Picture Handouts - what are they good for?

I don’t expect for one minute that everyone who regularly plays in quizzes will agree with me on this, but that’s fine. It’s just my personal opinion. As we so often say, please feel free to disagree. The thing is, I just don’t like picture quizzes. – Ah – those who know me might say – that’s because you’re no good at them- which is sadly true. If you were to twist my arm behind my back, I’d offer my opinion that recognising people’s faces, while a valuable skill in its own right, isn’t really quizzing. Okay, okay, put the pitchforks down, please – as I said this is just my opinion. I’ll try to explain my prejudice against picture handouts. Some people think that with a quiz question it’s simple – you either know the answer or you don’t. Personally I don’t think so. In the early days of the blog I formulated what I grandiosely titled Clark’s taxonomy of questions, in which I split them into 4 basic types, namely :-

Questions whose answers you know that you know.

Questions whose answers you don’t know that you know.

Questions whose answers you know that you don’t know.

Questions whose answers you don’t know that you don’t know.

So, for example, last Thursday night we were asked “In which cathedral is the tomb of King John?” Immediately I answered Gloucester, convinced that I’d heard this in another quiz. Heaven alone knows why because the answer was Worcester. You see, I didn’t know that I didn’t know it. On the other hand, though, we were also asked at one point,

“Where did experts replace confide save the number of flags?” No, I didn’t know that I knew it. This is partly because ‘experts’ was wrong. ‘Confide’ and ‘flags’ were nagging away at me, and when I decided that instead of experts the question master may have meant ‘expects’ then I was able to get the answer – Nelson’s message to his ships at the Battle of Trafalgar.

So, wending my tortuous way towards my point, in a quiz, I always feel that there should be opportunities to work out the answer to some questions where you don’t know that you know the answer. Well, with pictures, it’s pretty rare that there are enough background clues in a photo to help you figure out the name of a person you don’t recognise. You literally do recognise it, or you don’t. If you’re the sort of person who will learn things, and improve your quiz performance that way, there’s precious little you can do to make yourself better at recognising them.

I reflected upon this as we only won on Thursday night because of the pictures, an occurrence which has been sufficiently rare over the years as to be worthy of comment. It’s just the way I feel about it, but to lose on the questions and just win on the pictures feels like losing to me. What’s that? No, of course we didn’t renounce the win. That would have been rude.