There must be people who don’t like quizzes, but I have yet to meet them. Meanwhile, the rest of us launch ourselves with obsessive-compulsive regularity into Wordiply, Wordle, the New York Times’s utterly infuriating Connections and the Guardian’s own Thursday quiz, which comes complete with its own official dog. Why do we do it? Presumably there’s a competitive element, though I have muted “wordle” on my Bluesky timeline, and it would never occur to me to boast about having named the Framed film in one go, or identified a west African country purely from its shape in Worldle.
Quizzes are educational, but only to a degree; Artistle has taught me more about 19th-century Russian landscape painters than is ever likely to be of use in any sphere of life apart from other quizzes. It’s certainly not social, though quizzes are not a solitary pastime per se, hence the popularity of Trivial Pursuit; I like to brag about having once won the French version – against French people! – but am less keen to be reminded of that time I humiliated myself at my sister’s local pub quiz by expecting to ace the round on 1980s cinema, only for most of the questions to be about The Goonies, which I have never seen.
