Today’s editorial is going to be focusing on just a single topic.
A number of Jeopardy! fans over the past week have been noticing that there’s been a slight shift recently in some of the question writing, with some users on Reddit certainly feeling that three of the four major clues in Thursday’s game hinged on wordplay.
As the title of this editorial says: Yes, the show is changing. And, yes, this is a deliberate change.
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Michael Davies has gone on record in the past (on Inside Jeopardy) to say that he would prefer more clues that rely less on rote memorization from J! Archive, and presumably more on synthesizing information (a skill that wordplay clues tend to test). Certainly, for me as a home viewer and fan myself, I enjoy these clues more—Lyndsey Hamen, the lovely pub quiz host from The Ship Pub & Kitchen here in St. John’s, Newfoundland, often refers to these questions as “critical thinking” questions, and she loves to include those sorts of rounds in her own game—and while it’s great to have the underlying knowledge, which can be learned from J! Archive, being able to apply what you’ve learned—using “critical thinking” as Lyndsey puts it—is a much more useful skill in the world. The show has definitely moved on from the era where one basically needed to know 25 authors, 15 composers, 20 scientists, 100 great historical figures, the key members of U.S government (past and present), and surface-level information about countries, TV, movies, sports, and music in order to be successful on the show.
I should also note that it’s probably a good idea to see the potential biases of some of the loudest commenters on this issue. Many diehard fans who have been trying to get on the show are more likely to have spent significant time trying to rote-memorize J! Archive and are probably watching their study time bear less fruit with this shift in content, and are potentially trying to push the canon back to a place where they think they have the best chance of winning multiple games on the show.
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I also mentioned in my recap on Friday that I’d have more to say about Friday’s Final Jeopardy as well, and although it didn’t end up affecting things on Friday, I think the skill of “how long is 30 seconds, and how to best manage that 30 seconds” is also a valid skill for the show to test; I was very worried that a player was going to leave themselves too little time to complete their response, but that would have been on the player, in my opinion, and not the show.
In closing, I absolutely believe that the show is best to move away from simply testing the rote memorization of facts from J! Archive, as I firmly believe that a better test of actual intelligence is by testing the ability to quickly synthesize things from what already knows.
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I might dislike this change IF Jeopardy! hadn’t always [well, at least for quite a while] had these types of clues, but since only the quantity of them is going to be changed, I look forward to it.
Do you know whether the plan is to have more “critical thinking” (or “wordplay”) categories or to also scatter such clues among the “rote knowledge” clues within ordinary subject categories?
I wonder if they’d adjust the response time allowed for those types of clues. Either pre-emptively based on historical record or after a seeing a number of attempts after time’s up lockouts.
I wondered that, too, but felt it was very unlikely they would do so since they generally barely get to the whole board as it is.
However, leaving a few clues not played more often could be a good thing, providing some variation and uncertainty as to the amount of money “left on the board” since time would be more likely to run out before the chance to make all the money left (for instance when formulating a bet for a late DD3 or maybe not even getting to the DD3).