First of all, I have no knowledge of what is cool and what is trendy. It’s important to establish that. In fact, I’m not really sure what a current craze would even look like if I stumbled across it. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the viral or progressive and I am not aware of what is cutting edge. Actually, the only way I would even have any involvement on trend spotting is that when something is pretty much played out, when it’s already becoming un-cool, that exactly when I’ll first hear about it — Marketing experts call this The Everett Point and they track it on progression and sales curves. It’s also a good way to know when to dump stock.
But one of the advantages of living with teenaged sons is that if you pay attention, if you look around, you can actually have a front row seat to the relatively new — if only by osmosis but that still counts. And this is one of those times.
So here it is.
There is an app called Trivia Crack, that — at the time of this writing — is officially the single most popular app in the country — and we are following Latin America where it is even more widely popular.
How it works is, you load this app on your phone and then you play against your friends on general trivia questions— you can choose random opponents as well but that takes out the fun of texting those you are playing against and taunting them. You spin the wheel which determines what category question you need to answer; art, science, history, geography, entertainment or sports. You are asked a question and you have a time limit — which is several seconds shy of how long it would take you to Google it. If you answer correctly, then you get another question and another and your opponent has to wait their turn until you get an answer wrong; sitting and watching the screen, hoping you’ll lose so they can get back in the game and save their dignity.
You need to collect the characters that correspond to each one of the categories that are determined by the wheel and you can steal characters from your person your playing if you challenge them. There are Power-Ups that will help you along with ways to eliminate options of any of the tough 90,000 questions that are constantly updated.
Now the game itself is pretty fun but that’s not the interesting part about it.
By definition, because you are playing a real life person, Trivia Crack falls in the category of a social game; meaning that you are competing with a living, breathing people somewhere else. But that title is somewhat misleading because some of the most anti-social activities can be done with social games — if you are holed up in a room for a weekend playing an interactive game with someone online, this is not exactly a social activity.
But Trivia Crack is different. First of all it’s very difficult to play the game alone. Meaning you will most likely need help, advice, direction on at least some of the areas that you’re not familiar with. So if you are playing the game in a room with people — even in a room with complete strangers — you can’t help but call out for help. Quick, what Hockey team won the most championships? And someone will answer you.
Here’s an example. We were playing the game in our living room the other night; four different games going with four different people that we knew and all of us helping each other win — and we make the ultimate team; Alex is an encyclopedia of sports knowledge, Debbie has a medical and science background Nick is great with pop culture and I have all the weird stuff. So we’re at home playing as a group.
Now a friend of ours, who is just one of those games going, was in a car with another group of other friends coming back from a trip. They are all screaming out answers to help Dave; helping him play and we are all at home were helping my wife. And — here comes the best part — while they stopped at a restaurant to eat, Dave shouted out a question to Jeff who was ahead of him and a random person heard it and answered — therefore involving even more people.
Trivia Crack as far as a game is great, but it does what Angry Birds and Candy Crush could never do. It actually gets real people talking to each other in order to play.
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