A 21st version of the pub quiz format

I’ve blogged about the Artefact Quiz before. With the country under lockdown still (maybe!?) the Artefact is currently closed to the public. This wasn’t going to stop local Stirchley Celebrity Seb from hosting the monthly quiz. The quiz took place via the medium of Twitch, which is very 21st Century. I was expecting Seb to abandon the quiz half way through to start a Call of Duty live stream.  Friday’s virtual edition of the Artefact Quiz allowed multiple households to be on the same team, which was great news for live alone Shaz, as most other quizzes that he had found were one team per household. Shaz successfully found a few friends and attempted to join the twitch stream at 7.30pm

Team Shaziety.com

Shaz is always on brand and so our team name was Shaziety.com. The Artefact Quiz players are the perfect target demographic for Shaziety.com. Seb even clicked through the link during the quiz to confirm the existence of the website that you are reading. I think that Shaziety.com received an extra 16 views due to the quiz. Hurrah!

Team Shaziety.com had some initial technical problems. The three separate households tried to watch the twitch stream on three separate devices, whilst we talked in a shared zoom call. Our problem was that we had different levels of lag. I was one question behind Sandra and Dan, whilst Ben was one question behind me. The problem was solved by having all of us watch one shared screen on the zoom call. Eighty-Six people were following the twitch stream and there were 29 teams in total. Many more than could fit into the Artefact itself. Online events have allowed crowds to gather from all over the world, no longer are many social events limited by geography.

The Quiz begins

All the rounds had a visual or audio format. I think this worked well overall. Having questions read out, could have been difficult to follow with the lag that teams were dealing with. In the first round, we had to look at slogans, lyrics, notes from books etc in the form on the stay alert poster from the Government. Personal highlights included, the German version of the Philosopher’s football team from the Monty Python sketch and the “I need your boots …. “line from Terminator 2. Each team had to mark their own scores and feed them back via twitch. There was a round on dead or alive celebrities. I assumed that Mikhail Gorbachev and Jimmy Carter were both dead, but it turns out that they are both still alive as is Princess Beatrix. The music round was based on the theme of Dominic Cummings and involved songs like “Fast Cars” by Tracy Chapman, and “Cars” by Gary Numan. Disappointingly there was a lack of Nickelback. We had a Castle Round, with Dominic Cummings visiting each castle. Local castles, Kenilworth and Warwick were featured. The good name of Warwick Castle was tarnished by Seb. Shame on him! Pleasingly for Shaz, there was no Film score music round. In the last Artefact Quiz, team “Anywhere but last” came last partly because they got 0 out of 10 on the film score round. Between us we had watched some television and so we recognised the Game of Thrones theme, the Good Life theme, the Spam song from Monty Python and much to our pleasure, the theme from the Crystal Maze. Best of all though was the Saturday night ITV favourite Gladiators.

Shed Fighter

There were two special rounds. The first featured a video created for the quiz, based on Street Fight, named Shed Fighter. Please watch the video, it is incredible. I presume it was Artefact owner members Dale and Jonny in the video, but who really knows?  In the video we observed the two characters being selected, the weapons they chose and their attempts to dismantle a garden shed. I won’t spoil the ending. As the Artefact is a Co-op, they of course played Co-op mode. Boiler Suit Kevin armed with the Gordon and XAEA-12 chose the Shedmaster 2000. I want to see how Field Marshall Zhukov would get on with the Collin’s Pocket Dictionary. I am pleased that he did not pick the electric guitar. I’d also like to see the Luxury Carpet Salesman (presumably a fellow Stirchley business) use the Didgeridoo. I ask of you once more. Please watch the video. As quiz players we had to list the names of the Characters and the weapons they had to pick from.

Cats, cats and more cats

In the final round I got to make use of my Instagram account. We had to post pictures of cats to Instagram tagging #theartefactquiz. We owned no cats between us, so we had took photos of model cats, had pictures of friend’s cats sent to us and drew our own cats. Initially I got the hashtag wrong, so I had to post each picture twice. Some of our pictures were featured by Seb in the twitch stream. Seb also liked a lot of the photos that I posted on my Instagram page. Before the quiz I had zero pictures of cats on my Instagram, now I have maybe 30 photos of cats. Check out my Instagram for pictures of cats!

Always on brand

Once Seb had reviewed the best pictures of Cats, the quiz ended. Jonny and Dale (we presume) counted the marks of the combined rounds. We had a dramatic pause, deliberate of course (maybe) before the top three were announced. Team Shaziety.com did not place in the top three. Does this mean that the other 26 teams came equal last? Either way we had an enjoyable time playing the quiz. We would definitely play again if a similar quiz were to happen in June. Most importantly the branding message of Shaziety.com was seen by the 86 plus twitch stream watchers. Rest assured that Shaziety.com will be invading/ branding more events. Hopefully there will be Nickelback at the next Artefact Quiz.

Artefact is a Co-op that supports the arts and is based on Stirchley High Street. Check them out, they are wonderful.