Then came the Internet: How could Trivial Pursuit survive in the age of Google? The Internet has the rewritten the rules of the game. The old measure of the trivia master was how many facts he could cram into his head. The new measure is how nimbly he can manipulate a search engine to call up the answer. The now-defunct ABC show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire included a lifeline called 'phone-a-friend,' in which a desperate contestant was supposed to call upon the knowledge of a smart companion. Seconds after the contestant dialed for help, you could hear the guy on the other end pecking away at a keyboard Googling and I thought, This is it. Trivia is dead.
That's overstating it a little. Trivia lives; it's generalist trivia, the kind of fluency that Trivial Pursuit prized, that's ailing. . . . Gone is the proud generalist of the original Trivial Pursuit, who knew the most common Russian surname (Ivanov) and the international radio code word for the letter O (Oscar). In his place is the specialist, who knows every inch of Return of the Jedi.
When's the last time you picked up a Trivial Pursuit board? And where does Quizzo fit into all this?
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