872Part VCase StudiesThe GameSeveral years ago, a friend (Make web site)
872Part VCase StudiesThe GameSeveral years ago, a friend asked one of us to try a quiz he d seen somewhere on the Internet. After I agreed, he told me that he would ask me ten questions, each of which had a numericalanswer (dates, weights, lengths, counts, and so on). The unusual part was that instead ofanswering with a number, I was to give a lower bound and an upper bound on the answer. Icould make the ranges as large as I wanted, and otherwise I had only one instruction: Makesure that you answer nine out of ten questions correctly. I answered the questions confidently and was surprised at the end to find that my final scorewas six (or was it four?). At any rate, I did surprisingly badly, but my friend said that every- one else he had tried it on had done even worse. Now, how could anyone lose such an easilywinnable game? After all, when asked when Shakespeare was born, I could have said Sometime between 30,000 B.C. and A.D. 30,000 and been pretty sure that I would be right. What trips people up seems to be some combination of pride and overconfidence. The prideprevents you from giving a ridiculously large range (because then your questioner knows you don t have the foggiest idea when Shakespeare was born); the overconfidence makes youwilling to narrow the range beyond your real range of certainty. In the end, the game isn ttesting your knowledge it s testing your knowledge of your own knowledge (or lack ofknowledge). Our versionIn this chapter, we implement something like this quiz game, but with some changes to makeit more Web-friendly. For one thing, rather than having the player type in numbers freely, wepresent a range of choices that the player narrows down further. For another, we don t relyon pride to make the ranges narrow (because people may end up playing this over the Webinthe privacy of their own home). Instead we add incentives to the scoring system to make people guess narrowly rather than broadly. Finally, we add some features familiar from onlinegames, such as levels of difficulty and a list of top scorers. The upshot is a game that, while it may or may not be fun, is certainly frustrating, which formany people is nearly as good. Sample screensFigure 46-1 shows the game screen as it may look to a new arrival. There is a welcome message to the right, and a question to the left, with radio buttons for choosing a range ofanswers. Figure 46-2 shows the screen immediately after the player has answered the first question. Another question is offered on the left, and now the state of the game score is highlighted onthe right, showing the correct answers to date, the credit remaining, and the level attained. (See the next section for an explanation of what these things mean.)
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