Instructions of the game

• Two teams made of two. Each team has a "performer" and a "producer"
  
• The performers will perform the task of asking and answering; the producers can communicate to their performer on phone and help them score. The producers have access to Internet and can use it to either ask or answer the question raised by the other team. Performers do not have access to the network.
  
• Each team can spend ten minutes discussing their questions prior to the game. The goal is to think of a place that might be least known by the opponents but best known by themselves.
  
• Each team has 30 second to answer a question and the performers have 30 second to find the place on the global map.
  
• If a team answer the question on time, it scores. If not, the other team does.
  
• The places they pick for the questions should be more than one country and, for each place, there can be a maximum of 5 questions regarding it.
  
• Once a question is asked, the first task to be done by the answering team is to point out the place on the map using the interface designed for the game. (Therefore, if one team increases the number of different places in their question, which seems to gain them a better chance to ask more challenging questions, however, it also runs at the risk that the other team will have extra time to pre-familiarize themselves with the place when they pinpoint the place on the map.)

A simple diagram of the setting

About the participations in the experiment

The participants are of all aged between 25 and 30, well known to one another. And everyone uses on-line resources on a daily basis, such as Google search, Wikipedia, etc. The two teams are team Mike & Jayne, and Jisu & Salvador. Among them, Mike and Jisu are the producers, Jayne and Salvador are the performers.

The flow of one task

The two videos below demonstrated the flow of a task, one failed and one completed.  

Observational findings

Experience vs. on-line source

Though the participants were not limited to the source they use to raise/answer the question, most of the questions were found based on on-line resources. For those few answers based on personal knowledge or experience, they turned out to be completed faster than just using the on-line search. (see video below)

Searching habit

It was found that for both producers, each time a question is raised, a new on-line search is started. For example, searching the keyword in the question instead of looking for the answer in the Wikipedia page already open about that place. It was found that a few questions led to to the answers in the same Wikipedia page, but resetting the search is the first reaction upon getting the question.

Choice for places

Both teams have selected one place in the US, their country of birth, for their questions. And both teams have used the maximum of 5 questions about that place.

It is found that it is not an impulse for the producers to help their performer find the place on the globe, rather than to focus on their computers. For Mike & Jayne's team, however, as they communicated about the difficulty of finding a smaller place in the global map designed for this game, Mike started to support Jayne by describing the geographic landmarks around the place. On the contrary, Salvador failed to find Switzerland on time, as the team did not communicate about the progress of locating the place. (see video below)

Strategies of re-organizing information

As the game went on and the participants became familiar with the flow of the game, the competitiveness of both team has increased. It was both teams' strategy of making the answer to their questions inaccessible to their participant. However, a lot of the questions were generated from the same search engines used to gain the answer. As a result, the participants adjusted their way of speaking to lift the question apart from the original text found through Google or Wikipedia, so that the question will hide away from search engines when the opponents try to use them. By doing that, however, the game became less self-regulated and a lot of misleading expressions started to occur.

The chart below listed all the questions being asked with the most debatable ones(as voted by the participants themselves) highlighted in pink. The more "tricky" a question is, the brighter the color. We can see that such questions occurred mostly in the second half of the game.

(Click to enlarge)

Different tactics of "playing tricks"

I took out all of the "tricky" questions as being highlighted in the above chart, and analyzed them according to the language tactics used to form them.

Question 3 -- Whose face is on the dog in Fremont?

The "dog" means the "statue of dog" in Fremont. It was not clarified until the third time the question was repeated.

Tactics: Omission - the question leaves out necessary description about the keyword.

Question 8 -- Which TV series is inspired by Capidokia?

Tactics: Misleading - The answer "Smurfs" should be referred to as a cartoon series.

Question 15 -- What is the modern day entity that Cern gave birth to?

Tactics: Concept exchange - The answer is World Wide Web. It can not be equalized as "modern entity", an abstract notion, which can lead to a diversity of things.

Question 17 -- Where is the British commander from who left Boston Siege?

The answer is "London". The proper way of asking should be "From which part of Britain is the commander from?"

Tactics: Paradox - The answer is already included of the question. So as the question being asked, one may initially look for places outside of "Britain" which will lead them to a wrong answer anyway.

Question 18 -- What chef is responsible for the Boston Tea Party?

The answer is "there is no chef responsible for the tea party".

Tactics: Trap - the answer does not exist.

Question 19 -- This 25-year-old soldier captured what at this fort and brought it to Boston?

Question is made of three questions - what is the name of the soldier? what did he capture? And where did he find it?

Tactics: Ambiguity and concealment - The question is not to be understood after the essential parameters about it are eliminated.

Conclusion

It fanscinates me to find, through the experiment, how fast people adjust their way of expressing to their condition, with acute observation of the media they use. In this case, the participants became aware of the pros and cons of on-line search tools and developed their own strategy of both using them to find the answer as fast as possible for themselves, but as slow as possible for the other.

The opportunity for the participants to create tasks for each other has resulted in more careful choices of the questions and the strategies of organizing the speech. And the competitive nature of the game also plays a catalystic role of pushing these activities towards extremes. The linguistic tactics such as "concealment", " omission", "misleading", "paradox" and "ambiguity", were all evidences of the adaptation the participants have made within the gaming scenario they were given.