13 February 2011

Editing is for Losers

I spent the weekend with my SiL and her sister at their Aunt's cabin near Windsor. It was a glorious weekend of woodstoves, spiked hot chocolate, and snow shoeing. 



Last night we played a hunting, fishing, and camping trivia game. It's basically a themed Trivial Pursuit, but with the board changed just enough to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits.
It was the funnest game I've played in a long time, mostly because the questions were hilarious. At Christmas, we played a Christmas trivia game with hilariously stupid questions. At the time, I never thought I'd play a game that could reach that level of awesome badness. I was wrong. Aside from having no consistency with grammar, capitalization, numbering/letter multiple choice options,  the questions often made no sense. Or they were, really, a matter of opinion and not belonging in a trivia game. Clearly, the cards weren't proofread. Or they were proofread by semi literate fourth grader. It made for fun gaming.

A good example of the proof reading quality is seen in the two cards below (the answers are in italics following the question) - see if you can spot the errors  (I'd never heard of Naismith's rule, but apparently, it's a real thing): 



Are here are two awesome questions about fish. Remember, 1/3 of the target audience for this game is people who like to fish:

3 comments:

Deb said...

But, what about all of those land-dwelling fish?!

Ellie Fish said...

I know! It's the wording that kills me. I mean, if it was just "where do most fish live?" then it'd just be a stupid question. But the "most" implies that there are a minority of fish that don't live in water. I know there are some species that can survive droughts and periods of dessication, but I doubt that's what they're refering to.

Candra said...

Ah, it must have been amazing to snowshoe all over the place!