On Saturday the 28th of December, I participated with some friends and family in an online quiz. A local organisation arranged a quiz for local teams. All teams got a care package and tuned in to a specific YouTube channel at the right time. As always, the objective of the quiz is to get as many answers correct as possible… or is it?
In the picture next to this text, you can see one of the objects that was in the care package. It’s a small wooden die. It was the solution to one of the more cryptic questions. I am very happy that a few more letters (4) came into my life by chance. Two of the sides have holes in them; therefore, only 4 f’s have been added to the collection.
The collection, as of this moment, stands at 1,804 letters.
But the question is: Is the objective of the quiz to win? On the surface: yes. But what do we win by proving ourselves the better team? Intellectual superiority? Logical acuity? Does that change anything about ourselves or about how the world sees us or we see the world? I would argue that it does not really do any of that.
A more philosophical answer would be that the objective of the game is to participate. We had fun with our friends, ate way too many snacks, and had a lot of laughs. It was time well spent. Like the game of life, the objective is not to race to the end or accrue the most wealth; it is to participate. And consequently, to participate with others and enjoy the process.
At first, I was a little pissed that we ended on the bottom half of the results. In previous quizzes where you would physically sit at a table and answer questions with only your brain and your intellect, we would do pretty well. In the past, we have been in the top 3 a few times. So our score was really not that bad compared to our result in a traditional contest. The big difference is that here, you can just look up most of the answers if you wanted to, resulting in a near-perfect score from most of the top half of the final results table. So this means that most of those teams, unless they have an eidetic memory, would have cheated their way to the top. While the jury specifically asked not to do so, they had no way to check.
This brings me again to the point that I made in a previous post: Isn’t it much easier to just buy a bunch of letters and put them in a box? Of course, it is. But isn’t it a much more fun experience to happen upon 4 f’s on the side of a tiny wooden die?