Categories bend, split and retire: what awards trivia by profession really tests

A prize category is an administrative object. Categories bend, split and retire, and that is what an awards trivia round by profession really tests.

A committee creates it. It can be renamed, split into two, merged with its neighbor, suspended, or retired.

Most of the wrong answers in a profession-sorted awards round come from this, not from the people.

What to take away

Categories are made, not found

Any scheme for sorting work into kinds is an act of categorization, and the interesting property of such schemes is that they have to be maintained.

An awarding body starts with a set of categories that reflects how the work was done when the body was founded. The work changes. New crafts appear, old ones merge into others, and the boundaries that made sense once start producing entries that fit nowhere. So the body adjusts, and every adjustment leaves a seam.

Those seams are where questions go wrong. The Academy introduced an Oscar for Best Dance Direction for the films of 1935 and retired it after the films of 1937.

A category was split so one prize became two, and older results are not comparable with newer ones. Its name stayed the same while the eligibility rules underneath changed, and it was suspended for a period then brought back.

None of that shows up in a results list. The list looks continuous. What it actually records is a sequence of slightly different questions asked in slightly different years.

Profession is a second layer on top

The profession axis adds its own problem, because prize categories do not map cleanly onto jobs.

Awarding bodies sort by craft, a version of the division of labor inside one industry. They drew those divisions for their own purposes.

A category can cover work done by people who would describe their jobs differently. Two categories can cover work one person did on the same project. Several crafts have never had a category at all, a fact about the body rather than about the craft.

So a round organized as "prizes for performers, prizes for musicians, prizes for athletes" is already an approximation, and it will strand any question that sits near a boundary. The same leakage problem in a general context is worked through in guess the celebrity by profession.

The practical response is to organize the round by awarding body rather than by profession, and to let the professions fall out of that. Each body's categories are internally consistent because one committee maintains them. Any grouping you impose across bodies is your scheme, not theirs, and you will be the one defending it.

Where the good questions are

Once you stop treating categories as fixed, the material improves considerably.

Ask when a category was created and what problem it was created to solve. Every new category exists because something was not being recognized, and the reason is usually stated by the body at the time.

Ask what happened to a category that was retired. Retirements are decisions with reasons behind them, and the reasons are the interesting part.

Ask what changed when a category split. A split changes what winning means, and comparing before and after is exactly the kind of reasoning question that plays well and cannot go stale.

Ask which craft a body does not have a category for. This is a good question because it is answerable from a published list and because the answer is often surprising.

Here is one worked question. Question: how many times did the Recording Academy present a Grammy for Best Disco Recording? Answer: once, at the 1980 ceremony. Source: the Recording Academy's own award archive, which lists the category and its single year.

Each of these has a source, an exact answer, and no dependence on remembering results. That is the profile the whole approach is built around, and the profile behind awards trivia.

Checking a category before you use it

Three checks catch nearly every failure in this round.

Confirm the category existed in the period the question covers. This is the single most common error, and it happens because the writer knows the category now and assumes backwards.

Confirm the name in the question is the name the body used at the time. Renamings are frequent and a question using a modern name for an older prize is asking about something under a label that did not exist.

Confirm the eligibility rule. What a category admits decides what the results mean, and rules change more often than names do. Where the rule has changed, say which version the question uses.

All three are answered by the body's own published record, which is also where you should get the results if you use any. Second-hand lists carry the modern category names backwards over the whole history, which is precisely the error you are trying to avoid. The general sourcing ladder is the one in career quizzes.

Running the round

A category-history round is more interesting than a results round and it needs slightly more setup.

Say which body each block is about. Without that, players answer about whichever organization comes to mind, and half the wrong answers will be right about a different prize.

Keep the blocks short. Three or four questions per body is enough to establish the pattern and not enough to become a specialist round.

Put a reasoning question first in each block. Something structural gets the whole room in before anything specific arrives.

Here is a block for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The answers: a merge means the older question and the newer one are about different sizes of category; the design category was Art Direction; the writing category was Best Story. All three come off the Academy's own list of past awards.

And do not let one body dominate. A round that is mostly about a single ceremony is that ceremony's round, not a profession round, which is the same balance problem discussed in photo quizzes by profession.

Common questions

Is it fair to ask about categories nobody follows?

Yes, if the question is about the structure. Why a category exists is answerable by anybody who thinks about it, and it does not require having watched anything.

Where do I find a category's history?

The organization that runs the prize publishes its rules and usually its own record of changes. That is the primary source, and it is also the only one that will tell you what a rule said in a given year.

Can I compare prizes across different bodies?

Carefully, and never as if they measured the same thing. Different bodies use different electorates, different eligibility windows and different definitions, so a comparison is a comparison of procedures.

Should I use current names or historical ones?

Historical, with the current name in brackets on your answer sheet. Using the modern name in the question is the error the round is supposed to be about.

What about prizes that are voted by the public?

They are a legitimate category with a completely different procedure behind them, and that difference is a good question in itself. Just do not treat the results as measuring the same thing a jury measures. That confusion about what a prize means is at the center of movie and tv trivia.