When people tell me how good they are at Trivia Crack, I roll my eyes so hard I can see my brain.
Trivia Crack is a smartphone trivia app that, according to USA Today, has more than 100 million users worldwide. You compete against other users to answer questions that test your knowledge about entertainment, sports, geography, art, history and science.
Honestly, Trivia Crack mostly just tests your luck, and that's pretty lame to brag about.
Normally the format for trivia games isn’t multiple choice, but in Trivia Crack it is, so you’ll always have a 25 percent chance of getting a question right. This feature means that even total clowns have a chance winning against people who actually know things.
I understand that the usual trivia format doesn’t work as well on a phone, so it’s understandable that creators of the game would make it this way, but that’s not the only problem.
The questions in the game are submitted, and approved, by users through the in-game Question Factory. Questions only have to be approved by 100 users to be featured on the game. This means you’ll never know the quality or the difficulty of the question you or your opponent receive.
"What color is a gorilla?" somehow made the cut. I got that one right, if you were wondering.
Just to prove to myself what a dumb system this is, I approved every question in the Question Factory regardless of its quality. I switched to questions from different countries and approved all of those too, even if I didn’t speak the language. Who’s going to stop me, huh?
Also, your opponent might take days to finish his turn answering questions, so games can last a very long time.
Basically, Trivia Crack is sort of the equivalent to playing “Guess how many fingers I’m holding up” with a friend, except through animated text messages, over the course of a week.
None of this is important, though. Trivia Crack is wildly successful but not because anyone really likes trivia. If they did, I’d have a lot more friends who watched "Jeopardy" and threw Trivial Pursuit parties.
Trivia Crack is just another way to waste time, and people constantly need new, mildly entertaining ways to do that. It's not wrong to let something silly have your attention now and then.
Just don’t tell me how good you are at Trivia Crack, please. My eyes are getting tired.
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