Suggestions on how to create trivia questions

June 25, 2018 10:34 AM

I'm looking for advice on how to craft movie-related trivia questions that can't easily be answered with a quick Google search.

I'd like to come up with some movie-themed trivia questions for a contest. People would essentially have unlimited time to answer them, using whatever resources they want (asking friends, looking up stuff on-line, consulting books, whatever). It's too easy to answer questions like, "Who won the best actress award in 2015?", because a quick Google search would give you the answer.

So I'm thinking of something like, "When was the last time the best actor/actress Oscar was awarded to someone who was born in New Jersey"? It's still possible to research this question, but maybe not quite as easy.

Of course, if there is some published source that I could tap into for pre-written questions, that would be great, as well.

Also, the questions shouldn't be so hard that no-one will get them. Maybe a hint can be built into the question.

I might be asking for the impossible here... I dunno.

One other thing: If you have specific questions you're suggesting (as opposed to a general approach for crafting questions), please MeMail them to me directly, rather than posting them here. Otherwise, they'll show up in a Google search. Thanks.

posted by JD Sockinger to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (10 answers total)

One way to make it take longer but not necessarily be more difficult is to make them do some math based on two or more answers. Example: (__ Monkeys + Catch __) x Number of Von Trapp siblings
posted by soelo at 10:42 AM on June 25, 2018

Ken Jennings' Trivia Tuesday emails accomplish this by asking questions like:

"What unusual distinction is shared by all these movies? Beauty and the Beast, Being John Malkovich, Chocolat, Desperado, The Great Wall, Interview with the Vampire, Master and Commander, Out for Justice, Pulp Fiction, Thor: Ragnarok, The Witches of Eastwick, Yojimbo." (Tuesday Trivia DCXIX, Ken Jennings)

There are also visual rounds (Geeks Who Drink style), especially if you're distributing paper quizzes and edit the images to make reverse image search difficult.
posted by thack3r at 10:55 AM on June 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

Best answer: You should check out the questions on Learned League. It's an online trivia league, so even though nobody cheats because cheating is wrong and also against league rules, the questions are all written in a way that it wouldn't be easy to google. Film is a category. I wouldn't suggest using these questions (stealing is also wrong) but their phrasing may give you some ideas for composing questions of your own.


Here are a few movie related questions from this season so far:

What everyday object, a compound machine consisting of two wedges connected by two levers, appears in the titles of a fantasy film from 1990 and a 2006 cinematic memoir, and was also central to the plot of the 1991 thriller Dead Again?

Identify either of the films that fill in the blanks in the following list. Dirty Harry, _______________, The Enforcer, _______________, The Dead Pool.

Though she did not star in the film (having died seven years earlier), Rita Hayworth plays an important role (of sorts) as a plot element in what 1994 film?

The actor who portrayed fictional mercenary leader Barney Ross in a three-film series during the 2010s has portrayed two other characters in successful multi-film franchises with at least three installments. Give the name of either of these other two characters.
posted by phunniemee at 11:13 AM on June 25, 2018 [3 favorites]

You could Six Degrees-format questions, like "What supporting actor do the films Beetlejuice and Ferris Bueller's Day Off share?" (IIRC there's only one, but I guess you'd wanna check first!)
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 11:53 AM on June 25, 2018

One approach I've seen involves indirection, and visual information.

In this big screen film, Mrs. Murphy strongly disapproves of an offer of employment to her husband, finding it blasphemous and disrespectful. According to the Pepsi sign, what's the list price of a pork chop and ribs? Please be complete.
posted by zamboni at 12:02 PM on June 25, 2018

Best answer: There's a movie quiz on BBC Radio 4 and one of the rounds involves describing the action in a scene without using character names or actor names or dialogue. 'A group of people are singing. A boy is playing drums....'
Surprisingly tricky and fun, rewards people who know and love the film.
posted by Heloise9 at 12:22 PM on June 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: One approach is to refer to movies or actors/actresses by their characteristics rather than by naming them directly. So, instead of "Who won the best actress award in 2015?", which was Brie Larson, pick some detail about the movie or the actress and make the question about that.

The movie was called "Room". Not "The Room", which is the famously awful movie by Tommy Wiseau.

In the movie she plays Joy and her son is Jack. Oddly, Jennifer Lawrence was nominated that year, also for a character named Joy.

Three of the nominees that year were in their 20s.

She was born in Sacramento.

Perhaps something like "This Sacramento born actress won an Academy Award for playing the mother of Jack, in a movie that could be confused with a famously bad movie featuring Johnny, Mark, and Lisa".

To make it easier you could say "Best Actress" award.

This controversial actress, producer, director, writer, editor, and cinematographer filmed Hitler in 1935 and briefly became the world's oldest scuba diver after filming an underwater documentary 67 years later.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 12:27 PM on June 25, 2018

Best answer: There's actually a thread about Google-proof trivia on the LearnedLeague message boards right now. It's highly derailed, because people on the LL message boards are obsessed with discussing possible cheating, but there are some good suggestions interspersed.
posted by kevinbelt at 12:28 PM on June 25, 2018

Best answer: Many, many years ago, I used to hang out in an AOL chatroom (like I say, many years ago) called "Guess Movie by Plot." The name speaks for itself, but the concept was simple and intriguing. It worked best as a chatroom game because who ever was in charge could keep adding details until someone guessed right (that person would then get to describe the next movie), but I could see it working in a more traditional context as well.

Some of my favorite versions involved taking a deliberately topsy-turvy approach to the plot (it's a bit cliched and also feels icky now, but for instance, portraying the rebels in Star Wars as terrorists), or focusing on a side-plot (I used to enjoy describing Godfather II as a movie about the Cuban revolution).
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 9:02 PM on June 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

Maybe questions where you have to put movies in a certain order according to certain metrics? Though it'd still be Google-able, it would take a little longer to do. Some ideas I had for a list were things like "age of the film's top-billed star at the time of the film's release", "number of years between when the novel was published and when the movie based on the novel came out", "total number of feature films directed by the same director", etc.

This would take a little more work, but it could also be fun to make anagrams out of different film titles or actors' names and have an unscramble section. Thanks Mo = Tom Hanks, harder ones that I can't think of right now because I have poo brain, etc.
posted by helloimjennsco at 8:48 AM on June 26, 2018