Witnessing Adult Quizbowl
A Visit to My Crooked Neighbors
A ludologist must never grow complacent. I have to see new games constantly and they each need to be more confusing than the last one, either in their procedure or in their appeal. One of the most beguiling questions I chase in my studies—a question which from an academic standpoint I probably oughtn’t be chasing because of its profound subjectivity and my own lack of rigorous investigatory methods—is “Why do people find this game fun?”
“Why do we come back here, again and again, to repeat this procedure in a fixated series of ritual acts which offer some inarticulable sense of relief or satisfaction?”
This is a difficult question to research because when you ask people why they enjoy a game, they will say, invariably, “I dunno, it’s fun.” It’s also a difficult question because, while it sounds psychological, it’s really more philosophical.
Did you know adults play quizbowl? Yes, you did: you’re reading this. On the off-chance this blog post breaks containment, recall that quizbowl is the academic-ish question-answering competition. On teams together the players press loud, angry buttons to answer lengthy questions composed in a decadently abstruse fashion. Though known primarily as a school-based activity, what I have learned is that adults do this thing too: Adult Quizbowl.
In early August, I went to see the quizitors engage in their fabled Chicago Open tournament, which they will want me to call the “most challenging form of quizbowl practiced in North America” or something similarly aggrandizing. In many ways, this experience was exactly like you think, if not more so.
In other, more important ways, it was not like you think at all.
The quizitors made the process of answering “Why do they find this fun?” appropriately challenging. Many of them are difficult to access via normative communication practices, living as they do with their minds enclosed in metaphorical clocháin composed of esoterica. Luckily, I’ve always had an anti-normative approach to interpersonal communications myself. For once, instead of sending me directly to the bottom of the social-emotional Marianas Trench, my malformations allowed me to locate and secure the meaning of Adult Quizbowl.
Quiz As It Was Documented Before Me
Others have studied quizbowl as a practice prior to my own foray into the secret circle. In 2012, Slate published an article focused on a national-level college tournament, with digressions into the history of the sport. Author Alan Siegel expounds upon the key procedural elements of quizzing, dedicating ample time to the critical sub-activity of quibbling over the definition of “valuable” knowledge. Most relevant to our work here today, Siegel describes quizbowl as A School Thing, a competition among the very nerdiest nerds of the most dorked-up universities.
Soon after, Slate published a short reaction to the article by Lauren O’Neal, a former quizbowl participant. She reflects upon the challenging experiences one may have as a female quizitor: the gendered pressure to excel without taking up space, as well as the overall discomfort of existing in a Scene with the demographic profile of Mulan’s military unit. O’Neal concludes on a note which we are presumably intended to find heartening: since school she has Become Normal, attending bar trivia, a place where other women often appear. I admit this is a wise tactical decision, but unfortunately as a reporter I have the spiritual safety instincts of a member of the Bangbang Club so it is not one I am interested in emulating at this time. Also, I personally get nothing from answering trivia questions other than a sense of mild amusement.
Earlier than either of these articles, the Harvard Crimson embedded one of their student journalists, a “Christian B. Flow” if you can believe that, onto the 2008 Harvard B Team to study the sport from the inside. This article most closely reflected what I observed and experienced at the 2026 Chicago Open. However, it was also the most condescending of the three articles in the treatment of its subjects, a failure which you must believe I am trying as hard as possible to avoid.
Across all three of these articles and most others I could dig up, the core fact of quizbowl was that it is A School Thing. None of these articles could answer why the quizitors care for such an activity, and none of them seemed much concerned for what becomes of quizitors once graduation rolls around and they get spat up into this cold world.
What did become of the fresh-faced young quizitors featured in these articles? (Easy question: I met many of them; they have become, like, 40 and they’re perfectly nice.) More importantly, the type of non-factual question which quizbowl does not prepare one to confront: why, after so many years, do they need to spend all weekend answering intentionally obscurantist questions?
Faced with the intractability of this question when applied to mere college students, my predecessors in the field of quiz studies always cracked. They often resorted to ad hominem references to the quizitors’ appearances and affects. I have plenty of ad hominem references, but they’re for my private amusement only. There are more important things to say about the activity of Adult Quizbowl.
