Intelligent Game Shows

GailForce
Fri, 01 Nov 2024 16:09:22 +0000
Cafe Society

I find most of them, from The Price Is Right to Jeopardy, pretty unchallenging and unfocused. Sometimes I don’t know the Jeopardy answers (questions), and often I don’t know them instantly, but I find the game’s structure uninteresting, a mere hodgepodge of trivia. And that’s among the more challenging of TV game shows.

One alternative game I’ve devised (for U.S. TV, naturally) is called U.S. Geography, or just Geography, in which people are tasked with the job of declaring the mileage between two points, as the bird flies. Round One might be to supply two U.S. cities for the contestants to guess the exact mileage between them. (So this doesn’t turn into a discussion of driving routes, the show’s judges will determine in advance the answer based on the shortest possible air route between the two cities’ limits.) Round Two might be called Landmarks. Round Three might be to add the complication of a third locale. And the final round would require each contestant to write down a locale, and for them to compete to find the distance between the two. Each round would end with the judges superimposing the exact air route between the two points.

Maybe that’s a better title: “Two Points”?

I got this idea when I found myself wondering how far Cleveland was from Pittsburgh, and realizing that I could probably estimate the distance as the bird flies, given a few minutes. Turned out, my guess (105 miles) was off by quite a bit–it’s more like 135 miles.

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