New Scaratings

Hybrid Showdown is a very new, very different way to play Showdown, just as remote team play was a new, different way to play Buzztime. If you've been playing NTN/Buzztime in a bar for the last few decades, you may think that very new and very different equals very bad not only for you, but for anyone else. Your immediate reaction may well be something like "That's cheating!! Play the old-fashioned way!"

Is this really cheating? Let's look at that.

To some degree, cheating is in the eye of the beholder. The average solo player probably thinks that team play is cheating. If there were ever a referendum on the matter, team play could well lose. But Buzztime over the years has implicitly indicated in many ways that team play is acceptable, running contests for teams, for instance. This has never changed any solo player's mind, but that is some people's personal belief, not general canon.

So if team play isn't cheating, then can there be cheating in team play? This issue came up in the latter part of the Nineties, when National West Covina began to use computers to get answers in Showdown, and promptly became the dominant team in Showdown. Others like Inglewood followed. Outside of some trivial changes in Showdown, NTN did nothing to prevent or discourage the practice. Starting around this time, NTN-sponsored tournaments diminished and player-run tournaments began to spring up. They paid no attention to NTN's benign neglect and instead made rules against computer use to get answers in the game. The earlier rules said just that and only that, often quite succinctly. The consensus rule was simple: no use of reference materials, including those on computers. Back then, computer use meant "use as a reference" because that was the only use a computer could have had in the Buzztime environment, and some of the rules explicitly state that. Cheap, easy videoconferencing
did not exist at that time. The principle was simple: no answers from nonhuman sources, or if you prefer, only answers from brains. A phrase often used was "Wetware only." This general principle held up well when new situations arose. When the Internet became a viable source of reference material, that fit the criteria, and that was properly considered cheating, too. On occasion over the years, technical issues made it possible to see answers from games played in location X before the same game was played in location Y. No problem applying the general principle here, either.

Let's apply the general principle to Hybrid Showdown. If a Zoom person answers a question, where is the answer coming from? A human. A brain. Wetware. The general principle has no problem with that. Yes, a computer is used, but only to convey an answer. not provide it. When a TV interviewer asks someone elsewhere else a question, you do not think a computer answered the question; you know a human being answered it and the computers just relayed the answer.

So where's the problem? I went through Scaratings from when it began in 2010 to now to get an idea of the history of the definition of cheating.

In McCarthy 2011, the general principle was altered, by one rulewriter, to add a prohibition to "telecommunication from outside the location." The only apparent reason for the change was Buzztime's introduction of a phone app which for at least some periods had little to no geographic restrictions; otherwise, this seemed to be a solution in search of a problem. The author seemed to be of the belief that "everyone and everything must be in the bar" but doesn't necessarily say quite that in this or later versions. I could spend pages parsing the legal meaning of this and later versions of this rule, but the real issue isn't the parsing of old and current rules, but whether there is any good, objective reason for having such a rule at all.

A different person handled McCarthy in 2012, and his rules didn't include this concept at all. The same was true in McCarthy 2013. For quite some time, whether or not the idea was in the rules depended solely on whether the creator was writing the rules or not. Then it became a cut-and-paste exercise, to the point where rules that became obsolete due to Buzztime changes were left in years after they stopped being applicable.
The point here is that we are not dealing with the Ten Commandments or U.S. Constitution here, rules can and have been changed or dropped quite easily.

Technological advancements since 2011 have changed the meaning of phrases. In 2011, Zoom didn't even exist as a company, and its availability as cheap videoconferencing on just about any old piece of equipment is about as new as COVID. But technological advancements are almost trivial compared to the societal change of attitude about the use of video in everyday life since 2011, or for that matter, 2019. Think about how much attitudes have changed about a hybrid environment for work, for schools and universities, for meetings and gatherings. Why did that happen? Wasn't it due to necessity? Wasn't it a choice between going hybrid and closing up shop? Yes, the COVID crisis has faded, and some bosses want everybody back into the office like back in the good old days, but they don't dare because they'll lose much or most of their employees if they do. Even Buzztime, which was built financially on the basis of play in bars, threw the rulebook out the window when COVID struck and let you play most games remotely.

We who used to play at Mad River have spent the last two-and-a-half years in this brave new world, so we know all about it. We had no choice: it was do it or quit. I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have about it, but on the whole, while it has its disadvantages, it's better than nothing. And we would suggest that when you've lost almost 95% of your customers and most of your stores, maybe you shouldn't keep the doors locked and barricaded to new ways of using and (hint, hint) paying for the product. Unless . . . . you have a really, really good reason backed up with proof that this newfangled way of playing the game would greatly harm the game. like computer use almost did twenty-something years ago.

And if you do have that reason, could you please tell me? I've done all this, and I don't see anything that even vaguely resembles the threat of the "Borg" back in the good old days.