The game pulls you in by dangling a cash prize, offers manic highs and seething frustrations in quick succession, then dumps you out, usually empty-handed. But the HQ refractory period — six to 18 hours — is just long enough to relax you into a state of optimism about playing again. It’s dystopian “Jeopardy!”: not the trivia game we wanted, but the one we deserve.
HQ is based on an enticing proposition: It turns our phones, those founts of infinite knowledge, into a rare site of human recall. (Because questions are set on a 10-second clock, answers are generally un-Googleable.) But while the game purports to test legitimate knowledge, the questions are so frequently absurd that it comes closer to testing your undivided attention to mindless tapping. If you answer a question correctly, you still get that high of intellectual superiority. The Darwinian aspect — watch hundreds of thousands of people get eliminated as you rise — fosters a gleeful arrogance for as long as you’re on top.
But when you get a question wrong, you’re granted plausible deniability. If you can’t finish the crossword, it feels like a personal failure. But when you lose HQ — which the vast majority of players do the vast majority of the time — it often seems arbitrary and unfair, the fault of the unskilled question writers or the unsophisticated technology. It’s not you. It’s the game. And even if you do win, the big-sounding prizes — $1,000, $2,000, $10,000 — are often reduced to pocket change when split among the sometimes hundreds of other people who also won the game. HQ is a little app that channels big feelings about the fundamental lie of the meritocracy. Every session becomes an opportunity to rail against life’s injustices.
HQ Trivia
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Originally Posted by SteelBlue
