Why people quiz

Why do people quiz? The major quiz shows supply one easy answer: to win big. One of the world’s most successful quizzers, Pat Gibson from Ireland, was a multiple world champion in quizzing who won the £1,000,000 jackpot on the U.K. version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Gibson built software with which he recorded facts that he came across; on some days, he would add as many as 100 facts to his database. But what Gibson valued far more than memory was his capacity to submerge himself in a topic: “If you answered a question about Alexander the Great, it’s because you were interested in Alexander the Great, and you read about Alexander the Great,” he told The Guardian in 2020. “Curiosity—there’s a big payoff for curiosity.”

Curiosity is why most quiz events take place away from the spotlight, in dingy basements and rented halls on weekends. What drives serious quizzers is a combination of the desire to know more and more about the things they see and read about and the joy of retaining and recalling these unrelated facts in the heat of the moment to answer a question. In the Academy Award-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire, the protagonist, Jamal (played primarily by Dev Patel), from Mumbai’s slums, wins a quiz show’s jackpot because every question he is asked on the show has a bearing on some incident in his past. These connections, against all suspicions (he is briefly arrested for cheating before being allowed to finish the show), help him answer the questions. Staying alert and curious about facts and events around you is the best preparation for quizzing.

That said, when it comes to inclusivity, quizzing has some distance to go. It has long been a male-dominated space, though there have been notable exceptions. In 1955 Joyce Brothers became the first woman to win on the show The $64,000 Question. She had deliberately been given questions perceived to be beyond her ken because the show’s producers did not want her to win. She answered them correctly anyway. In 1966 College Bowl saw four students from the women’s college Agnes Scott in Decatur, Georgia, best an all-male Princeton team 220–215. Archana Garodia Gupta, the winner in 2001 of the fourth season of Mastermind India, went on to win the Champion of Champions title. To do so, she had to defeat three other Mastermind winners. But quizzing often continues to be perceived as a space for men to hang out. This is unfortunate because quizzes are, by nature, equitable. No one in the room will ever know all the answers to the questions asked, and even seasoned quizzers will pick up facts they had not known before.

The allure of being known as the person who knows it all is dying now, thanks in part to the proliferation of smartphones, which allow people to call up virtually any fact on the spot. Other kinds of computers tend to know all the answers: IBM’s Watson supercomputer famously won on Jeopardy! in 2011. As smartphones have proliferated, so has cheating in local quizzes, regardless of the stakes. This has increased the onus on quiz setters and quizmasters to set unsearchable questions. The Karnataka Quiz Association in Bangalore, India, took the opposite path: it devised an annual quiz, Go Ogle, that challenges participants to find answers either in their own minds or online. And in this lies the continuing joy of quizzing—the ability to recall a fact from some book or incident in your past and tie it to the question being asked.