It Is About The Personalities
Early in my visit to Chicago Open, a friendly quizitor told me with great conviction that “it’s not about the personalities, it’s about the questions.” Already under a suspicion that quizbowl does not cultivate the virtue of self-awareness, I marked this down as something almost certainly not true. The quizitors may tell themselves it’s not about the personalities in order to self-soothe, but there is something essential and unique to each of the protagonists of Adult Quizbowl which can only be expressed by answering lengthy academic trivia questions in a competitive fashion. Adult Quizbowl answers needs for them, as they answer questions for it.
It answers a need for fellowship and camaraderie in the field of knowing things no else can be bothered to know. One might generalize the protagonists of Adult Quizbowl as people who cannot necessarily find fellowship with ease elsewhere.
It answers a need for them to prove themselves against each other. The vast majority of people have no interest, no want, and no need to prove themselves in this peculiar way, but almost everyone has the desire to prove some aspect of their own self. You’re witnessing me write a multi-thousand word blog post on the activity of Adult Quizbowl in an exercise to prove to myself that I can have a hot take on anything.
It answers the quizitor’s need to service their own hermetic self-involvement, to justify the cycle of getting profoundly lost in one’s own thoughts. I am not a protagonist of Adult Quizbowl, but I know this cycle by other avenues and I know how endlessly it reinforces itself. It can be hard to escape. I have a blog.
As you might suspect from the phrase “hermetic self-involvement”, or pick up from the material in the articles linked above, or know from experiencing quizbowl yourself, the Quizbowl Scene as a whole is not without its aesthetic and ideological failings.
Now I must stop and assure you: this is not a downward punch. A willful refusal to acknowledge the flaws in something is not true affection; it’s dismemberment. We examine the whole corpus of observed Adult Quizbowl because it’s only fair.
Their Scene, like my own, has its epic dramas. These proceed in that particular nerd fashion—familiar already to tabletop gamers, science fiction fans, and other weirdos—which combines the lurid emotional trauma of reality TV with the pacing of Brideshead Revisited (1981). The ability of any nerd to emotionally self-regulate in the face of such events issssssssssssssssssssss variable. Having myself experienced what it is to receive bottomless rejection from the external world and subsequently exerted a Herculean reformatory effort in order to not to make dickish behavior my reflexive form of engagement with that world, I know the kinds of psychic cycles which make it so easy for nerd-victim to become nerd-victimizer. I salute the several folks I met at Chicago Open who, having met some key social or personal development milestones, provide themselves as brave examples of how to have a good time while keeping it medium.
Though I myself went unharmed in my time at Chicago Open, I do not hesitate to believe the attestations of other quizbowl-adjacent women that this is not always the case in the Quizbowl Scene. I also believe, instantly and without hesitation, that my introduction to quizbowl was improved by my being a self-possessed adult woman who recently broke my own hex bar deadlift PR by a significant amount. I am not an anxious high school or college girl. But I was her, so I am thoroughly familiar with the specter of the Nerd-Misogynist. I’m sure he’s lurking around the Quizbowl Scene.
One’s ability to leash one’s own internal Nerd-Misogynist, or to modulate other personal failings, is not necessarily enhanced by the qualities which quizbowl cultivates in a person: namely, the ruthless determination to always be right and the reinforcing instinct to go slightly apeshit when not. 110% of the most important things I have learned in life, I have learned by being wrong and tasting that bitter failure. The procedural rhetoric of quizbowl does not reliably bring out the sweetest qualities of even my favorite characters of Adult Quizbowl. That I find their showboating pedantry, on the whole, more charming than obnoxious testifies, above all else, to my personal pathologies.
Among the variety of methods we human beings use to answer our loneliest needs we can find plenty of maladaptive ones. I do not consider Adult Quizbowl to be one of these maladaptive modes. If there is a difference between me and the protagonists of Adult Quizbowl, we might locate it in the opportunities which have been provided to me, not in the essential natures which animate us. If I had one wish to spend on the protagonists of Adult Quizbowl, I would not wish them away from Adult Quizbowl, for they would wither up and turn to dust without it. It’s part of their process. If I had one wish to spend on the protagonists of Adult Quizbowl, I would wish to give them a few additional productive strategies for healthy emotional self-regulation.
I would also love to witness them eat a vegetable other than pizza. Probably some fiber would be good too.
