To ask or not to ask. Representations of the past in the sport version of "Chto? Gde? Kogda?"

Ðàçìåùåíî íà http://www.allbest.ru/

FEDERAL STATE AUTONOMOUS EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION FOR HIGHER PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

Saint Petersburg School of Arts and Humanities

Daniil Fedkevich

Field of Study: “History”

Degree Programme: Applied and Interdisciplinary History «Usable Pasts»

Master's thesis

To ask or not to ask? Representations of the past in the sport version of “Chto? Gde? Kogda?” Quiz game

Student of Group ¹: ÌÏÈ181Ñ A. Kolesnik

Saint Petersburg 2020

Abstract

The thesis examined representations of the past in questions that have been played at the sport version of Chto? Gde? Kogda? quiz game. Being an adaptation of the popular TV show originated in the mid-1970s, the offline-game attracts thousands of Russian-speaking players across the globe. Combination of diverse methods such as consulting the shooting team's materials, media publications, interviews with the sport version's authors and quantitative analysis of the game's content allows to present the very first research on the topic. First, this paper describes how the sport version has adapted the show's rules to play without TV cameras and later become a commercialized activity which players from many countries are involved into. Second, approaches used by the game's authors in composing questions about the past is studied focusing at verification of facts, self-censorship, cooperation with organizers and feedback by the audience. Finally, the dataset comprised of 3,276 questions is analyzed with assistance of R computational language to shed light onto dynamics in representing the past topically and geographically within the studied environment.

Acknowledgments

This thesis will never be written without my supervisor Julia Lajus who has put colossal efforts in instructing, finding external advisors, defending the project in front of critics and, what is the most important, encouraging and supporting me. Stepping into a field which is new for her, Julia was very curios and brave, and this helped me to believe that the research is possible.

I would like to thank professors of the Department of History at Higher School of Economics in St Petersburg who were helping me in discovering history as an extremely multifaceted and comprehensive discipline. Special thanks are reserved for Alexei Koupriyanov who has opened the field of Digital Humanities for me and was always ready to give an advice about this thesis.

I express my profound gratitude to authors who agreed on being interviewed for this thesis and found a spot for a conversation in their tight schedules.

It would be impossible to do a digital part of the research without assistants who spend hours annotating the dataset. Anastasia Alekseeva, Nikita Golubev, Arina Gomazova, Elizaveta Ivanova, Arseniy Malyshev, Maria Podryadchikova, Anastasia Ryazanova, Evgeniya Zakovorotnaya, Fyodor Zhelne and especially Veronika Fedkevich have my deepest thanks for their contribution.

Last but not least, it was a pleasure to study and constantly discuss our theses with Lois, Alexei, Anastasia, George, Lewis, Nadyya, Giovanni, Yadhav and all other students of our program.

Content

Introduction

Chapter 1. “A people's game”: A brief history of the sport version of Chto? Gde? Kogda?

1.1 The TV show is equally interesting to play and to watch

Chapter 2. “There is nothing special about `historical' questions. Oh, but wait...”

2.1 The game's authors and their approaches in representing the past

2.2 A brief history of composing questions

2.3 How to compose questions about the past

2.4 Self-censorship, organizers' control, and feedback

Chapter 3. “We started grazing on new fields”

3.1 Representations of the past in the game's content

Conclusion

Sources

Appendix

Introduction

What do we know undoubtedly? At most, just a few personally experienced things because the overwhelmingly prevailing amount of knowledge we receive relying on mediators who turn what they (or their sources) know (or think that they do) into information we consume. For the present, we believe in mass media that retranslates news to the public. For the future, we believe in experts who make forecasts. For the past, we think that we trust historians but actually these professionals rarely have an opportunity to share their findings to a wide audience; thus, people are forced to communicate with the universe's previous experience through non-academic forms of activity such as reading popular-history books, visiting museums, watching documentaries, attending open lectures or listening to podcasts. Regardless the level of a guide's expertise, in all forms of interacting with the past (and the present as well) there is one that has become a subject for this research - a game and more specifically a quiz the content of which is based on facts derived from what happened and what happens.

This thesis is devoted to the sport version (sportivnaia versiia) of What? Where? When? (Chto? Gde? Kogda? in Russian Hereinafter, all terms italicized are transliterations from Russian, unless otherwise specified). Having its roots in the Soviet and later Russian TV quiz show, SChGK is an offline entertainment practice that regularly occupies a place in thousands of players' timetables. Instead of being atomized and tied to particular venues like participants of relatively similar pub quizzes do in the West, the community of SChGK has organized a system of local, national and international tournaments uniting Russian-speaking players across the globe; solely, the 2019 World Championships attracted teams from 27 countries. While the game is based on facts, a significant proportion of questions that participants are intended to answer represents the past events and processes, historical figures

and issues of the yesterday, and relationships between the past embodied in questions, these questions' authors and the perceiving audience constitute the core of this study.

