I was playing Scattegories with some friends last night and ran into an interesting scenario. The game is about coming up with names of things/people/places/etc that begin with a particular letter. The goal is to get as many points as possible and you get a point if yours is a unique answer for the particular category. Apparently, one of the rules is that you cannot use the same response for more than one category. Initially this did not seem like a big deal. After all, what are the chances that a capital and a menu item or an insect name and a crime would be the same? But it turns out, it happens more often than one might think. I suspect this may be because you are so focused on the letter and the words you have already come up with that if one of them fits another category, you’ll make the connection relatively quickly. You have three minutes to find a dozen matches, that’s a lot of cognitive switching in a short span of time. I ended up with the same response to the following two categories: President and Product Name (which we interpreted as brand name). What was my answer? There are probably several matches depending on the letter, mine happened using the letter H. I got the product name first and then realized there had been a U.S. president by the same name. Knowing the outcome, it would make sense to figure out the match here the other way around, of course.;) Remember, no Web searches available during the game and you have about fifteen seconds to come up with a response. (Of course, from the point-of-view of the game this is a silly exercise since the goal is to avoid such overlaps, but we’re not playing that game.:)
{ 24 comments }
A_Steele 07.25.04 at 4:25 pm
My guess would be President Hoover, and the vacum cleaner by the same name.
eszter 07.25.04 at 4:28 pm
Yeah, well, I figured it wouldn’t take that long…;-) Good job! At least this response is below the fold.:)
keef 07.25.04 at 5:00 pm
I direct your attention to an episode of Larry David’s HBO Comedy “Curb Your Enthusiasm” which features a game of Scattergories.
Shaquille O’Neill is laid up in [the] hospital, thanks to Larry David. He’s playing a game of Scattergories that includes his doctor as a competitor. Turns out the M.D. is cheating, and Larry uncovers the evidence.
Apropos of nothing other than I like “Curb Your Enthusiasm”
Keef
Mrs Tilton 07.25.04 at 5:10 pm
I was playing Scattegories with some friends last night…. The game is about coming up with names of things/people/places/etc that begin with a particular letter.
‘Scattegories’, eh? Sounds remarkably like what I know as Stadt, Land, Fluss.
J. Ellenberg 07.25.04 at 5:13 pm
As if you needed further proof of my nerdiness, I immediately assumed the answer was “Hayes” — as in, Rutherford B., and the Hayes Smartmodem, the 1200-baud version of which was among the dearest possessions of my teenage years.
eszter 07.25.04 at 5:21 pm
Keef – How was the MD cheating and what was the evidence?
Mrs. Tilton – Aha! Now I remember what the game was called in Hungarian: Ország, város (I think), which translates into: Country, city. We didn’t have an actual board or printed up cards, we’d just take a sheet, write country, city, river, mountain, etc. on it and pick a letter. It was a very popular game at birthday parties. I guess the focus could be on geography because we actually had geography classes.;-)
Jordan – That’s funny. I did wonder if anyone would come up with a Hayes product.;)
keef 07.25.04 at 5:32 pm
eszter wrote:
“Keef – How was the MD cheating and what was the evidence?”
As I recall, it went like this. After time ran out for a round the players were reading from their sheets the words they had used in each category. The doctor read his words, threw his game sheet in the wastebasket, and left to work.
Made suspicious by the doctor’s sneaky demeanor, Larry David pulled the sheet out of the wastebasket and discovered that one or two of the blanks on the game sheet were not filled in — the doc had claimed words he had not written in the alloted time.
I’m not giving too much away, as this is a small scene near the end of the episode, and there’s a lot of other funny stuff going on in this little scene, too.
Keef
andrew 07.25.04 at 5:42 pm
Bush baked beans. In the US, they throw brown sugar and a slab o’ pig fat in the can.
eszter 07.25.04 at 5:52 pm
Keef – Thanks for the clarification. It’s true, there is potential for cheating at that stage of the game. You could claim to have written things you hadn’t written either to neutralize someone else’s response or to add something last minute to a field you left blank. We played a very friendly (and honest) game last night. We were more inclined to accept iffy responses than to reject them.. especially if they were imaginative. There is a lot of room for creativity with categories like “things in a suitcase”, “things you like to keep hidden” and “things you save up for”.
