TRASH (tm) question ratings

fizzball_GS · Tue, 04 Sep 2001 23:00:39 -0700

Question posted on qbtrash, which I'm bringing
here, as trash (upper and lowercase) is a quiz format
demanding "knowledge and speed of recall," therefore
germane for discussion on this forum:

<<Why
is so much TRASH (tm) PG rated at best? There is a
world of knowledge to be
 exploited, and too much
self-censorship is going on.

 -- qbprophet
>>

Speaking only for myself, but based on knowledge gleaned
as a TRASH (tm) writer and editor,

The glib
answer is, there *is* a world of knowledge out there,
but in this format as well as others -- it's not
*all* worth knowing. :-) 

Seriously, Mike and
Dave are on the right track, I think. As a business,
TRASH has to keep the playing audience *and* hosts'
needs in mind. Hosting teams may be beholden to some
sort of oversight. Minimizing offense to players and
observers is a legitimate concern, but I think the easily
offended generally stay clear of trash. The majority of
trash players just aren't interested in an excess of
"fringe" material of any stripe. I'd love to see a study
of what gets lamed at tournaments. I'd bet near the
top would be sci-fi/computer gaming, non-big-4 sports
(two factions canceling each other out?), and adult
questions.

In previous tournaments, TRASH has flagged adult
questions and left it up to the hosts' discretion to remove
them altogether. This was initially to accommodate
some high-school teams that wanted to play Regionals.
We later advised hosts to discourage HS teams once
we found they were routinely getting stomped. But
the flags remained, and I believe we're still
flagging such questions. 

I think TRASH runs very
close to what the market will bear in terms of
adult/porn content. We do look at the post-event feedback,
and the "less smut" comments outnumber the calls for
more. Of course, in a packet-submission tournament the
host can tweak the distribution to get as nasty as
they wanna be, but in all the distributions I've seen
as a player and observer of the trash format, I've
never seen porn get its own requirement. If what's
going on is self-censorship, it's not limited to
Company Product. 

--Greg Sorenson
again, not
speaking as an official voice of TRASH (tm)