The original Chto? Gde? Kogda? TV show was initially created in 1975 by producer Vladimir Voroshilov and editor Natalia Stetsenko. It is significantly different from many other quiz shows broadcasted in Russia because players are required not to answer questions based on merely knowing something but to use their logic and creative thinking finding an answer on the offered narrative which is constructed on real facts; therefore, the entire audience has an opportunity to discuss possible solution simultaneously with players. This type of questions has been labelled as “unknown about known” and, arguably, they have been the secret of the show's success for decades. Since 1986, the show is aired live what contributes to the TV audience's loyalty as well.

The game itself is a competition between a team of TV watchers who ask questions and a team of six players (labelled as znatoki) who answer these questions sitting at the mirror-covered round table in the Hunter's House (Okhotnichii domik), an eighteenth-century pavilion located in the Neskuchnyi Garden in Moscow. This table is divided into thirteen sectors, and each of these sectors symbolizes one question sent by a TV watcher in advance, then selected and edited by the show's producers. The host is not present in the pavilion physically; he sits in a separate room and communicates with players, assistants and present audience with his voice. The game is comprised of maximum eleven rounds, and each round consists of choosing a question randomly, reading it by the host, one minute of team members' brainstorming, giving a team's answer and announcement of the correct answer. If znatokfs answer is correct, they gain one point, otherwise a question's author gains this point for TV watchers and money prize for himself or herself. The game ends when one of participating teams scores six points.

In the late 1980s, the game's fans started to think how they can play a similar game without TV cameras and the specific entourage of the TV show. These discussions turned into development of the set of appropriate rules as well as establishment of the International Association of Clubs (IAC) in 1989 and emergence of the sport version (SChGK). The set of rules which was designed to allow people to play by their own is significantly different from one of the TV show. In the sport version, the number of participating teams is not limited, and questions are prepared by professional authors. Teams compete not with these authors, but against each other, and their goal is to give correct answers on most questions during a tournament consists of a priori known number of them. By contrast with the TV show, teams provide their answers in a written form on special pieces of paper or less often via software specifically developed for this purpose.

Roughly speaking, teams can participate in two types of the SChGK tournaments. The first category is general tournaments (ochnye turniry) that require a physical presence of competing teams in a tournament's venue. The second category which is synchronized tournaments (sinkhronnye turniry) can be played anywhere in the world during a short period of time (usually, from three to five days). An organizer of such a tournament uploads a set of questions to the special website, then any person can download this set and organize a sub-venue (ploshchadka); after, a representative of a sub-venue shares its results with a tournament's organizer who compels results from all sub-venues into one table and publish summarized score.

The movement has been rapidly growing during the last twenty years. Currently, more than 170,000 people in more than 50 countries are mentioned as players on the website of IAC's official rankings. Most of them live in Russia and other former Soviet republics, while the number of people involved in the movement increases as well in countries where people migrate from the overmentioned states. Nowadays, tournaments regularly take place in the USA, Germany, the Czech Republic, Finland, Switzerland, Israel, and other countries. Despite this dissemination of players, the major language of SChGK is Russian while some local tournaments can be played in other languages.

The thesis explores how the past is represented in questions that have been played at SChGK tournaments with a focus on representations of Russian and Soviet pasts. Using interviews I have conducted with authors of questions together with results of questions' quantitative analysis, I study how this form of mass entertainment applies historical knowledge and affects its audience as well as how this has been changed since the beginning of the century. I argue that while the general domestic attitude which is followed in Russia aims at turning the past into mostly symbolical representations and a resource to implement political agenda on different levels, the highly internationalized community of SChGK focuses priorly on factually correct representations that could usefully entertain the audience regardless the dominating narrative supported by the state. At the same time, the international character of the game could lead to changing the attitude toward Russian and Soviet past that used to be shared by players and nowadays has been becoming progressively distant.

To prevent possible confusion, I should utter three clarifications. First, in this text I use the word “fact” not as a term, but as it is applied within the studied community. For them, a “fact” is something at the heart of any question, either real or fictional, objective or opinion based. In this sense, facts come from the outside, and authors turn them into questions removing the excess and casting into the playable form (as I will try to demonstrate in Chapter 2, it does not mean faking). Although this approach might be likened to Fleck's idea of fact as a result of negotiations aimed at dividing one from surrounding interpretations Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)., it would be too ambitious and arguably unreasonable to make such a comparison. I follow similar approach when I mention “historical facts” in this text relying on the idea that this term is axiomatic in many senses Ivan Kurilla, Istoriia, ili Proshloe v nastoiashchem (St Petersburg: EUSP Press, 2020), 40.. Therefore, the constant usage of this word does not mean an attempt to participate in long-running discussions on the issue; however, it might turn to be a topic for future research about the game.

