Zach Baker: Story-Driven

Well, I hope that by now everyone has seen the conclusion of my three-day Jeopardy! career last Friday. So…

Congratulations to Ben Taylor, the reigning Jeopardy champion for the next two months!

Okay, so a little explanation. Due to the way that Jeopardy works, being a pre-recorded program and all, Ben and I last saw each other in April. That’s when we taped the program seen last week. And that was the last normal (non-tournament) episode of Jeopardy’s 23rd season.

The 24th season will start airing in mid-September, and they of course invite back the champion from the previous season’s last game. And yet the first two weeks of the next season have already been taped, five on Tuesday and five today.

Who knows what has happened in real life already. Maybe Ben is still on a tear, like another Jeopardy champion who was studying for his master’s in Germany at the time. I wouldn’t doubt it if I heard it. Or maybe he’s caught up with whatever circumstances have kept every successive champ from reaching ten wins.

Of course, having three months between games also means that Ben has had three months of interregnum in which to prepare. I had mixed feelings about being in that position, since I would feel like I had to train and study for my return appearance, while knowing that it could all be over on my first game back. But hey, Ben’s a student, so studying for Jeopardy is not nearly as major a sacrifice for him, I figured. So that part of it worked out well.

Again, congrats to Ben, the reigning champ (as far as any of us know!) for a great game and for claiming the unique end-of-season Jeopardy crown. I’m eager to see what happened afterwards, so I’m looking forward to September.

InviteShare has just launched and is the subject of a Techcrunch story. They let you share invitations to websites that are in limited beta with users that want them. There are many informal places to do this, but not a site for it yet.

What’s this? The site is already up for auction on SitePoint, just three days after its launch. That’s an interesting way to do it.

But what I find really interesting is how having this process formalized allows us to measure how many people are interested in an invitation to a website in development.

What’s the next step? It must be people signing up for invites before the website even exists!

Think about it. Founders can pitch their just-started projects and see how many people want to be at the head of the line when it launches. Nobody? Then forget it. Lots of folks? Hustle and get it finished up as fast as you can, or show that long list to someone with money.

There are already sites where you can audition ideas, and now there’s a site that gives you invitation access. So put them together and you get a simple gauge of early demand. Hey, someone go bid on InviteShare and do this!

Michael John is the best game designer at analyzing the gameplay experience I’ve ever seen. I was really pleased that he put together a blog about design and production, although it’s been a month and a half since anything new popped up there.

MJ’s talk at the DICE Summit is a great look at some of the systemic production problems in the game industry, but I cracked up when he showed his Brain Age slide, with guys moving from one development house to another:

Of course, that was what I was facing me at Luxoflux when I quit.

Did I say development house? I mean studio! MJ makes a great point that the word “developer” has become a source of confusing ambiguity in games. Developers are people, studios are where they work. Makes a lot of sense, so I’ll adopt that myself.

If you are interested in MJ’s blog, check out his design category for what I think is the coolest stuff.

So hey, if you’re one of the hundreds or so people that my family or I told to watch Jeopardy! last night, you saw that I won a close game against Jeopardy champion Monica Lenhard. It was an amazing, exciting, nervewracking and fun experience!

You pretty much only get one shot to be on Jeopardy!, so I was dedicated to preparing myself in the weeks before I got behind the podium. I played along with all the episodes I had on my digital TV recorder, pausing at the end of each question and keeping score on paper. Then I thought, hey, there’s an amazing website, j-archive.com, that has the record of countless games, and I’m a web programmer who uses the sweetest web framework ever, Ruby on Rails. I’ve got to make my own training setup!

So here’s what I did in a day and a half one weekend – just skip this part if you’re not interested in the technology. I put together two of the most useful Rails plugins, Mechanize (which uses the fantastic Hpricot parsing library) and attachment-fu. I was able to download and parse the games from J-Archive using Mechanize, and show the clues’ pictures instantly using attachment-fu. It only took 244 lines of Ruby and some Javascript to make it all work.

With this setup, I was able to pick my own categories, have my patient wife read the clues, stand back and click my clicky pen at the right time. Since it was all on the computer and based on actual games, I could see at a glance how I was doing, stop at any time, compare my scores to the actual contestants, and get a better sense of the flow of the game.

It kept score without regard to Daily Doubles, known as a Coryat score among the Jeopardy fans. This makes the score more comparable and predictable. The main page I went to was a list of the games I had played, which let me keep track of my progress.

For the benefit of future potential contestants who want a benchmark, here are the scores I got in my practice sessions, with both the number of questions I got right and my Coryat score for each. The total numbers next to them are the number of questions that were actually seen and the total value of the questions contestants got right in that game.

Did I go too far? Well, it took less than a weekend to write and was fun, so I would say no. And it really helped me get a feel for the game. Having been on the show, I now think it was even more useful than I thought it would be. I can definitely say that Ruby on Rails helped me win on Jeopardy!

So my appearance on Jeopardy! airs tonight. That was a really fun experience – I’ll tell more of that story later. But I want to share a weird circumstance I noticed.

Just about everyone who’s dreamed about being a contestant on Jeopardy! has fantasized about “their” category coming up, right? Not one that they’re the #1 expert in the world in, just one that they know more about than any random contestant.

Like, say, if you edited a Wikipedia entry for something and that ended up being the exact subject of the category. Maybe, let’s just say, you’ve only created one entry in Wikipedia ever, one you wouldn’t ever expect would be a category on Jeopardy, and then bam, there it is on the game board.

Well, I was exactly one month away from that scenario coming true:

The only contributions I’ve made to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Zachbaker

A month ago on Jeopardy, June 11, 2007 (see the second category)

Let me say I’m not bitter or unhappy at all, just amazed. So I had to mention it. Tune in tonight and see what categories I actually face.