Voting questions: shaking up a smartphone pub quiz near you!

In the space of just a few years, we like to think that our SpeedQuizzing smartphone pub quizzing system has completely revolutionised the experience of pub quiz gameplay, allowing teams to compete by using their touch-screen devices to play along in real time with the quizmaster, thus removing the possibility of cheating (players have no chance to look up the answers to questions when playing in real time) and creating a more engaging gameplay experience in the process.

Not content with merely changing the format of pub quizzing, we are determined to keep creating new quiz experiences as we continue to develop our app. One feature which proves as much is the new Voting Questions (beta) which has been featured in a recent version of our hosting software.

This new feature has been causing quite a stir amongst quiz-goers, turning quiz conventions pretty much upside down. Unlike a regular question where the answer is a hard fact, a voting question is more of a survey of opinions where the majority answer becomes the correct answer – in a way it’s like the reverse of TV gameshow Pointless – your team wins points if your answer correlates with the answer chosen by the most other teams in the room.

Using the Multiple Choice screen, these voting questions can often end in total hilarity and when playing one, you and your team need to consider a few factors. For starters, if you want to win the points, you are not simply answering with your team’s opinion, you are answering with what your team thinks the majority of teams in the room will think.

For example, when your quizmaster asks, “Which are best… A.) the Star Wars films or B.) the Harry Potter films”, a hot potato of a question like that will instantly divide a room. Your team might have a strong opinion either way but the answer you go with needs to be more about second guessing how your fellow teams will answer than responding with your actual opinion. You’ll find yourself scanning the room and having to think a lot harder than ever about who exactly it is that you’re playing against!

Predicting majority opinion comes very naturally to some people and is a very different type of skill to remembering hard facts. Therefore, when these voting questions are sporadically thrown into play at a smartphone quiz night, they offer a welcome and refreshing change, representing an opportunity for all involved to engage another part of their brain and experience a totally different kind of quizzing.

Only pub quizzes using the SpeedQuizzing system have features as exciting as this. Find one near you!