Second, as the paper's title suggests, it makes no pretense to examine how historical expertise is perceived, explored, and exploited within the community. On the contrary, people who participate in the studied activity are not professionals; thus, the key term for this research is past, not history, and I am interested in how “the past is maintained through our attention to this past” Ibid, 41. within the SChGK and how “knowing about previous social reality constructs this reality” Irina Savelieva and Andrei Poletayev, Znanie o proshlom: Teoriia i istoriia, vol. 1, Konstruirovanie proshlogo (St Petersburg: Nauka, 2003), 244. for the studied community. Arguably, this purpose does not actually require diving into numerous works attempting to classify the past such as ones by Shils Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981). or Oakeshott Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999).; at the same time, appealing to such a mass-culture understanding of this concept does not mean putting one into frameworks of the secondary school's textbooks. Roughly speaking, for the thesis it is possible to understand the term “past” in its broadest sense.

Third, this thesis does not aim at studying the so-called Russian World or any form of identity. While constant mentioning of the game's several features (such as Russian as its main language and its roots in the Soviet culture) could mislead the reader, it is important to highlight that I am interested in players as znatoki exclusively. SChGK is not a tool of Russia's soft power Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). because it is a self-supporting community that does not embody anyone's agenda. Also, it is not a closed community based on national identity due to absence of anything political in this game's core Ronald Grigor Suny, “Provisional Stabilities: The Politics of Identities in Post-Soviet Eurasia,” International Security 24, no. 3 (2000): 144.; on the contrary, it is quite diverse group of people who simply use Russian as lingua franca. Nevertheless, it would be irrelevant to study this side of the game on my sources and especially groundless to make any conclusion on the issue.

Taking into account that this research is dedicated to how the past exists in a form of game, generally two fields of scholarship are reviewed - first, Game Studies and second, Public and Popular History - together with studies on the overlapping of those. For the researchers interested in Game Studies, the basic monograph is Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga. In his book, the Dutch anthropologist distinguishes the main features of games which are as follows: (1) game as a function which has a meaning, (2) game as something different from the ordinary life, (3) game as an opposite for seriousness, and (4) game as a voluntary action. While the scholar mostly uses examples from the classical Greek, Roman and European cultures, the described features of game contribute to the thesis's subject. From the perspective of Huizinga, players who are involved in games representing past events do it voluntarily and seem to be open for any kind of this representation. The scholar also highlights that questions presented in form of riddles have been an important element of human interaction since the earliest times. Moreover, when the society changes into post- industrial one, games tend to appeal to intelligence rather than physical abilities as well as become more “serious” Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study Of The Play-Element In Culture (New York: Routledge, 1949)..

In his Man, Play and Games, Caillois draws a distinction between play and game. According to the scholar, play is an entertaining, frolicking, and improvisational activity whereas game is more defined in terms of rules, space, and time. Within this contraposition, four main types of games exist; they might be combined in one game as well. According to Caillois, these types are as follows:

agôn (from Greek “contest”) is a competition. These games are characterized with artificially created equality of competitors, and their contention aims at detection of the most successful gamer;

alea (from Latin “dicing”) is a game based on chance. In contrast with agôn, path of these games is out of a player's responsibility; a player is passive and does not demonstrate his or her skills while he or she fights not against his or her competitors but against fortune;

mimicry is role playing. Player is supposed to wear a mask of another person and follow the set of established rules playing his own role within a game's environment and scenario;

ilinx (from Greek “whirlpool”) is a sense of altering perception. It comes with doing extremal sports, riding Russian mountains or taking psychedelic drugs Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001)..

Although Caillois does not consider content-based games in his study, a question on possibilities for representations of the past in the previously delivered types of games arose. It seems that mimicry provides the widest set of opportunities for such a representation. As it can be assumed from the literature reviewed below, most historical (digital) games rely on this mimicry offering players to become a soldier in shooters or a god in games like Civilization. At first sight, representation of the past in games is restricted to this type only, though I argue that agôn can be a field to do so but it requires a significant change of the gameplay. This implication is possible if the past is not only the atmosphere which a game takes place within but the content which gameplay is constructed on. Developing these ideas of games' role in people's social life, McLuhan suggests that game is a reaction on cultural influence. Games create an artificial situation which people use to interpret and complete their understanding of everyday life and culture they live in because these games present a relatively rare opportunity for pure communication within post-industrial society characterized with decentralization and lack of direct relations Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).. I argue that SChGk gives such an opportunity to players and can perfectly illustrate ideas offered by McLuhan.

