Tickled by trivia

In a wired world of Facebook addicts, online poker players and Addictinggames.com loyalists, it isn’t difficult to find distractions from everyday life.

The Internet is teeming with Web sites designed to let people explore, play and procrastinate through the day. One particular site has been popping up on screens across campus, and students are beginning to recognize it as a possible alternative to their usual daily diversions.

Sporcle.com, launched in 2007, is an online trivia site offering timed quizzes about everything from history and geography to music and movies. According to the site’s homepage, there are currently about 2,800 published quizzes and 66,066 user-created quizzes to choose from, and the numbers just keep growing. The site also recently came out with an application for the iPhone so that users can play on-the-go.

Sporcle founder Matt Ramme, an avid fan of crossword puzzles and Jeopardy!, said that he created the site because he found himself wanting to know the answers to basic trivia questions.

“The idea basically started with me trying to learn information such as the U.S. state capitals,” Ramme said.

He said that he started with flashcards to try to memorize information, and then eventually began building tools online to create a more sophisticated system. The first quiz he published asked users to name all of the U.S. presidents in 10 minutes.

Stefanie Grubbs, a 20-year-old junior linguistics major, said that she likes using Sporcle because she gets to see how much she knows about a wide variety of topics.

“It’s a better form of entertainment than some of the other games we end up playing,” Grubbs said. “It’s more educational—there’s more to gain from it.”

Sporcle product manager Derek Pharr also talked about the site as an entertaining and educational alternative to other online activities.

“It’s guilt-free time wasting,” Pharr said. “It’s a way to maybe take a break from your studies or do something with your friends. It’s not just sitting down and maybe watching some viral video or something online. You feel better for doing it in a way.”

Pharr said that he and Ramme look at several factors when they consider publishing a user-created quiz. Among these factors is the quality and variety of the quiz, its level of accuracy and whether other users have nominated it.

“At the end of the day, we want things that are high quality but also fun,” Pharr said. “It’s got to be something that’s enjoyable to play.”

Ramme said that one of the reasons he thinks Sporcle is becoming increasingly popular on college campuses is its ability to function as a form of social entertainment.

“It’s a great group activity,” Ramme said. “You get one computer up, and a bunch of people huddle around the computer and yell out answers.”

Vignesh Ramachandran, a 20-year-old junior broadcast news major, said that he enjoys the site because it allows for more interaction than some of the other things he does with his friends, such as watching movies.

“When you have a lot of people over, it’s kind of fun to just play that as a game,” Ramachandran said. “And it gets everyone involved.”

Because Sporcle does present quizzes on a multitude of academic subjects, in addition to intensive tests on sports and pop-culture, some users said that it is useful as an educational tool.

Chelsea Brotherton, a 19-year-old sophomore integrated physiology major, said that she used the site’s quiz on the periodic table of elements to study for a chemistry test.

“It’s like a game, but you learn things, too,” Brotherton said. “It makes you feel like you’re not completely wasting your time.”

Ramachandran also commented on the informative benefits of the site. He said that the knowledge gained from some of the quizzes, such as the state capitals or the countries of the world, is useful trivia to know for day-to-day life.

“You’re playing a little quiz game, but maybe you’re brushing up on your trivia and learning a few facts or a few things that you didn’t know or you hadn’t reviewed since elementary school,” Ramachandran said. “Those are things we don’t practice anymore.”

Timothy Oakes, associate professor and chair of the geography department, said that while he has never used Sporcle, he does appreciate the kinds of trivia games it provides.

“I would say that testing yourself with geography trivia is perhaps not a complete waste of time, and is even a better use of online time than many other diversions out there,” Oakes said.

But trivia quizzes have limited value, Oakes said.

“They don’t really have much to do with geography as a field of study,” Oakes said. “Approaching geography as capitals and countries trivia is exactly the kind of thing we try and teach against in our classes. It misses the point of geography as a field of study, which is to understand our relationships with the world and how those relationships change.”

Ramme said that he thinks some of the content on the site does give users a better sense of the world around them. He mentioned watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics with a group of friends and listening to their comments about the countries represented on the screen. Some talked about how they didn’t previously know the names or locations of all of the countries until they took the quiz on Sporcle.

“I think there’s this feeling of happiness that you kind of have a greater understanding of the world,” Ramme said.

Pharr said that he and Ramme have gotten feedback from users of the site who say that they have used it to make study guides or to practice for final exams. Pharr said that it depends on what quizzes people choose to take, but that he thinks the site can be beneficial to the learning experience.

“We hope that we’re actually helping to expand peoples’ horizons and to educate as well as entertain, or to entertain as well as educate,” Pharr said. “We’re hoping that people will go and have a good time and learn something that maybe they didn’t know before.”

Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Kaely Moore at Kaely.moore@colorado.edu.