Why Do People Love Trivia So Much?

Here’s are some facts: both Val Kilmer and Jack White have played Elvis in movies. The longest-running Broadway musical is Phantom of the Opera. Stuart Sutcliffe was the original bassist for the Beatles. A male platypus has a poisonous stinger on its back foot. That’s something I know. Some things I don’t know: how Bitcoin works, how to build a website, Spanish, or how to drive. Then again, driving has never won me a $50 bar tab.

Just when you thought that bar trivia and its ilk were only for college kids comes the rise of HQ, an app-based trivia game that’s made a legit celebrity out of host Scott Rogowsky. Trivia games have become a staple of the way we entertain ourselves, and reward ourselves for what we know, even if, by definition, the things we’re being rewarded for are of no use for anything but trivia games. That’s why we flock to it. If there’s no benefit to knowing the important stuff, we might as well get a round of shots for the useless.

Nobody can claim to have invented “knowing random stuff for fun,” but the trend gained a lot of ground in the ‘70s. While the original Jeopardy! daytime game show premiered in 1964, the nighttime syndicated version started airing in 1974, around the time pub trivia began to take off. While again, pub quiz nights probably evolved organically, the first formalized version came about in 1976, when Sharon Burns and Tom Porterpeddled quizzes to pubs in southern England. (Remember this for your next trivia game.)

At first, the plan was to just give bars a way to get people in on slow nights, but the concept of pub quiz turned into a phenomenon. In the U.S., groups like Pub Trivia USA and America’s Pub Quiz organize city- and state-wide competitions, often with serious cash prizes.

“We don’t want people to walk into a bar and feel like they can’t contribute for a round,” said Cullen Shaw, co-founder of the NYC Trivia League, of what makes for a good trivia night. “ If there’s a really difficult 17th century poetry question, maybe there’s one person in the bar that KNOWS that, but a sports question comes up after that and they let someone else answer. That’s what’s fun about team trivia.” Then again, you don’t even need to be on a team to participate now. Hundreds of thousands of people log on every night to play HQ, and though that’s made the app glitchy for some, it hasn’t stopped anyone from trying to claim hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars in prize money.

On a certain level, the draw toward trivia seems obvious. “We are a competitive people,” said Shaw. “We like games, in general, humankind has gravitated toward games.” We also like alcohol and socializing, so a combination of all three, multiplied by the boasting that comes with knowing you are smarter than someone else, makes for an activity with longevity. But there is something to the fact that, with trivia, the object isn’t just being smart, but collectively knowing a little bit about everything.

In high school, we are rewarded for being well-rounded, and quickly discover that there is little use in it once you’ve chosen to pursue a profession. Sure, we may know how to do Punnett squares or the dates of one of Napoleon’s conquests, but what good is that if you’re an accountant or a plumber? As an adult, knowledge is rewarded when it’s in the service of capital, and literally trivial all other times. There is also a lingering resentment at the concept of being “well-rounded,” a wishing that high school lessons on Bartleby and mitochondria came with a class about doing taxes, or something actually “useful.” We know that having a diverse pool of knowledge to draw from helps us approach our lives and problems with nuance, but that’s hard to remember when arguing about health insurance premiums that have nothing to do with when Germany industrialized.

It’s easy to walk around feeling useless, especially in a society that puts an (unfair) premium on “use.” If we’re not proving that everything we’ve learned and absorbed over our lives can deliver us some sort of reward, then what’s the use? What’s our use? Trivia competitions are one of the few ways we reward ourselves for this library of crap we walk around with. We all know something about something. We all have one area where we feel we know too much, and when that question comes, we finally get our moment to prove ourselves. For a moment, we’re useful.

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