MatchFlick.com recently released a Facebook Application in which users can play online movie trivia and compete for prizes. Movie trivia is one of the greatest joys of any true movie fan, wether you want to just test your own knowledge our prove to your other movie guru buddies that you are the trivia king.
Although not the first movie trivia game on the internet, MatchFlick took a chance and made some changes to the normal movie trivia format. While there are several movie applications on social networking sites for people to use most are pretty standard and have the same flaws. First the bad thing about online trivia is that its easy to cheat. I use to play movie trivia and I totally admit that I would look up the answers that I didn't know on MatchFlick or IMDB. Even with large sites that offer trivia they do it more as just for fun rather then a competitive experience and never focused on a way to eliminate cheaters. So what we did was add a 30 second timer to each question if you fail to answer within that time frame then the question is over. 30 seconds may sound like enough time to Google an answer but that time goes by quick and I have personally tested it with almost no results of being able to manipulate the system. This really makes you know the answer to get the question right.
So with the timer helping to deter cheaters, we thought what else can we do to make this different? For one as a trivia player I know most trivia games are thrown together really quickly. As a developer you learn that typing in thousands of questions gets REALLY old....REALLY quick and its easy to convince yourself just to make any question you can think of to fill space. One large game offers a "never ending quiz" which has so many questions in its database that you are supposedly never to run out of questions to answer. Doing that makes the level of questions become very childlike to where even if you have not seen the film then you can almost guess the correct answer. Easy questions makes it far too effortless to gain a win even by using process of elimination to figure out some answers. Why play a game that you will always win every round? That would be like playing a video game with enemies that couldn't harm you and you could just walk right through the maps never having to come up with a strategy or try hard at all to pass the game. One word for that "BORING."
For example if a question were to read :
Name the 1996 Will Smith film in which he battled Aliens?
Answer choices:
a) Bad Boys
b) Wild Wild West
c) Independence Day
d) Men In Black
Anyone knows that its either Men in Black or Independence Day just from the titles so then its just a matter of trying to remember what film came out around 1996. This is just too easy for every question to be written like this because anyone that's good at general trivia can still do good just guessing. So we wrote movie specific questions in which you must know character names, actor names, movie names etc. Some questions are easy like the one above, some are hard and some are almost impossible even if you have seen the movie a couple of times. We balanced it out to where it was a real challenge to play the game. I do not think there is a person on this Earth that could get every one of our questions correct and that's ok...it makes it fun.
So what else can we do? We made it hard to cheat and challenging to get correct answers is that enough? Well we didn't think so. So then we devised a point system to keep people from just answering through the questions as fast as possible trying to just gain correct points on the questions that they know. We achieved this by awarding 10 points for correct answers but taking 5 points away for wrong answers. Other trivia games offer a skip question option so that if you don't know the answer or are not familiar with the movie then you do not have to answer......WE DONT! Game shows that come on television such as Jeopardy or Family Feud give you questions that you must answer wether you are familiar with the subject or not and MatchFlick feels the same way!
Finally we get to the best part. You play movie trivia on other sites or even board games such as Scene It which I love and what do you get out of being number one? The satisfaction of looking at your competitors and saying "HAHA I'm the king" and then its over. So we said you know what if someone is that dedicated to film and has a love for movies that makes them number one then why not reward them with something that makes their time worth while. So we award a FREE DVD each week to the first place winner. On top of that some weeks even the second and third place winner will be award prizes such as FREE RED CARPET MEMBERSHIPS to this lovely site called MatchFlick. So if you are going to play trivia why not really challenge yourself to a game that's worth testing your skills and knowledge on something that you can be proud to say you were a part of. On top of that why play for free when you can play for something that will add to your movie flare even more?
So if this column interest you at all then how about joining us over on Facebook for some really fun times and see if you can be number one. You can play wether you are a member of the MatchFlick community or not and we are in the middle of adding the trivia game to MatchFlick itself so that you can play wether you are logged in here or on your Facebook account. If you don't have a Facebook account then I would suggest signing up, if you like Myspace then you will like Facebook as they are really similar and both are two of the largest sites on the internet today.
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| MatchFlick Mayhem |
Every other Thursday
This column explores every aspect of the film business from a true fanboy's perspective.
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| Tim Malcolm |
Tim Malcolm got his first job at a movie theater in 1996 working as a projectionist. He quickly learned that there was no better job then getting paid to watch movies. Since then he has been an advid film watcher, collector, critic and writer.
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If you have a comment, question, or suggestion, you can send a message to Tim Malcolm by clicking here.
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