Core Post #5

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).