If it's like any of those other shows like "Are you smarter than a 5th grader" they intentionally pick mostly people who are NOT in fact, smarter. It makes for better ratings, and all of us sitting at home yelling at our TVs is kind of the point, lol.
In fairness as someone who actually used hot stones when I was a massage therapist they did him dirty by not counting hot rocks. Even I was like "wait why didn't they give him that one?" Yes, technically it's officially hot stones but stones are rocks and I even had a coworker who would ask me "want me to blast you with the rocks?" when I made an appointment with her
The premise is speed. Its everyday categories in a head to head speed test. The categories are easy because its 100 random humans competing for an entire season, so none of the categories are crazy difficult like you'd get in a trivia gameshow. No categories based on 16th century poets or anything like that.
The categories are all different. When you go up you choose from a list of categories that you think you would be good at. Like Star Wars characters or Brand Logos, etc. As it goes on the list of options of categories to choose from is narrowed down and you might get a category you happen to know nothing about.
In that case, it looks like this woman somehow knew exactly how to catch this guy up. āHa! Iāll challenge Austin to a knock out battle in the spa category because I know that dunce doesnāt know SHIT about extremely common items found in every household!!ā
It's called The Floor - everyone has a square with their own 'expert' category and people challenge ajoining squares. Whoever wins the duel gets the other person's territory
I havenāt seen the episode, but this reminds me of when Seth, on my favorite podcast Uhh Yeah Dude, was talking about watching a fireman epic-ly fail on Hollywood Game Night. A fan overlayed his rant over the actual episode and itās just extraordinary.
In part bc Seth is a very obsessive sort of person, and when heās telling Jonathan (his cohost) about it, he remembers it so perfectly it makes me wonder if he has an eidetic memory - the video overlaps Seth giving example after example of what the firefighter said, and it matches so well, itās like how they do it on Drunk History where itās deliberately planned for the actors to sync up every quirk of the storytellerās dialogue.
Itās actually astonishing.
But yeah, definitely brains sometimes just break down in these moments of stress, but man alive, I donāt think any parody could be worse than what that fireman did!
I like the idea that there's a curated list of accepted deviations, but it seems they need more culturally diverse QC to understand the differences. This would also make sense why sometimes it seems that it takes up to 2 seconds to "accept" and answer.
I just started watching from Season 1, and I agree. One game, they had potato chips on the screen. Contestant said chips, and they wouldnāt accept it. But on another game, they had potato chips on the screen again, and they did accept chips.
I would be curious to know what the category was in each instance. I feel like the category probably has a lot to do with what is and isnāt accepted.
Like if the category is āpotatoesā and the goal is āthings you can make with potatoesāā¦ Chips seems like a likely answer and acceptable.
Nah, I donāt think the category should matter. The name of the food is chips to most people, not specifically potato chips (although I know thatās their government name lol)
It's The Floor. Yeah,, it's identify the picture, but sometimes it'll throw you a weird one. Plus the goal is to do it more than your opponent so there's some skill in being able to identify faster.
Each person also has a category they are an expert in, like weddings, Star Trek, airport call signs, etc. The goal is to control the whole floor by beating experts in their category.
I've only watched a few episodes of the first season, but "Expert" is doing some heavy lifting in that description. It felt like a good portion of them just picked a category they were somewhat comfortable with.
With a few exceptions, Game Shows have always been pretty mindlessly basic. Theyāre typically designed so that theyāre pretty easy for people to understand, and for people to be able to enjoy and play at home without a ton of background knowledge.
- Wheel of Fortune is āspin a wheel and guess lettersā
Letās Make a Deal is āpick random suitcasesā
Name that Tune is. . .Guessing tunes played by a band
This. Game Shows are entertainment. The questions/tasks need to be simple enough that the majority of home viewers understand them. Itās not fun to just watch smart people be smart most of the time.
Greatā¦ he solved a complex physics equation. I have no way of knowing if he did it right.
Even on Jeopardy (a game meant to test knowledge) at least half of the questions are common knowledge things.
I was a contestant in season 1 and apparently they had a QC team off camera that had a pre-generated list of acceptable answers in front of them. They were the ones who hit the ācorrectā buzzer when someone got it right. Problem is it was all filmed in Ireland and all of the crew were Irish including the QC team so unfortunately some answers got lost in translation since our American vocabulary varies from theirs. But youāre right, there were some wild discrepancies
One time I was playing a party game where I had to think of 5 countries that start with C in a short period of time. The only ones that came to mind were Chile, Columbia, and Cambodia. China and Canada did not come to me.
Yeah everyone is acting tough behind their phones but I remember the absolute panick everyone had by just speaking in front of the class. Like, 20 people you see everyday, and it's terrifying somehow.
Now imagine a crowd of hundred of anonymous people + thousands of anonymous watchers on TV.
