions, for instance, had a huge membership fee instead of nightly entrance fees (and would not be constantly on the verge of banning paying members), I'd pay it. It's not because I'm afraid I'll miss all of the questions because I'll be off-line when they appear. It's because chances are, I'll already be anticipating the trivia event I'm planning to go to that afternoon or evening or the next day. And if I'm about to go to an event that either doesn't charge or charges a moderate fee with the promise of chances to win huge prizes, then why would I pay to receive questions I'd need to answer ten of to eventually make back my investment?

In addition, even though I'm obviously not at an event every minute of the day that I'm in SL, the events at the venues are what make me feel connected to this amorphous group of people and what we've built up for ourselves in our little corner of SL. I don't even mean that in a mushy way. The venues anchor us. They give our network of acquaintances some shape. I have done trivia by group IM a few times in the Buccaneer Bowl group, and it's fun as a supplement to the other events announced via that channel, but one of the reasons that it's fun is that you're competing with other people in that group IM with whom you have a competitive or team relationship already. I've formed familiarities with people who are mostly names I recognize in a particularly active group IM (e.g., hunt groups), but I can't say I've developed a friendship that way. Maybe others do. But even if the trivia from TAA were to generate conversations in the group, any real camaraderie is likely to be due to pre-existing friendships.

All of this is fairly obvious, even if I'm the only nerd who bothers to write it down. But it raises a more compelling question for me: whom this group is meant for. Who do the owners expect to be their target audience? It's unclear how they chose those they invited, since Ms. Gravois does not have any trivia groups visible in her profile aside from her own and most people I know who received invitations didn't previously know who she is. Simply because this group isn't designed for people who already build their social second lives around trivia, however, it does not mean that it doesn't have a place somewhere in the trivia landscape.

JoshuaStephen Schism

As the description says, it's for "those of you who love trivia but don't like to hang around at a venue for questions to be asked." I'm sure there are plenty of people who fall into this category. Some of them probably like "dancing with trivia" more than "trivia with dancing." Many probably have stronger social ties at other types of clubs and don't have the time to spread out to the trivia venues. Some might have other obligations in SL throughout the day so that they are in-world but cannot attend events very easily. And some may not like the atmosphere of trivia events for a variety of reasons; I even know trivia regulars to whom this applies. What the group fee essentially pays for is the ability to play competitive trivia without having to go to an organized event, ever. This fee might be worthwhile to any of these people. TAA is thus not that dumb of an idea when viewed through the eyes of those who are, to put it bluntly, "not us," that is, not the sort of people who are likely to write and/or read trivia blogs. It does have a fatal flaw, however, and it is directly related to the concept of "us":

It will probably be difficult to locate the people who are interested, since most existing groups for trivia are based around events -- the ones that the target audience, by definition, doesn't want to go to.

Unless Ms. Gravois already knows a number of people to start her off (since it's always possible she began the group to meet a demand, not to shape one), it will probably take a lot of legwork locating players who love trivia enough to pay L$500 but not enough to "hang around at a venue." There are other things notable about belonging to social circles in SL outside of the trivia community, though, and the way we handle money is one of them. A lot of us do trivia specifically because we found we're good at it and can generate or supplement SL income with it, so our brains actually think in terms of SL economy over RL economy. L$500 doesn't equal US$2 (or your country's currency's equivalent) for us, it equals twenty-five questions at Shiraz or twenty questions at Blaizing Inferno or five correct first-place wins from Thorn. For those who are good at trivia, it is a reliable enough source of income to support a second life but not, for most, a second life of leisure.

There's no way to generalize how people outside of the trivia community think of money (and of course the description I've just given doesn't apply to everyone within it, either). But for those who see SL more as a game to invest in as one would pay to belong to World of Warcraft, I imagine special expenditures have a different meaning than for those of us who are self-sustaining in-world. When you approach the platform expecting it to be something you pour money into, it shapes your experience differently from what it's like for those who do not. What all this means is that L$500 may or may not seem all that exorbitant to people who are not accustomed to SLiving off of their winnings.

To sum up, the Trivia Anytime Anywhere group sounds like a good idea. It's just not a good idea for most "trivia people," and for that reason, I'll be very impressed if it gets off the ground. More than that, though, it's another one of those interesting indications of how social circles operate in Second Life. The introduction of an entirely different kind of format makes us notice how central the venues are even to those who only visit them on occasion. It also brings up the issue of money and how different the SL economy is for different people. I wish Ms. Gravois luck with her venture and will try not to be snarky from now on when I ask questions via IM in one of my groups.