I like the idea but the set up seems very complicated! Is this meant to be a new tool for professional pub quiz hosts rather than for pubs or community groups to run themselves?
I don't know if pub quizzes are a thing outside the UK, but I'm pretty partial to one. Unfortunately, cheating can be par for the course - you tend to get a lot of time with the questions, so some nefarious types use that time to Google the answers. SpeedQuizzing aims to revolutionise the pub quiz format! From their website: "The SpeedQuizzing system has changed the way people today approach quiz events, but more specifically it has enabled the Great British pub quiz to evolve into something new. Gone is the slow pace. Gone is the cheating (that has undermined the integrity of pen and paper pub quizzes for many years) and the days where quiz contestants actually have to mark each others question sheets is thankfully also now a thing of the past.
SpeedQuizzing’s quiz game software heralds a new age of high-energy smartphone pub quizzing where the fast-paced game style takes trivia nights to new heights while ensuring it is impossible to cheat."
The SpeedQuizzing concept has spread far and wide over the last four years. At the time of writing this, there are 218 smartphone quizzes coming up over the next week. Most of them are UK based (home of the pub quiz), a fair few in the USA and one in New Zealand.
My brother Alan and myself embarked on this venture together in an attempt to try and fix all that was broken with the traditional pub quiz. It seemed that we lived in a world where technology was steadily fixing the outmoded, but pub quizzes had been left unchanged for decades.
There are many archaic elements to a traditional pub quiz (marking each others question sheets for example), that make this original concept now seem rather tired.. and sure enough a computerised version would obviously be able to take over simply tasks like marking the questions, but the largest hole that needed plugging was of course that players can cheat at a pub quiz. They always have been able to. Provided there was a pay phone in pub or an encyclopaedia in a player's car, cheating has always been an option because there has never been a time limit imposed on submitting a final answer as answers are submitted together at the end of the quiz.
But, really, back in these olden times how many people did bother with these slightly elaborate means of cheating? They would be spotted on the pay phone or continuously visiting their car between rounds.
Today though, this quick access to information that smartphone technology has heralded in, basically makes the decision to cheat a considerable smaller one. Quite possibly the alcohol you're drinking may have weakened your moral compass too! You also hear people say "Everyone else was cheating on their phones so we had to, to compete". You are left with a situation where unless the cheating is clamped down upon by a schoolmaster-like quiz host, the once great British pub quiz has fast descended into a rather weird game of "which team is best at Googling the answers". Because of this, at the core of our quizzing system is a fast turnaround between question asked and answers submitted, in which there is barely time to source an answer. This inherent faster pace makes the game feel engergised and more contemporary and because everyone playing knows that nobody else could cheat, even if they want to, fair-play at the pub quiz is finally resummed.
Pivot
SpeedQuizzing