Obsessive ? Moi ? Well, now that you mention it . . .

Answers on a postcard for this one. Is it desirable to have an obsessive personality if you want to get to a certain level in quizzing ? I’ll tell you why I ask the question. I was on Facebook earlier, playing Triviador, and was messaged by Daniel ( proprietor of the TQA blog ). I don’t know if you’ve ever played Triviador, but it’s difficult to hold a typed conversation as you’re playing the game, because you risk your answers coming out in the conversation, rather than where they belong in Triviador. So I told Daniel that I was on the game, thus preparing him for any meaningless numbers that suddenly appeared in our conversation, to which he replied jokingly that I am a Triviador addict. Addict is a bit strong, but I have to admit that at the moment it is the latest of the obsessive phases that I go through from time to time.

At the moment I find that I’m making sure that I play at least 5 games a day, and Heaven help me, but I’m impossible to live with if I find that I’ve dropped out of the top 1% of players. That can’t be healthy. It’s not as if Triviador is the finest quiz game ever created either. It’s fun, but it certainly has its flaws. It’s not as if this is the first game this has happened with either. There was Sporcle – which is still a hell of a lot of fun. Then there was the quiz race game on the BQA site, until that went down. I didn’t even mind paying for that one. Then there was The Bank Job online game. Then the City Challenge on Facebook.

I seem to have been in confessional mode a lot recently. Well, so be it. Alea jacta est and all that. The fact is that it’s not even really about maybe learning new things, in fact, it’s not even really about beating innocent strangers, although I’m honest enough to admit that I don’t mind doing this at all. However, often it’s more about beating myself than anything else. Case in point. Last year during the summer break I went through a phase of trying to beat my time on sporcle naming all of the elements in the periodic table, or identifying the flags of all nations, or naming the world’s capital cities in order of northernmost to southernmost. What’s more, at the time spending a couple of hours doing this seemed like perfectly normal behaviour to me. As Edmund Blackadder once said “Cluck cluck, gibber gibber, my old man’s a mushroom etc. “ If any of you happen to be in the Dyffryn Arms this evening, I’ll be the one in the corner with the potty on the head, and the pencils up the nose.