Quizzes and Knowledge

While I was covering Pokémon Go's latest paid event for a post on Sunday - more specifically, while I was writing up said post - something interesting related to Pokémon happened. The national association of main series and VGC Pokémon players, a group that I'm glad to be a part of, held a quiz over the Internet in order to give away a slot in one of the major tournaments that is part of their series of tournaments. Initially, I had no intention of participating in the quiz, but since I was writing up the post on my PC and I had the required communication channels on the ready, and that responses of intent to participate seemed to be low, I decided to give it a shot.

The quiz was administered much like (in fact, exactly as) a quiz that my regional figure group held during one of their gatherings that was held nearly two years ago. In both cases, a number of multiple-choice questions are given for the participants to answer sequentially, and points are given out based on correct answers and streaks involving them. Unlike the figure group quiz, which involved Pokémon species descriptions as in the Pokédex, the recent quiz involved trivia from facets of competition play as well as the anime, which naturally is tailored to the current Sword and Shield games as well as the eighth generation in general.

Unfortunately, that also becomes the crux of this quiz, as being that I haven't gotten to know the eighth generation well due to other pressing matters - let alone the fact that I'm Switch-less and Sword-less - I didn't have much to go on for many of the answers to the questions. Therefore, I got many incorrect answers, and the few correct answers that I had were either lucky guesses or things I fortunately had known independently, however few they are; most of these correct answers were also separated by spans of many incorrect answers, so streak points didn't help much to boost my position. I thus ended up in last place, as the score table below indicates.

(One of the other participants also delivered a take on the quiz in a more visual manner through a YouTube video.)

It is worth noting that even with only 10 participants in the quiz, quite a few had different backgrounds. Some were VGC players that paid little attention to the anime, a few were avid anime watchers that weren't as versed in VGC (one was in fact a TCG player), and others had a mishmash of backgrounds, like me. That could explain why no one had less than 21 incorrect answers and 10 correct answers. The variation of Pokémon things that we know lended well for certain things and not others. Even so, there was a goof in one of the quiz questions where the actual correct answer was incorrectly marked, causing a bit of a furor; the difference may or may not have mattered.

Despite this quiz resulting in a less-than-favorable outcome for me personally and mixed outcomes overall, it did in a way reveal the extent of our knowledge of Pokémon. No one seems to have full knowledge of everything, and the recall of that knowledge may be difficult and/or slower than the allotted time for each question (for this quiz, the limit was 10 seconds to answer each question). All the knowledge appears to be segmented and known to varying degrees. It seems to be the same case as the species identification quiz. And then there was also the aforementioned goof, though I'm told this may have been more the result of an accident rather than a lack of knowledge.

A quiz like this by my national association and like the previous one by my figure group is quite well-intended for the purpose of finding out whose knowledge befits a special prize. It can also highlight gaps where the knowledge falls short, such as myself with the eighth generation. I'm sure it would have helped me to familiarize myself with that before the quiz, though other spots of knowledge, particularly those related to the deeper aspects vital to VGC, could still pose problems. The quiz had become something unique for a group that primarily deals with real gameplay to determine just who is the best among the rest. A little demonstration of knowledge couldn't hurt either.

One year ago: Going For New Competitions
Two years ago: Artistic License
Three years ago: I Found You, Black and White