Living in the post trivia era

I don’t own stock in the company, but if I did, I would have sold it at least a year ago. Actually, that’s not true. I would probably have held on to it, and then kicked myself for not having sold it: it’s down about 23 per cent over last year.

I’m talking about the Hasbro Games company, and its one-time big selling product, “Trivial Pursuit.” And the reason I’m saying I should have sold out is quite simple: there’s no such a thing as trivia anymore. Let me rephrase that one too. There’s no such thing as unanswered trivia any more. Everyone seems to have the means to get to the root of the problem straight away. All it takes is a cellphone. We’re living in the post-trivia era.

Let me give you a simple example. I was sitting in the sun during the summer, deep in profound thought. “I wonder how the second verse of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ goes,” I asked. My intention, obviously, was to obtain acknowledgement that I had posed a very difficult question, and appreciation for my obvious skill in being able to remember the first verse. Not a chance. Instead, one of my companions pulled out an iPad, and in 29 seconds, I was told when the song was written, who played what instruments at the recording session, and what the other members of the Beatles really thought about the song. (Okay: Paul McCartney wrote it, John Lennon and George Harrison hated it; no record of Ringo’s opinion has been kept, but any guy who can foist a song like “Octopus’ Garden” on the world has no standing as far as I’m concerned to criticize anyone else’s writing; George Martin played the organ, and Mal Evans struck the anvil. See—I’ve already told you more than you want to know about the song, and all I had to do was take it off the first website I came to after typing in the name of the song.)

So now, Trivial Pursuit is pointless. I don’t feel sorry for Hasbro Games: it’s a grown company, and can make its way forward with old stalwarts like My Little Pony, Play-Doh, Monopoly and Scrabble. Nor do I feel sorry for the fabled Canadian inventors of the game, Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, who with very good timing sold the rights to the game to Hasbro in 2008 for U.S. $80 million, after everybody on the planet had already bought a copy. But I do feel sorry for the unfortunate soul who is sometimes referred to as the ‘Trivia Geek’— that socially awkward creature who can tell you, all the way back to 1947, who won the National and American League batting championships, as well as their stats for RBIs, home runs and slugging percentage. Trivia Geeks rarely get a chance to shine, and now their moment of glory has been taken away by the Internet, the Smartphone, Wikipedia and heartless newspaper columnists.

But there is a deeper side to the problem as well. What will happen to the spirit of inquiry? For example, if I can’t reach Terry Sprague, I no longer have to guess whether the distinctive “coo-roo-koo-koo-kookoo” I hear in the wild might be a herring gull or a common Mackenzie brother. Instead, I just record it onto my Smartphone and a birding ‘app’ will tell me what species I heard. It seems to me that the easier the answer is to find, the harder it becomes to maintain curiosity about the inquiry.

And I worry about the social implications of too-easy access to information. Suppose you run into an acquaintance outside the Foodland. It might at one time have been entirely appropriate to smile, say hello and toss off a casual ‘’looks like it might rain today.” That just won’t cut it any more. Your acquaintance will answer “well, actually, according to theweathernetwork.com, there’s only a 15 per cent probability of rain for the Trenton area today. But I would hate to be in Moncton, where the effects of tropical storm Gladys are expected to bring six centimetres of rain in a 12-hour period.” That’s a conversation stopper.

No, we’ll either have to become more profound, more obtuse, or more opinionated. The second and third of those sound like they carry the potential for disaster. So maybe we will have to turn to profundity. Maybe we will need to respond to a “good day” salutation with something like “…and the same to you, however you define ‘good’, whether it implies a virtuous time or hedonistic time; and whether goodness can be measured over the span of a day, or over a lifetime; or indeed, perhaps only after a lifetime is over, which in turn depends on whether there is a God, about which I would love to chat with you further.”

Now there’s a response that opens up the door for a conversation that’s a little more meaty than batting averages. The computer won’t give you an answer.

(Actually, it will. For the sake of science, I asked my computer “what is the point of life?” It instantaneously spat back an even 1,400,000 entries. Entry number one was an earnest Wikipedia discussion. But I struck it lucky on entry number two. It said “Hi I’m Verne. This site is about visiting, moving to and living in the Hawaiian Islands.” So I guess I was being told that hedonism is the answer; or that the answer lies in the journey, since it would take me a lifetime to check all those entries.)

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.