Trivia Obsession

We mentioned it once before, but Stevens Point, Wisconsin (where we’re based) hosts the world’s largest trivia contest. There’s even been a documentary about it that makes us all look like lunatics (we’re really nice people, we just have an unhealthy obsession with meaningless facts).

We take it kind of seriously, though.

It’s basically a big fundraiser to support the college radio station, WWSP. It’s 89.9FM if you’re in town, and streaming online via iTunes or TuneIn if you’re not. Brett lives far enough outside Stevens Point that he can’t get WWSP on his radio (he also lives far enough outside of town that he has no internet service, but that’s his own fault).

Anyway, all of us in the office (except for Rachel, who only just moved here) are psyched for this weekend to varying degrees. Brett and Pat are on teams that have been playing for over 20 years. Pat’s team does better than Brett’s every year. Every. Single. Year. But their friendship has withstood such hardships. Somehow.

In Point, Trivia is something the players look forward to every year, and it’s an excuse to get together with old friends and junk food, stay up for 54 solid hours, and answer literally hundreds of questions about sports, history, old movies, and cereal box packaging. Nothing is sacred.

During Trivia weekend, the entire town changes. Local businesses offer special promotions. Traffic increases in some areas and decreases in others, as travel patterns change to be more Trivia-centric. It’s very difficult to find a hotel room.

But the support is palpable.

Over the years (47 of them), the contest has changed a bit. Now that the internet is a thing, the questions have gotten very complex. Sometimes, trying to figure out exactly which nugget of information is required is more difficult than tracking down the answer itself. Most of the time, the answer is only contained in an obscure source that can’t be found online.

Trivia kicks off each year with the Trivia Movie, a secret film that’s shown at a local theater for two days, where members of the different teams show up and take furious notes. Throughout the contest, there will be questions where the only setup is, “In the Trivia movie…” So if you haven’t seen it, you’ll have a rough time triangulating exactly which movie they’re talking about.

Each hour is broken down into eight questions (with a few exceptions). The DJ will ask the question, then play a song–usually an oldies tune or a novelty song while all 400+ teams madly research, confirm, and call the Trivia hotline to give their answer. Then the DJ will repeat the question and play a second song. At the end of the second song, operators stop taking calls for the answer and the DJ immediately reads the next question. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For 54 hours, non-stop. The contest starts at 6pm CST on Friday and runs until midnight on Sunday. And you’re more than welcome to listen in, whether you’re on a team or not.

At the top of each hour, the DJs read off the top five teams, and twice during the weekend, they read off the entire list of teams and their places. That hour is especially gruelling, since to make the time for the whole list, they limit the time between each question to one song instead of two.

To make things interesting, they also have a scavenger hunt around town, called the Trivia Stone. Teams are sorted into two houses–sorry–two groups, A and B, and each group has a different route. The scavenger hunt runs all weekend, with strange, oblique clues given out to guide players along their route. At the end of each set of directions is a volunteer who will stamp your Trivia book, confirming that you made it. Then, the next set of directions starts where you left off, and you’re on the hunt again.

There are also three Music Questions, where they have cruelly cut together eight tiny, un-Shazam-able snippets of songs that you KNOW you’ve heard somewhere, but since they’re surrounded by the other snippets, you just can’t figure them out. One year, it was just eight clips of different drum fills. Another year, one question was just car honk sounds from different songs. We didn’t even know there existed eight different songs with car horns in them.

So that’s Trivia. It’s a phenomenon that literally takes over the town for a weekend every year, and we kinda love it.