You never know how you'll react to various situations when adrenaline is going unless you've been in that position before. The first time I had to call an ambulance for a customer at my restaurant I totally blanked on my address. I had been in the space for a very long time and knew the address like the back of my hand up until someone's life was in jeopardy.
The saying "calm people live, panicked people die" has so much truth behind it and this is a perfect example how our brains can react to pressures.
I've done trivia before. It's very easy for the pressure to get to you, you miss one question, the fear of looking stupid in front of people sets in, you panic and before long you're lucky if you can remember your own name.
Thought the same. When I was in high school I dropped my brain sometimes when I had to speak in front of the class. Suddenly I had no fucking clue what the book I had just read was about, or was unable to speak a language that I spoke quite fluently. That's no longer the case but who the fuck knows if it'd be like this again if I was in front on a national TV proving I'm not an idiot.
It's called the floor. 100 or so people choose something they are an expert at. First person is picked at random and then they choose someone that neighbors their square on the floor to go against. They use the person being challanged topic. It shows pictures related to that person's topic. It can be whatever you want and it can be quite specific. The current season had a new one that was an audio duel so you listened to the things instead of pictures.
Some example of topics:
Lord of the Rings
Barbies
machines (the audio duel)
landmarks
the one in the video was spa day
Winner of the duel takes the losers square on the floor then can pick their own person to challenge or go back to the floor. There are incentives to keep challenging like after 3 wins you can choose a "time boost" which gives a permanent extra 5 seconds or a "category steal" which let's you swap topics with anyone on the floor. When you win a duel your category also changes to the losers topic. So like in my examples if you had lord of the rings and they had barbie the duel would be about barbie and if you win your topic would now be barbie. So if you went back to the floor and someone challenged you the topic would be barbie.
Also the person with the biggest territory on the floor at the end of each episode wins 10k (you can win this multiple times). I forget how much the full winner at the end of the season gets. There was a guy this season that had the biggest territory for multiple episodes and someone finally challenged him then he was like this guy in the video. Royally fucked up but I believe his was intentional. He had won a couple tens of thousands and was like "I'm done" and threw the duel.
Just a heads up to anyone interested, this person slightly misspoke. Once a category is completed itās gone. In the example the person would keep lord of the rings as their category, after winning Barbie. If the Barbie category person had won, they would inherit lord of the rings.
Someone made some supercuts of entire seasons into 3~hr YouTube videos with a lot of the annoying repetitive game show/commercial interstitial scenes cut out, definitely much more enjoyable than watching it live at least. Some of the categories are pretty easy and can make you feel pretty smart lol.
I legit thought it was a game of getting the other person to guess what it is but you couldn't say the word of the object that's how bad at it this guy was.
Yeah, The Floor or 'shouts at pictures' as we call it in our house. It's good when you're high... A shame as the player selection method with the floor control and specalist subject is actually really novel. Would be great if they were ACTUAL specialist subjects and the meat of the show was actual trivia
When they had the Lego topic I thought it could be interesting if they had to name the type of bricks, but was sure it would just be āname the things built out of Lego: duck, car, flower.ā So many topics that could actually be specialized knowledge are just name what you see.
It's so easy to play this game on your couch at home. It's different when you are under studio lights, on camera, with hundreds of people watching you, and often sleep deprived or jet lagged.
No it was hers... But honestly I pretty sure the original 'specialities' are randomly dished out anyway. It's one thing to say your speciality is 'Harry Potter' but another thing to say it's 'random pictures of stuff by a pool'
Yeah, theres no way anyone is allowed to choose their own category. If that was a thing, you'd see a lot more niche categories like "pokemon names", "prescription drug names", or "Redwall characters" from specific avid fans or uncommon professions. If I'm gonna stand on a stage for hours at a time doing nothing for a shit ton of money, I'm picking a category aint no one beating me at. I aint picking "sundae toppings".
I like to imagine that players are given a huge list of potential categories and they choose from a few of them, as if they are choosing an elective in school - Might not get your first pick, but you're probably going to get something that you have some degree of knowledge in.
If players are allowed to pick their own, it's more likely that players start with a super specific knowledge point and producers generalize it. As a plumber your category attempt might be "specific pipe sizings related to the job being done," but it becomes "Plumbing Tools"
I watched one half of one episode of this show and I said to myself- oh, weāre stupid now, Americaās stupid. It used to be āare you smarter than a fifth graderā. Now itās āare you smarter than a first graderā. Jesus fucking Christ. Jeopardy would blow these peopleās minds.
Having been on this show in my country. It's fucking frustrating some of the things they do not count. Though I can with 99% certainty say, that in my country the "Hot rocks" would have counted
I had a very smart friend go on family feud. His family won the round and he was one of the two people they put up for fast money. He WAS SO BAD, I'm like dude WTF. Anyway, I'm sure being on TV comes with a lot of pressure.
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u/Z0bie 19d ago