The object of the game is for players to try and guess the most popular answer to a general question. An example question might be: "someone famous with the first name George". The players must try and guess the answer which the majority of the other players will answer here. Example answers might be "George Washington", "George Clooney", etc. Points are awarded based on the number of people who picked the same answer. Questions should not have a "correct" answer. For example, the question, "The height of the tallest building in New York" should not be used -- it has some correct answer. Rather, it would be more appropriate to use, "The name of a tall building in New York" -- a question with multiple possible answers, none of them "correct".
The Sheep game can be run in teams or individual mode. In individual mode, no master list of players is required -- this makes it easier to get started. If running in teams mode, a teams file must be supplied to enumerate the teams and their members. The teams file must be a JSON file formatted as follows:
{
"TeamA": [
{
"email": "jjc@acme.com",
"name": "Jim Croche"
},
{
"email": "bhf@acme.com",
"name": "Bill Fettman"
}
],
"TeamB": [
{
"email": "abc@acme.com",
"name": "Allen Crab"
},
{
"email": "mrb@acme.com",
"name": "Mike Brown"
}
],
"TeamC": [
{
"email": "xxx@acme.com",
"name": "XXX"
},
{
"email": "jdoe@acme.com",
"name": "John Doe"
}
]
}Teams mode also introduces more complex scoring where the team gets a score composed of the total of all the scores of the members. If a member does not submit a set of answers to a quiz, the score of the missing member should not be left at zero as that would doom the team to failure and the whole point of the game is to provide fun, comradiery, and interaction within the organization (failure isn't fun). There are three ways a missing member can be scored with this program: average, least, and middle. Average takes the average of all the scores of those who submitted answers, least picks the lowest score, and middle picks the midpoint or median score (average is the default mode unless another is choosen).
You should strive to have the same number of members on each team. This is hard to maintain over time, but it does make it more fun. Three to six is a good number. It is possible to rearrange teams at any point simply by adjusting the JSON file. If you do change teams, it is recommended to keep a history of the JSON teams files along with the quiz results file so that you can always go back and rescore a quiz as it was at the time. This is useful if you want to total scores over time instead of or an addition to a single quiz scoring. For example, at the end of a year, players or teams can be scored for all-time high scores, total high scores, all-time low scores, etc.
The hardest part of running the quiz, besides coming up with the questions, is the answer normalization.
This is a manual process whereby all similar answers must be grouped so that all similar answers become the same
exact text. I find this is easiest to do while the answers are still in spreadsheet format. I sort the rows
by the answers in question #1. Then I look for commonalities in the answers, highlight all those common answers and
execute a Copy-Down function (CTRL-D in Excel or Meta-D in Google Sheets). Sometimes I have to remove "the" or "a" or
other common words in front of some answers.
Players might try and make social, political, or company cultural comments which often are unacceptable or which are not appropriate for the Quiz. Someone may feel like they are being singled out or bullied by an answer. Someone might have tried to make a joke but their humor might not translate to everyone in a safe manner. The quiz master must look for all these cases and deal with the answers. In some cases, the answer can be sanitized and in others just removed entirely (leaving a blank answer for that player).
Finally, there will always be a subset of players who are trying to be funny with their answer. If the humor seems harmless, I'll just leave the answer in place knowing they will obviously get a low score. Other times, the player obviously just is too lazy to answer properly and in that case, I might, again, just leave the answer knowing they are going to get a low score.
During answer presentation, you might find that you missed an answer normalization, For example, let's say we had the question, "A sweetener for food or drink". Maybe we got the following answers: Saccrrin Sweet and Low Sugar Steevia Fructose Sweet-n-Low Sacirine Sucrose
You normlized the answers to: Saccrrin Sweet and Low Sugar Steevia Fructose Sucrose
During the answer presentation, someone points out that Sweet and Low is the same thing as Saccrrin and you realize that you missed that. You're the judge, you can choose to overrule the objection or, you can correct it. If you wish to correct it, you would just edit the answers and rerun the tabulation again.
You can play with bonus values for certain questions. Anyone getting the bonus answer will get an extra score equal to 150% of the top answer for the question. For example, if the answers were as follows:
10 Chocolate
5 Vanilla
1 Strawberry
and Strawberry was the bonus answer, then the user(s) who answered Strawberry would get a score of 16 for that question; as opposed to 1 in the above example. If the bonus answer were Chocolate, then 10 people would get a score of 26 for the question. Obviously, the bonus feature is designed for a non-common answer. Maybe the quiz master wants to emphasize an answer. For example, in the above example, maybe people know the quiz master has a Miss Strawberry character in the background of their web cam and so players might be able to put two and two together to score the bonus.
You can mark a question as a bonus question by prepending the question with the 🎯 character. If the question starts with the 🎯 character, you must also append in square brackets the answer which qualifies for the bonus. For example:
🎯 A song by the group Cold Play [Adventure Of A Lifetime]
In this example, any answers consisting of "adventure of a lifetime" will get a bonus score added.
When using Google forms, you should create a _______ type of form. You should restrict the end-time of when submissions must be supplied. You must collect the email of the players. Google Forms will not supply a name with the email address. There is not a good way to get the names from email addresses using the Google APIs (the API to do that is helplessly broken at this point).
When scoring the quiz, you export the Google Forms result as a Google Sheet and then download the sheet as a CSV file.