(tara atkinson)
The team Lawrence Undead,
a group composed mostly of
Lawrence alums who have been
playing trivia for years, won the
Great Midwest Trivia Contest XLV.
The team of self-proclaimed “dedicated
players” stayed up for about
39 hours during the two-day nonstop
contest.
During Trivia, players tune into
the Lawrence’s WLFM to hear questions
read by the trivia masters.
Various teams then call in with the
answers.
This trivia contest includes
unusual questions, as well as extra
tasks players are asked to do,
known as action questions. One
team responded to an action question
by staging a Bris, a Jewish circumcision,
to the sound of Britney
Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More
Time.”
In Lawrence’s contest, the
last question of the year before is
always the first question for the
following year.
Part of the fun seemed to be in
taking silly questions seriously, as
members of the winning team Greg
Griffin, the campus center director,
and his daughter Marianne, Plantz
Hall RHD, both alums, seemed to
think.
Greg Griffin discussed his formation
of a “war room.” According
to him a proper war room consists
of “large conference tables with all
players sitting around it, computers
and phones ready, a couple
of dry erase boards, box loads of
crap for action questions … and
an ample supply of caffeine, beer
and food.”
Another key to Trivia success
was giving teammates a schedule,
Greg Griffin said. According to
Greg Griffin, this involved “getting
people to alternate sleep schedules
so you don’t have everyone playing
at 1 a.m. and nobody playing
at 5 a.m.”
The way people answered their
questions has changed considerably
over the years, said Greg
Griffin. He reminisced that the contest
has evolved “from 1,000 books
and rotary phones to a half-dozen
laptops and cell phones.”
He continued, “The current
iteration is very different, but just
as fun … a bunch of people sitting
around trying to answer stupid
questions that no sane person
would ever care about.”
When asked why she plays trivia,
Marianne Griffin said that she
played because she “got to hang
out with all my friends … we had
a few Trivia-virgins on our team, and its always fun to watch them switch from skepticism to addiction in the matter of a few hours. It’s the high of being the person who gets just one question right that keeps you coming back over and over.
(tara atkinson)
(tara atkinson)
(tara atkinson)