I am pleased to announce that the halftime show of the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction will be held on Discord, this Saturday, February 15th, at 8:00 PM Central time.
Before I go any further I must make it very clear that participation in the halftime show is not limited to Entrants in the Exposition. Anyone can participate in the halftime show. Protocols for maintaining the anonymity of Entrants in the midst of this very fun and cool halftime show will be laid out below.
Trivia Night
Like all aspects of the Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction, the halftime show serves my (Ryan Veeder’s) own selfish interests. I will explain:
Since 2014 I’ve been designing and hosting trivia night fundraisers for Family & Children’s Council of Black Hawk County. I try to make each event into a unique and exciting evening, and frequently I include material that’s less trivia-style and more puzzle-style, or sometimes just goofy. Here are some examples:
Whose Cat Is That? (1/3) (2/3) (3/3) (2016)
Celebrity Guest Host (2017)
Whose Dog Is This? (2017)
Death By Charades (2018) (You can’t really play along with this one but you can read the instructions and listen to bangin’ tunes)
RELAX-O-VISION (2018)
Bird Identification (this isn’t the final version) (2019)
RELAX-O-VISION 2019 (2019)
(The video rounds I make are usually more experimental. Most of the material is in a much more conventional “bunch of questions on a slideshow” format. But I don’t have convenient URLs for that stuff.)
Structured gameplay in any format benefits from iteration and revision; however brilliant its initial design, a game’s success lies in its adaptations against players and their unpredictable foibles. That is to say: I need people to playtest some trivia for me. Therefore, I am selfishly asking the intfiction.org community to supply guinea pigs for an event that will take place later this month.
I must warn you that material written for this event is not designed toward posing a challenge to the super-nerds of the intfiction.org set. If you come hoping to really test your trivia mettle, you may be disappointed. But hopefully you will have fun. And hopefully you will notice any errors, ambiguities, or lapses in proper trivia construction that I have committed, and you will report them to me, and I will fix them and improve the experience of people who attend the fundraiser.
Maintaining Anonymity
Strictly speaking, the administration of this halftime show has nothing to do with my judgment of my Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction, but it stands to reason that Entrants, being interested in the Exposition overall, will be disproportionately inclined toward interest in the halftime show. And so the grim possibility arises that I will be able to guess the identity of Entrants based on their participation in the halftime show.
To avoid such a catastrophe, I will put Entrants on an even footing with non-Entrants, such that everyone is equally likely to participate in the halftime show. I will do so by issuing these edicts, which bear the same legislative weight as all the many rules in my Exposition:
IF YOU ARE AN ENTRANT IN THE EXPOSITION:
YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST SERIOUSLY CONSIDER NOT PARTICIPATING IN THE HALFTIME SHOW, ON PAIN OF FORFEIT.
YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST ALSO SERIOUSLY CONSIDER PARTICIPATING IN THE HALFTIME SHOW, ON PAIN OF FORFEIT.
IF YOU ARE NOT AN ENTRANT IN THE EXPOSITION:
YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST SERIOUSLY CONSIDER PARTICIPATING IN THE HALFTIME SHOW, ON PAIN OF FORFEIT.
YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST ALSO SERIOUSLY CONSIDER NOT PARTICIPATING IN THE HALFTIME SHOW, ON PAIN OF FORFEIT.
As long as everyone abides by the above rules, it will be impossible for me to consider a person’s participation in the halftime show as evidence for or against their status as Entrant to the Exposition.
I formally discourage Entrants from participating in the halftime show under their Alter Egos, because the very decision to participate as your Alter Ego could easily constitute a clue to your true identity. If you participate as your true self, your anonymity as Entrant is probably safe. But I leave it up to Entrants to determine whether participating under their Alter Egos is the correct (anonymity-maintaining) move for themselves on an Entrant-to-Entrant basis.
Details
If you plan to participate in the halftime show, please join the Discord for the Trivial Authority of Black Hawk County at your earliest convenience.
I am obfuscating the invite link to the Discord because I don’t know whether there are bots that trawl forums for this kind of thing. The first part of course is https://discord.gg/ and then the second part, the interesting part, is AVzZJ6K
Also, if you can, please reply to this post, or @ me on Twitter, or say something in the Discord, that gives me an indication of the degree to which I should expect you to participate. I don’t mind at all if you have to say something like “golly, sir, I’d like to, but I dunno if the schedule will work out.” That at least is information—But if you just click the heart button on this post then I will have no idea what that’s supposed to mean and you will succeed only in vexing me!!!
But then on the other hand it is not strictly necessary for you to tell me anything ahead of time. I’d like to have an idea of how many people will participate, but I can tolerate some small irregularities. We’re not talking about the Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction here.
Final Thoughts
If you be ready on Discord a little before we’re supposed to start, that’s great. We might be able to split into multiple competitive teams if there are enough people, but that requires knowing how many people there are, and it requires setting up channels for the teams, and I’d like to start as close to the scheduled start time as possible, BECAUSE, I hope a lot of people will participate, and I would prefer for each participant to be minimally inconvenienced!
That scheduled start time again is: 8:00 PM Central time, this Saturday the 15th of February.
Thank you for your interest.
(at the bottom of this post, next to the 
symbol, is an up-to-the-minute numerical indication of how vexed I am!!!)
your