Ophelia Benson 07.25.04 at 6:18 pm
Hoover answer took me about half a second – no doubt because I used to have a thing for Art Deco, hence had a thing for the Hoover factory on the North Circular Road. I mention it because associations are sort of innaresting. That game must bump into associations all the time.
Ken Hirsch 07.25.04 at 7:19 pm
There was a game show on cable that I only saw once (I don’t even remember the name), but it had a really great category of questions this show: Vice President or Vacuum Cleaner. They would toss out a name and you had to say whether it was the name of a Vice President or a vacuum cleaner brand. Obviously inspired by Hoover, but that wasn’t one of the questions.
Matt McGrattan 07.26.04 at 12:55 am
The Hoover building is fantastic.
This guy here has some photos.
Another Damned Medievalist 07.26.04 at 3:07 am
Hmmm … Vice President or Vacuum Cleaner? Sounds like you were watching Win Ben Stein’s Money
bunny 07.26.04 at 3:26 am
Before I got to the point where you restricted it to the letter H I had come up with Ford. And of course cars remind you of Lincoln.
Thlayli 07.26.04 at 3:49 am
“Ford” is an obvious one.
“Johnson & Johnson” — it’s a brand name, and two presidents! ;)
“Carter” is a children’s clothing manufacturer.
If you’re not fussy about spelling, there’s “Busch”, a crappy-even-by-American-standards beer.
Jo Wolff 07.26.04 at 8:12 am
Just to underline Keef’s comment about Curb Your Enthusiasm. A month ago, like many in the UK without cable, I had never heard of this. But I was given the DVD and I would now have to rate it in the superleague of US comedies. It is in some respects rather like a cynical LA version of Voltaire’s Candide, by and starring Larry David, a, or the, writer of Seinfeld.
This allows me to introduce my Seinfeld theory, which I first tried out about five years ago to universal disdain. Could it be that the characters are – implicitly or otherwise – based on Disney favourites? Jerry is Mickey Mouse, Elaine Minnie, George Donald Duck and Kramer Goofy?
Mrs Tilton 07.26.04 at 9:05 am
Eszter,
yes, that’s it exactly; Stadt, Land, Fluss is clearly the German for Ország, város. Nothing more than a piece of paper and a pencil and a frantic race down alphabetised mental lists.
But you’re not implying that this ‘Scattegories’ is something that uses a board and cards and that one buys in a box, I hope? Next you’ll be telling me that Coke has taken ordinary tap water, stuck it in a bottle with an exotic name on it and flogged it off to foolish yuppies at an obscene mark-up!
dave heasman 07.26.04 at 12:15 pm
The Hoover factory is indeed fantastic, but it’s not on the North Circular – it’s on the Western Avenue, a bit east of Greenford. And it’s now a Tesco’s.
jp 07.26.04 at 5:34 pm
Since scattegories is really all about fighting, the underdetermination of the rules makes good sense. When friends and I play, we usually leave the rules as vague as possible at the outset in order to maximize yelling in the course of the game.
eszter 07.26.04 at 8:07 pm
Mrs. Tilton – No, I’ll be telling you that Coke has taken ordinary water, stuck it in a bottle without anything additional, and is selling it for more than the stuff with the magic syrup.
Yeah, I’ve been amazed at the number of do-it-yourself paper-pencil games that show up on store shelves in this country.
Rana 07.26.04 at 11:05 pm
Oh yes. Fictionary is a classic one — I forget what the stupid card-and-board version is called, but it completely misses the point (and the sheer fun of searching the dictionary for a good stumper).
David Salmanson 07.27.04 at 2:23 am
An earlier version of the boxed game was called Facts in Five. I played a version you didn’t buy even before that.
andrew 07.27.04 at 4:33 am
And Lincoln Logs, of course.
Jonathan Edelstein 07.28.04 at 5:52 am
Hammer DeRoburt and Hammer brand knives.
(It didn’t say last names. It didn’t say U.S. presidents. And no, I didn’t do any web searches.)
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