How to run a virtual quiz night

The thing that makes a pub quiz work is a table of four arguing quietly. Take that away and you have a very different event, and the mistake almost everyone makes is running the same format and wondering why it is flat.

What is missing: the conferring, the background noise that lets people talk without being heard, the ability to read a room, and the drink. What is left is the questions, which were never the whole of it.

So a virtual quiz has to be shorter, faster and more structured than the thing it is imitating.

Forty-five minutes is about right. An hour is the ceiling.

People are sitting at the desk they have been at all day, looking at the same screen, and there is no bar to walk to. Attention on a call decays far faster than in a room, and a two-hour virtual quiz is a two-hour meeting with trivia in it.

Three or four rounds of eight, no break, straight into the results. If you want a break, end the quiz instead.

Team play needs conferring and conferring does not work on a call. Everyone talks over each other, or one person talks and the rest go quiet.

Breakout rooms solve it technically and cost you the thing that made teams worth having. Four people in a breakout room are not a table in a pub, and moving everybody in and out between rounds eats more time than the rounds take.

Individual scoring is the default that works. Everybody answers for themselves, the leaderboard is longer and more interesting, and nobody has to be put anywhere.

If you do want teams, set them up before anybody goes anywhere and keep them for the whole quiz.

Every remote social has the same failure mode: twenty minutes of somebody's audio, somebody else's install, and a colleague who cannot sign in. By the time it works the goodwill has gone.

Which is why the rule for anything you use is that it must open in a browser people already have, with nothing to download and no account to create. A quiz that needs an install has already lost the ten minutes it could not afford.

Send the link in the calendar invite as well as pasting it in the chat, because somebody will have the chat closed.

Everybody has a browser open. You cannot stop it and trying to is worse than the problem.

Two things reduce it to a non-issue. Short answer windows, because ten seconds is not long enough to look something up and type it, and questions where looking it up does not help: opinion-adjacent questions, nearest-wins numbers, questions about the people in the call.

And say at the start that it is for fun and the prize is nominal. A room told that in a friendly way mostly behaves.

Some people in a room, some at home. It is the worst of both and it is increasingly what gets asked for.

The room will always be faster and louder than the remote players, who end up as spectators. The fix is to treat everyone as remote: everybody answers on their own device, including the people sitting together, and the host reads questions into the call rather than to the room.

Put the call on a screen in the room so the remote people are visible, and resist the temptation to talk to the room rather than the camera. It is a discipline rather than a feature.