What makes a good $1,000,000 Question

[TLEberle]

After all of the discussion and posting of people's Level Fifteen questions, and wondered, "What makes a good Million Dollar Question?"

Answer however you please.  By that, not by posting your questions, but what is the makeup of such a question.

Travis

[BrandonFG]

[quote name=\'TLEberle\' date=\'Feb 3 2004, 07:58 PM\'] After all of the discussion and posting of people's Level Fifteen questions, and wondered, "What makes a good Million Dollar Question?"

Answer however you please.  By that, not by posting your questions, but what is the makeup of such a question.
 [/quote]
IMO, simply something that isn't extremely obscure, but something that a little brainstorming couldn't fix. Something where you wouldn't have to go through 20 pages of Google archives to find a concrete answer for.

Joe Trela's "computer bug" question is a perfect example. Another would be the Silorsky helicopter one.

Bad examples: most pop culture, esp. if it happened in the Baby Boomer or Gen-X time eras, i.e. the "Laugh-In" question. Nothing involving numbers, such as the distance from the sun or when the Julian new year began. Personally, I don't like the idea of offering anything involving recalling a specific date. It seems too....."broad," so to speak.

[SplitSecond]

If you were to ask 15 of your friends a good million dollar question, almost all of them should say "I should know this!" or "That's really interesting!" or some variation thereof.  Of course, 14 of them should get it wrong.

And if 3 or more of them say "Who cares?", you can pretty well assure yourself that it's not a good question, million dollars or otherwise.

[Little Big Brother]

I think the answer choices used can greatly affect the difficulty.  For example, the infamous Pokemon question (still my favorite question in all of Millionaire).  The question asked which of the following was not a Pokemon, with the correct answer being Frodo.  However, this question appeared before Lord of the Rings was released as a film, so the Hobbit connection was not as salient.  If asked today with the same choices, I could see it as 16k, maybe 32k.  However, if the fourth choice was from Digimon or Yu Gi Oh (anachronisms aside), that question probably could have been bumped from 500k to 1M.

One of the best 1M questions would have to be the Carol Brady maiden name question.  The choices included Sam the butcher's last name, Alice's last name, Martin (the last name of Carol's first husband), and the correct answer (which I don't remember).  I was certain it was Martin, completely forgetting that that was her first married name.  My mom and my sister, who were watching with me, were able to trace the answer as being from the grandparent's episode, but didn't know which answer was right (the above connections were after the fact, BTW).

So to answer your original question, the 1M question should contain a subject that most people would be familiar with (computer bugs, the song God Bless America, walkmans) but not necessarily well read on the subject.  If a person is likely to be well read on the subject (The Brady Bunch for example), the choices should throw a wrench into your thinking, possibly to confuse you.

[brianhenke]

The question asked which of the following was not a Pokemon, with the correct answer being Frodo.

    Lauren was a big Pokemon fan when that question was asked.  In fact, we got the Official Pokemon Handbook around that time (Nov. 1999) and I got to know the names of the 150+ Pokemon (so I would have known Frodo was the correct answer).

   Brian

   The Jehovah's Witnesses distribute Mad magazine?

   We want some more pro wrestling (STILL) and NASCAR questions!

[Ian Wallis]

One of the best 1M questions would have to be the Carol Brady maiden name question. The choices included Sam the butcher's last name, Alice's last name, Martin (the last name of Carol's first husband), and the correct answer (which I don't remember).

It was Tyler, and that threw me too.  Glad I wasn't in the Hot Seat for that because I was sure it was Martin.  I did see the first episode of "The Brady Bunch" again a few months after that question came up, and it's definately Tyler, but you have to listen closely!

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'SplitSecond\' date=\'Feb 3 2004, 09:27 PM\'] If you were to ask 15 of your friends a good million dollar question, almost all of them should say "I should know this!" or "That's really interesting!" or some variation thereof.  Of course, 14 of them should get it wrong.

And if 3 or more of them say "Who cares?", you can pretty well assure yourself that it's not a good question, million dollars or otherwise. [/quote]
 This is about as good an explanation as you would want (not surprising, considering the source).  It's very easy to write a very difficult question.  It's not easy to write an interesting one, especially in the multiple choice format.

The goal of a good upper-level question is to make them sweat in the Hot Seat. If it's too easy (like Carpenter's Laugh-In question) there's not enough drama.  If it's too obscure there's no drama either because the player simply walks.

Going back to specifics, Little Big Brother said:

The question asked which of the following was not a Pokemon, with the correct answer being Frodo. However, this question appeared before Lord of the Rings was released as a film, so the Hobbit connection was not as salient.

Mike, I'm afraid much like your "Kenneth" question in the other thread, this one (which I know you didn't write) isn't nearly as difficult as you think it is.  The Tolkien books were very famous long before the movies came out, and you wouldn't have to know anything about Pokemon to pick out the wrong answer out of the bunch.  You're definitely right that the movies have made the question even easier.

But that's why questions on shows like this aren't written by just one person.  We all have our own blind spots and areas that we don't know as well as others.  From experience, I've learned that the pop music questions I write are generally a lot easier than I think they're going to be.  The entire writing staff of Millionaire (or at least a few editors) go over the material to judge its difficulty, not just the one person who wrote the question.

Sorry to go on and on about this, but question writing is a lot more challenging than it looks, and a subject I find endlessly fascinating.

[Ian Wallis]

We all have our own blind spots and areas that we don't know as well as others. From experience, I've learned that the pop music questions I write are generally a lot easier than I think they're going to be.

