As a young child, I can fondly remember rushing to finish my dinner and guzzle down my glass of milk to get in front of the TV. “Finish your veggies, Keaton,” my mom would say as I shied away from the mound of asparagus, “and then you can go watch television.” But unlike other seven-year-olds eager to catch the latest episode of Even Stevens or Hey Arnold!, I was stoked about my half-hour daily trivia session with Alex Trebek on Jeopardy!.
I’ve always been obsessed with Jeopardy!. I’m not sure if it was Alex’s Canadian witticisms, the high stakes gambling of the Daily Doubles, or simply the fact that it gave me a chance to outsmart my parents, but since I could count, I’ve been fascinated by the treasure trove of knowledge that is Jeopardy!.
As I grew older, my love of Jeopardy! grew with me. In middle school physical science classes, I astonished teachers with my knowledge of the chemical symbol for Tungsten, W, which I’d learned in the Double Jeopardy round the night before. In high school Academic League competitions, I was consistently reminded that there was no need to give my answers in the form of a question. “This isn’t Jeopardy!,” the moderator would scold.
In college, despite losing access to cable television for two years, I kept up the spirit of Jeopardy!, wasting precious class time memorizing world capitals on Sporcle, or reading Shakespearean play synopses for that one day when I would need to know the lead female character from Much Ado About Nothing (“Who is Beatrice?”).
So, this past November, I applied to be in the College Tournament. But unlike my previous two attempts, I was invited out to Los Angeles for a personality interview and mock game, the final steps before getting on the show. So close to realizing a lifetime dream, though, I find myself contemplating how much Jeopardy! has changed since I first fell in love with the program.
The format is essentially the same as it was when Trebek resuscitated Jeopardy! in 1984. Two rounds. 30 questions per round. Double Jeopardy. Final Jeopardy. Theme song. All unchanged. The aesthetics, too, have been fairly static, never venturing from the standard blue and white color scheme.
And yet, as Jeopardy! has continued to air its standard trivia competition, the world around it has been transformed by the Information Age. The internet and ensuing creations like Google searches, Wikipedia, and Cha Cha have revolutionized the ways we learn about our world.
No longer does it take a trip to the library and a skim through The World Almanac to find out that Mister Robberts by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan won the first Tony Award for Best Play in 1948. Google it. Facts are more widely accessible now than they ever were before, and anyone with an Internet connection can learn almost anything.
In most ways, such technological advancements are positive, but in terms of trivia competitions, the Information Age has done a lot to damage the brand. Look to the bros using their iPhones to look up the answers during Tombs’ Trivia as evidence of a lost art.
For Jeopardy! such challenges don’t exist, but technology has not left the quintessential trivia program unscathed. In 2011, Watson, a supercomputer created by IBM, competed on Jeopardy! against two of the show’s greatest contestants: Brad Rutter and all-time earnings leader Ken Jennings.
It was a blowout. Watson dominated its opponents, winning $25,334 more than its closest opponent in the first trial, and bested the humans by a whopping $53,147 in round two. Watson’s victory, though imperfect—it guessed Toronto as a U.S. city whose largest airport was named for a World War II hero—finally proves that, in terms of trivia, machine beats man.
So if we can no longer compete with our hardwired creations, what’s the point of being able to ramble off the capitals of Australian states or the Popes of the 14th century? A computer, or anyone on the internet, can do the same thing without spending the time to actually learn anything.
The simple answer: it’s fun. Jeopardy! still averages over 10 million viewers an episode, Tombs’ Trivia is always filled to the brim, and nothing quite brings a freshman floor together quite like a group Sporcle session. We still like showing off what we know, even if the skill itself has been cheapened by an infinite access to facts.
And while the facts themselves have been relegated to the non-Jeopardy!-viewing masses, there’s still a skill in being able to quickly connect concepts across a myriad of disciplines in your mind. At least that’s what I tell myself to make my trip to the Jeopardy! auditions seem special.
Call Keaton a know-it-all at khoffman@georgetownvoice.com
