By Steven Witkin ‘16

The rise of smartphones and social media has created and forgotten countless fads. Social competition and ease of access combined has paved the way for games like Flappy Bird, Words with Friends and Clash of Clans. It may sound surprising, but another type of smartphone game has become immensely popular among both teens and adults —trivia.

“Trivia,” popularized in the 1980s by Jeopardy and the Trivial Pursuit board game, literally means worthless or unimportant details. The trivia game market, once confined to long-lasting board and computer games, has boomed recently on smartphones, giving students and teachers alike an outlet for all of their useless knowledge. The two largest trivia apps are QuizUp and TriviaCrack. What is distinctive about these games is their connection to social networks. Both games connect through Facebook, email and others so users can play against their friends in real time.

QuizUp and TriviaCrack have become enormously popular due to their short game lengths, competitiveness and fun topic categories. This allows for quick between-class gaming. Junior Tyler Golsen, who is currently sixth in the state for QuizUp’s “The Beatles” category, as well as an avid TriviaCrack player, says the appeal is in the competition. Explaining why he plays, Golsen said it’s about “trying to be smarter than your friends.”

QuizUp, which boasts over 20 million users from 197 countries since its release in 2013, has 673 distinct topics to choose from, ranging from Indian Mythology to The Sopranos. TriviaCrack has a less specialized format structured almost identically to Trivial Pursuit. There are the same six broad categories and colors as Trivial Pursuit. Players must answer the crown question correctly in each category to win. While QuizUp attracts trivia players who specialize in a specific topic, TriviaCrack has drawn in the masses with its colorful app and its easier questions based on common knowledge. While it launched in Argentina this summer, where it has its own television show and board game, its American launch in November pulled in over 65 million users after only a month.

To keep players from getting too many repeat questions, these games must have thousands of accurate questions. Since both games are run by relatively small app developers—QuizUp in Iceland and TriviaCrack in Argentina—it would be impossible for them hire the necessary question-makers. Instead, both games use a Wikipedia-like method of using questions submitted by players. TriviaCrack claims to receive 200,000 questions a day and reject most of them. Because the majority of questions are submitted by users, incorrect and irrelevant questions are sometimes approved by mistake.

Trivia apps are not only fun competitive games, they are mental and scholastic exercises, and teachers have picked up on this. Several teachers play trivia, especially TriviaCrack, and even get competitive with their students. History teacher Scott Allen noted how playing trivia helps with test-taking. “It requires critical thinking. Many times you may get a question and have to use a strategy to answer them,” said Allen. “If I could get my students to carry these strategies over to their unit exams and quizzes they would do much better on multiple choice questions.”

Senior Chris Takiar, state champion in QuizUp’s Name the Element category, said the benefit of trivia is that “it’s a fun way to apply the concepts you learn in the classroom.” Other teachers who play trivia apps against their students include math teacher Tim Altaner, social studies teacher Beth Shevitz and foreign language teacher Maria Peterson.

Portable and social trivia games have a lot of potential. They entertain and teach at the same time, make fact-based school topics more enjoyable, and could possibly replace the current Jeopardy format for in-class review. Only time will tell whether social trivia will recede into obscurity or continue to challenge players for years to come.