I remember one episode of "Millionaire", I think from it's first year, where they had a pop music question at the $500,000 level.  The question was which song had spent the longest time at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100.  The choices were "One Sweet Day", "Candle in the Wind 1997", "Macarena" and "I Will Always Love You".

Being a pop music fan and Billboard subscriber, this was easy for me ("One Sweet Day"), but I was in agony watching because the contestant in the Hot Seat didn't even know who sang them, then took a wrong guess and fell to $32,000.

I guess we all have our "I wish it was me" moments, and this was definately one for me.

This show may have bene repeated on GSN already, but I don't regularly watch the GSN reruns so I don't know for sure.

[tomobrien]

[quote name=\'fostergray82\' date=\'Feb 3 2004, 08:10 PM\']Joe Trela's "computer bug" question is a perfect example. Another would be the Silorsky helicopter one.

Bad examples: most pop culture, esp. if it happened in the Baby Boomer or Gen-X time eras, i.e. the "Laugh-In" question. Nothing involving numbers, such as the distance from the sun or when the Julian new year began. [/quote]
Interesting...to me the Sikorsky helicopter question was too easy for a $1M question, since not only was Igor Sikorsky credited for making helicopters practical, the company he founded (and which still bears his name) was virtually synonymous with helicopters for years.  I think Bernie Cullen's "plane letter" question was a much better question.
Agree with you, though, on the Julian New Year question...grrr.

[zachhoran]

[quote name=\'Ian Wallis\' date=\'Feb 4 2004, 10:00 AM\']


I remember one episode of "Millionaire", I think from it's first year, where they had a pop music question at the $500,000 level.  The question was which song had spent the longest time at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100.  The choices were "One Sweet Day", "Candle in the Wind 1997", "Macarena" and "I Will Always Love You".

Being a pop music fan and Billboard subscriber, this was easy for me ("One Sweet Day"),

This show may have bene repeated on GSN already, but I don't regularly watch the GSN reruns so I don't know for sure. [/quote]
 GSN aired this one, as it's from January 2000.

[Clay Zambo]

[quote name=\'SplitSecond\' date=\'Feb 3 2004, 08:27 PM\'] If you were to ask 15 of your friends a good million dollar question, almost all of them should say "I should know this!" or "That's really interesting!" or some variation thereof.  Of course, 14 of them should get it wrong.

And if 3 or more of them say "Who cares?", you can pretty well assure yourself that it's not a good question, million dollars or otherwise. [/quote]
 Absolutely! Richard Sher, who hosts the NPR panel game "Says You!" puts it this way:

        It was a dark and stormy night when, suddenly, Richard Sher drew the Trivial Pursuit question "What do you call the band of low pressure that surrounds the Earth at the Equator?"In his typically debonair fashion, his first thought was: "Who cares?! What a dumb question." Then, he realized the answer was "the doldrums." ...Richard's epiphany was "the point is not that it's important to know the answer; it's only important to like the answer."

[Matt Ottinger]

to me the Sikorsky helicopter question was too easy for a $1M question

Being a pop music fan and Billboard subscriber, this was easy for me ("One Sweet Day"),

And herein lies the problem when you're WRITING the questions.  Everything's going to seem easy to *somebody*, and just because a question is going to seem easy to YOU doesn't mean that it's going to be easy to others.  The tricky thing is to remove your personal interests and biases from the equation.  I remember back on Usenet somebody being absolutely stunned that no one on Jeopardy knew an incredibly obscure geography question -- that happened to be about his own home town.

The ideal situation for Millionaire would be to Ask the Audience beforehand for every question in a stack and then rank them according to the number of correct responses they get.  But gee, there might be some security issues with that idea...

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'Ian Wallis\' date=\'Feb 4 2004, 08:00 AM\'] Being a pop music fan and Billboard subscriber, this was easy for me ("One Sweet Day"), but I was in agony watching because the contestant in the Hot Seat didn't even know who sang them, then took a wrong guess and fell to $32,000.
 [/quote]
 See, that's a good high-level question, because I would have looked at it and given "I Will Always Love You" serious consideration, in fact so much so that I'd consider answering despite not even knowing who performed "One Sweet Day." And I consider myself a fan of popular music, even though the 80's are more my forte.

[Little Big Brother]

The Tolkien books were very famous long before the movies came out, and you wouldn't have to know anything about Pokemon to pick out the wrong answer out of the bunch. You're definitely right that the movies have made the question even easier.

I think the last part of the quote is closer to what my point was trying to get at.  I know that the Tolkein books have been around MUCH longer than Pokemon, but their presence in the pop culture collective consciousness, at the time anyway, was not as pronounced as it is now.

[tvrandywest]

Right on Matt, Split, et al. Glad to see some "props" for question writers. It's one of the hardest and most underated jobs in game shows. But producers know it is vital - some shows have as many as 20 writer/researchers. In fact, producers traditionally have graduated from the ranks of writers. Among the most gifted is Gary Johnson at Jeopardy.

As much as I wanted to get in the biz in the early 80s, I missed my first chance. I was doing run-throughs for Jay Wolpert who offered me a staff job if I could write 100 usable questions for one of the shows he was developing. Granted, it was a typically complex Wolpert format requiring a "twist" in each question and its 4 multiple choice answers, but when I turned in my 100 questions Jay explained why most of them were unusable. I had no idea how tough it is to write GOOD questions.

Weakest Link burned through questions far faster than any show I was ever involved with, and they had it down to a science. Two full teams of writers, researchers and authenticators, plus a database of previously used questions cross-referenced a bunch of different ways. And for security, the writers' offices shreaded more paper each day than Oliver North!


Randy
tvrandywest.com