It is only by chance and the heroic compassion of others that I have found ways to answer my loneliest needs without harming others or myself (much). I am not a protagonist of Adult Quizbowl, but I live in the same bad-name neighborhood as they do. I can say that without shame or fear. I see what they’re up to here.
For this reason, unlike my predecessors in quiz-journalism, I am given to know the real “animating tension”, per Alan Siegel, of quizbowl.
The Meaning of Adult Quizbowl
To see the protagonists of Adult Quizbowl overcome by seizure-like contortions of recall as they play is to at last understand the profundity of the activity’s hold on them. On one level, they perform these paroxysms for each other, trying to psyche each other out, trying to incarnate the breadth of their knowledge into some physical manifestation more commensurate to the content of their brains than their bodies are. On another level, they are so invested in getting these goofy questions correct that they’re going to fall out of their chairs.
Before your teammates, before the other team or the final tournament rankings, there’s you and your own shaky conviction you know the answer. Together you face down your own fallibility.
Essentially, quizbowl is all a struggle against self-doubt.
Quizbowl is a struggle against self-doubt, carried out by people whom I suspect to have received a great quantity of messages from a variety of sources about how much they should doubt themselves, especially outside the context of academia.
It has been my personal experience that when your self is found to be something indigestible or abnormal to your so-called peers or to the world at large, there is and may always be a part of you which wishes to destroy itself in some way, large or small.
In the course of inspecting Adult Quizbowl I watched its practitioners obliterate themselves over and over in the sinkholes of their own knowledge, and then come crawling back out again. Their essential selves always resurfaced because the specific collection of the facts they know and the composition of the questions they write are inseparable from who they are. Despite every swing at total self-erasure, the selves of the protagonists of Adult Quizbowl remained relentless and incontrovertible, visibly inscribed across their strange forms, audibly perceptible in their baffling statements. Which I’m glad for, because I like them. They’re like X-Files creatures to me.
Near the delirious close of my time at Chicago Open, it dawned on me that the activity is, I-shit-you-not, a “real fight” in the absolute William James sense. It is a fight to make some fairly odd lives thrilling to live in the most roundabout, nonsensical way possible: by circumscribing the entire world, all things known to all of us, inside the discrete and unusual beings of the quizitors. However doubt and shame may dog your life otherwise, Adult Quizbowl extends you an opportunity to exile them temporarily, buzzed out of sight and out of mind for a time.
(Unless you were to NEG! You IDIOT! You FOOL! But even the performative self-criticism post-mistake is part of this process, purgative humiliation to empty the mind before the next question—which is the promise of redemption.)
Nobody ever sees this real fight, because it occurs in a space so comprehensively uncool that it will never undergo normie-gentrification. This contrast came to me in a particularly poignant fashion because I had spent the prior weekend at Gen Con. Visiting Gen Con was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, a fantasy which had sustained me in my lowest days, but it was also awash in normies. When I first loved it, tabletop roleplaying was still a thing only major freaks, often Satan-adjacent, did. Now it is a hundred-million-dollar industry: a commodity. Normies will never have Adult Quizbowl. It is unsellable. It is unaestheticizable. It is indigestible. This makes Adult Quizbowl, and I hate having to say it, a little bit punk rock.
Don’t let that one go to your heads, guys.
Some might say there are other, easier ways to make one’s life electrifyingly tolerable, but I would argue not ones which will work on the kind of people who would participate in Adult Quizbowl. Though the desire to grind trivia questions like a sicko-fiend yet eludes me, I must admit that the numbers don’t lie (I have been rating the quality of every single day I experience in a spreadsheet since early January of 2024; I am sane.) I had more fun with the protagonists of Adult Quizbowl than I’ve had elsewhere in a long time.
At Chicago Open, I witnessed people driving overnight cross-country, taking 4am flights, crawling across burning fields of broken glass, all to spend 48 hours (at most!) in a featureless oubliette of contemporary academic architecture, asking or answering oblique trivia questions the whole time. At times it feels as if the world exists for the purpose of making us each feel small, insignificant, worthless, to forget us all as quickly as everyone normal has forgotten the fact-niblets which the protagonists of Adult Quizbowl treasure. If once a year—every year—you could have the fight of your life and always get home unscathed after, wouldn’t you go?
