So this thing would require you years, if not more before you can contribute meaningfully; and you have to build a community basically from scratch for it -- and before that you not only can't contribute, but you can't even participate. But hear me out.
WhatWhenWhere (спортивное Что Где Когда in Russian. Note the "sport" part -- it's an entirely different, much more interesting game than a regular one). Doesn't ring a bell, I know, but mostly because it is almost exclusively post-USSR deal, but wouldn't it be cool if the movement becomes worldwide? You can help!
The idea is simple. It's a quiz game. Think pub quiz, but formalized. You have a team of 6, you have 36 questions, and you have a minute to give an answer to each one. Sounds boring? It isn't, believe me, otherwise we wouldn't have people who have been doing it for decades -- myself included, I played my first game at about 13, and I'm over 30 now. Obviously I was doing it on and off for a while, but for last seven or so years it was pretty consistent. Last year I participated in 83 games, so about 1.5 a week.
So what's the deal, and what's the appeal? How is it different from a regular pub quiz? First, almost no just trivia questions. Yeah, you can get a question about recent Oscars or Italian brainrot here or there, but rarely and still packaged properlt. Second, and most important, as I mentioned, it is more formalized. There are rules, committees, leagues, nationals, ratings and so on. But the best part -- there is a way to write questions right. There are tools to help you lead players in the right direction, help them determine what possible solutions aren't correct -- all that without revealing anything that would spoil the right answer. Number of letters in the answer, the etymology of the word -- is it Greek, is it Arab, is it French?; grammar pointers, toponyms and personal names. You can make a host read you question in a certain way as a part of the question. You can print out (a lot of games are still played offline) something and turn that into question. You can ask a question that is one word long! You can ask a question without a single word if you set it up right -- recently played one like that. There is metagame to it -- you can set something up in a question 3, to have it come into play in the question 9. There's drama -- captain of one of my teams seduced a wife of opposing team's captain. There's dickmeasuring with global leaderboards. But most importantly, there's a constant race between authors and players to outwit each other. We have a publicly available database of questions played previously -- aptly named gotquestions.online with 6+ thousand of "packets" -- a set of questions, played in one game, usually 36, but since we have 24-hour marathons, some of them are over 600 questions long. And you can see the way questions evolved over the years. It was completely normal to ask something like "What's the name of the painting of the guy with an apple for a face" in the one of the most prestigious tournaments in the late 90s. Now this wouldn't fly even in a school tournament -- because it's not a proper WWW question, it's just a question. A WWW question makes you first unravel the thought process of an author, find a direction of the answer and then try to remember the name of the guy who dug up Troy. So yeah, it would require you to have some general and sometimes pretty deep knowledge of a lot of things, but most of the time it would be just logic, communication -- there are six people solving the same problem in your team, and ability to read hidden hints.
Interesting note: in my experience about half of players on any game would be tech guys and gals; almost all the rest would be split between lawyers of some description, and education professionals. Teams I currently play with consist of about 10 IT professionals (one of which also a professor of compsci), a lawyer, a psychologist, a private school headmaster, a professor of law in university (combo) and a logistics manager. So it also a great hobby for networking.
To finish my ramblings, I'll translate a question from recent school tournament and walk you through the solution. It doesn't require any intricate knowledge of an original language (a lot of hints built using that) or some deep specialized knowledge from any field, just general one.
On the days of the game near the Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo you can find unusual traffic jams. Where does this stadium located?
Solving this will take you just a couple of steps. First, make note of the stadium name. Obviously named after someone, but most likely not from English-speaking country. Sounds Italian if anything, and the guy isn't some world-famous athlete to have a stadium named after him elsewhere but the Italy. Keep that in mind -- it's probably in Italy. Next step: unusual traffic jams. What can be so unusual about the traffic jam? Long? Mundane. Colorful? No one buys colorful cars anymore. Not cars? That might work, but what if not cars? Mopeds? Too close to cars and gives us nothing. Bikes? Not Netherlands, and still leaves too many options for a city on the table. Boats? That might work, that's unusual. Are there any Italian cities full of water? Venice would be one.
And what do you know, that's the right answer.
So yeah, wouldn't this be a great pastime? Join us, play the game, write your own questions, build a community and be remembered as a Person Who Brought The Game to the Anglosphere.
