We have a special tutorial for all of you trivia players out there, including those on Your Resume Sucks, More Beer Less Pants and Brian Williams Reporting Live (the latter of whom we couldn’t tag for some reason). You’re going to learn how to do a trivia game re-cap. Think it’s just as simple as “write down all of the questions/categories/answers scores/teams and then type up everything later?” Yes, that’s basically the gist of it, but we’re going to share some of our top tips to writing trivia game re-caps with all of you! Why? Because we love the people who actually bother to read these damn things!
1. Think outside the box. Don’t have paper? Playing in a tournament where “regular” paper isn’t allowed? Find anything else available on which you can scrawl your questions. Napkins will work, try to find the ones most soaked with beer, pizza sauce, tears of shame for forgetting Parker Posey’s name, you get the drift. Paper beer mats (or coasters, if you’re unrefined) also work great. Be sure to use the printed side of the beer mats, not the plain side. You don’t want things to be too easy, do you? While we’re on the subject of beer mats, did you know the collection of paper beer mats is called tegestology?
2. Don’t be too perfect. You should not be able to read your drunken, heavily abbreviated scrawlings the next day. Use shorthand that you don’t understand, spell proper names incorrectly and be fuzzy and vague about numbers (the qualifier “ish” works great here). Remember, you can always Google everything when you’re typing it up anyway. Also, those little (or big) mistakes that wind up in your published re-cap are great for testing whether your page’s followers are actually reading your re-caps.
3. Include lots of commentary on questions, especially on the questions you missed. Your trivia rivals will love reveling in your misery and learning your weaknesses. It’s called “schadenfreude.” Google that. And like Don Henley said, people love dirty laundry. Also, putting in lots of commentary guarantees that if other teams copy and paste your re-cap to post on their pages, they will have to do at least a little bit of work editing it out and putting in their own. And this means you get to experience some schadenfreude yourself!
4. Use a photo that has only a tenuous connection to the questions that were asked – or even better yet, no connection at all. Christopher Lee is always a great go-to photo because he was just such a bad-ass. Did you know he recorded a heavy metal album when he was in his ’90s? More than one, as a matter of fact. He was also related to author Ian Fleming, who wrote the “James Bond” books. Now who can name the character Christopher Lee is playing in the picture?
5. We don’t actually have a fifth tip for you guys. But if you bothered to read this far, we just want to say thanks for continuing to read our game re-caps! And in case you didn’t notice, this whole thing was pretty much a lame attempt at satire. Now to get cracking on that resume for “Cracked.” Over and out, Go Pods!
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