The Birth of Bing

As some of you may remember from previous posts, my wife and I were involved in a trivia website. In fact, that's how we met, through online trivia playing games in live IRC chat rooms. Eventually we started our own website. The website[^] is still out there but we've had nothing to do with it for nearly four years and it seems, as far as I can tell, to be inactive.

But prior to that website I was already heavily involved in writing some of the software we used to run the games. I wasn't the only one of course but I fancy my version of the game software was better than its rivals. Of course, I would say that wouldn't I.

The way it all worked was that the game software would run the question and the players would answer, preceding their answer with a dot .

That dot was very important; without it the game software didn't see your answer at all! At the end of the round the game would score peoples answers and assign points accordingly. If you, the game host, were lucky, a player would have typed an answer that exactly matched what you had in which case marking was automatic. More usually players would type only part of the answer and rely on the host to divine their meaning and score it appropriately. We had a three letter rule; you had to type at least three letters of the answer and many a furious argument would flourish if the host felt that an answer was insufficient.

Usually one had two or three very good players and a bunch of somewhat less good players. As the weeks passed most players would work out who had a high scoring average and it became quite common to 'lem' a good player. Ie, to follow them over the precipice like a lemming. Some of the better players would play a wicked game; they'd fire out an answer at the start but precede it with a comma which didn't count. Other players would lem them and, right at the end of the round, they'd drop the right answer in with a dot. I fixed that one by allowing comma as well! :)

As the author of the software I felt it behooved me to actually run games with it. How else would I know if the software was usable under real world conditions? How else would I be able to guess which features might be valuable and which not? So I ran at least 3 games a week. They say that Television is a voracious consumer of material; to that I'd add that so are trivia games! Finding 105 new questions a week was quite the challenge.

So I (we) would take shortcuts sometimes. The software kept track of how often a given question had been used and how long ago. You could select a random set of questions or you could choose those that had the longest fallow period and so on. And so, one night, I used that feature but I didn't preview what questions comprised the game.

So off we go running the game. Three or four questions in and up comes one where the answer was Bing Crosby. Someone answered .bing and many others lemmed. So far so good.

A couple of questions later and up came another question to which the answer was, you guessed it, Bing Crosby. And again, a little later. This was becoming embarassing! By the time the fourth question to which the answer was Bing Crosby came up everyone was in the swing of things and .binging away like crazy. In fact, they became so enthusiastic that they started answering .bing even when that wasn't the correct answer. So I started scoring .bing with 5 points.

The game ended, I handed the chatroom over to the next host and went and added bing to the game. From that night on, if the host enabled it, answering .bing would earn you 5 points whether you were right or not!

And of course that little change annoyed some players. I even lost a couple of regulars over it. They felt that it diluted the competitive nature of the game. Maybe it did but it was all meant to be fun anyway *shrug*. Bing stayed!