With thoughts about television and the ideology of liveness
in mind after reading Professor McPherson’s piece, I was struck by Parks’
discussion of the late 1990s game show revival and its resonances with the
present-day mobile game HQ Trivia, which launched in 2017, averages
1 million players per day, and could itself be read as a kind of “liveness” revival. At certain points in a given day, HQ
Trivia allows its users to participate, live (!), in a kind of massively
multiplayer game show-style trivia quiz experience, the stakes of which are a
real monetary reward split between the winners of a given match.
What’s immediately striking about Trivia HQ is that its
basic premise seems predicated on a kind of fetishization of televisual liveness—a
quasi-lost object in the age of streaming. Where other trivia game apps (Trivia
Crack, Quiz Up) involve live multiplayer components, or otherwise reference TV
game shows (like, of course there are mobile versions of Jeopardy and Who Wants to be
a Millionaire), these can be played at any time. HQ Trivia, which bills
itself as “A Game Show To Go,” instead reinstates appointment viewing—or rather
appointment playing—with gameplay taking place only at scheduled times (users
receive push notifications when the game “goes live”). Moreover, where various
digital games reference televisual modes of address, this one actually adopts
them. Each daily match alternates between a gameplay interface and a live video
stream of a host who welcomes the audience/contestant to the game and comments
upon its progress following each elimination round. There is a multiplicity of modes of positioning/address at
work here. The game plays upon nostalgia for familiar game show models, recalling
the feeling of implicit simultaneity that comes with watching a broadcast of Jeopardy at home and imagining that
other people watching Jeopardy in
their homes are, like you, anticipating or calling out the answers. But it also
makes actual contestants of us. Alex Trebek may look directly into the camera
while, in studio, he is “really” addressing the contestants and live audience
before him; with HQ Trivia, it is us on the viewer/user end of the screen who
are the extent of both the live audience and the contestant pool.
To bring this more explicitly back to the readings: Parks
reads the late 1990s game show revival in terms of the major networks’ bids to reassert
mass appeal and recoup ratings. For her, game shows’ erudition-testing premises
and techy formal components (video playback, screens, telephony) “[enabled] the
medium to represent itself as a far-reaching center of knowledge” at a moment “when
digital technologies threaten[ed] to absorb and forever alter the medium’s
specificities” (140). While I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to the answer the
question of “why HQ Trivia, why now,” I suppose one answer would simply be that
such a form is now relatively easily technologically realizable. It seems almost
like a “natural progression,” even, what with other successful couplings of older
forms of televisual liveness with network-enabled connected gaming, e.g. Twitch.
But whereas Twitch is pitched at people who are already gamers, we might,
following Parks, note the ways in which HQ Trivia capitalizes on the “mass
appeal” of earlier game shows, and on nostalgia for the particular sort of
veneer of liveness and simultaneity such shows instantiate in their broadcast
forms. Indeed, the “HQ” in HQ Trivia seems to harken back to a time when
broadcast programming could be sensed as a kind of national hearth.
Yet, we might also note that HQ Trivia is itself pitched to
a particular kind of techy audience. Parks’ broader argument alerts us to the
ways in which digital media literacy and access has been unevenly distributed
along classed, racial, gendered, and generational lines, and while this is
purely anecdotal, I think such histories are evident in the fact that the few
people I’ve seen actually playing the game have fallen somewhere along the “early
adopter” spectrum. Also rather anecdotal:
at least one article characterizes the
app as a “millennial obsession” popular mainly among young adults working in
corporate settings, who play together as a sort of unofficially sanctioned
communal diversion during breaks.
This, plus the various ways in which the app is, like any
app, connected with larger systems of finance and monetization, perhaps
suggests that HQ Trivia calls for analysis in terms of McPherson’s
assertion that the experience in face of web-based interfaces “model[s]
particular modes of subjectivity which can work all to neatly in the service of
the shifting patterns of global capital” (207). HQ Trivia’s coupling of the
allure of liveness with masculinized, rational, “active” participation (a la Parks' reading of computerized game show aesthetics and discursive constructions of digital media more broadly) might thus be read as a form of “[instruction] for our bodily adaptation into virtuality,” literally “incorporating” the worker and their leisure time into capital with every thumb
stroke (McPherson 207).