Despite the fact that one of the key Huizinga's arguments on game's function in culture is the one about game's ability to draw a player away from “seriousness”, scholars have been arguing on the implementation of games in the professional life since the late 1960s. One of the most important contributions in the subfield has been done by Abt who introduced the term “serious game” to describe games played primarily not to entertain participants but to learn them. The scholar argues that these games can be beneficial to train students, doctors, representatives of the armed forces as well as to make people aware of artistic, cultural and religious issues Clark C. Abt, Serious Games (New York: Viking Press, 1970).. It would be groundless to claim that SChGK is a serious game because it was not developed with an educational purpose in its core. At the same time, this game is a relatively popular educational technique among teachers, and national championships among pupils and students take place in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus'

and other countries; thus, it seems possible that the game contributes to the development of people's knowledge and soft skills, and the concept of serious games can be applied to it.

For the last decades, digital games have been the most popular research object within the field of Game Studies and turned the scientific community's attention from other forms of gaming activity. I suggest that some ideas provided by authors working on computer games can be applied studying SChGK. For instance, Frasca suggests that games are specific objects that should be studied as games and nothing else. Developing his preposition, Frasca offers a term “ludology” to describe “[a] discipline that studies game and play activities” and states that this new field of research has some features similar with narratology; as narratives, games consist of beginning, development and result. From this point of view, it seems that SChGK is not only an example of this gamified narrative, but also a collection of smaller narratives represented in questions. During a minute of brainstorming, a team deals with one narrative offered by the question's author and then comes to another one whereas each of these narratives might contribute to better understanding of a particular event.

Another possible framework for doing a research on the past represented in games can be found in the collective monograph edited by Kapell and Elliott. They suggest that studying historical digital games requires defining what we know about intentions of developers who create these games. The scholars propose that there are three main elements shaping historical narrative within a gamified context. First, historical games are based on selected, ordered and reconceptualized facts, while this collection is always limited not only because of availability of the required information but also due to the existing necessity to bolster a game's rules and design rather than historical veracity. Second, previously selected facts should be shaped into a narrative which usually do not accurately follow historical one. Third, there are designers who create these games and can make mistakes representing the past in their products. Kapell and Elliott argue that representation of the past in historical games might include some inaccuracies whereas it is important to understand why this untidiness exists and what effects does it cause. Moreover, it is not obligatory that a gamer play to know more about the past and/or to understand historical development of the humankind; he or she just wants to win a game. Roughly speaking, gameplay is more important than historicity. Kapell and Elliott suggest that games mostly contribute to enjoyment and makes history more spectacular. At the same time, such games try to allow players to reconceptualize their perception of history, which is usually understood as a collection of slightly unconnected events and active persons, into a complicated process where all elements and actions are strongly interconnected Matthew W. Kapell and Andrew B.R. Elliott, eds., Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)..

Scholars who do not focus on Games Studies often share less optimistic view on the games' ability to provoke deeper understanding of the past. For instance, De Groot depicts how the past is represented in different types of computer games. The scholar characterizes these representations as “ambivalent at best and illusory at worst” Jerome De Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008): 134.; while games actively engage players with history, they do not contribute to deeper understanding of past events. Advantages of these representations are limited, and one of them is games' ability to demonstrate that historical experience is unprecedently complicated whereas it gives an imagination of a very inflexible model of the past. Digital historical games affect people's perception of the past and might cause a willingness to know more about the represented events, but they do not do it necessarily; moreover, a player cannot apply skills developed because of his or her playing activity. At the same time, De Groot highlights that non-academic and especially (semi-)fictional forms of representing the past makes it

“understandable if not touchable” Jerome De Groot, “«Perpetually dividing and suturing the past and present»: Mad Men and the illusions of history,” in Public and Popular History (New York: Routledge, 2013): 124.; therefore, such representations promote a broader historical imagination that academic history does.

Arguably, De Groot and others' claim that digital games are not actually useful for the development of players might be reexamined if a game turns to be a multiplayer one. An opportunity to play not against an algorithm but compete directly or indirectly with other players leads people to necessity to use their social skills. These positive effects become more evident if a game is relocated back from the digital mode into real world. There is an example of such a game which is also based on knowledge and therefore important for the proposed thesis; this game is a quiz.

Quiz games mostly exist in two formats. The first one is a pub quiz that emerged in the United Kingdom, where approximately 20 thousand bars and pubs organize such events weekly. Usually, all pub quizzes have their own sets of rules, but there are some common conventions such as competition between teams in answering questions prepared by a quizmaster. The basic difference between pub quiz and SChGK lies in the entire design of these questions, because in the former case they are usually reproduce the mode of trivia shared in most TV quiz shows. Scholars argue that this format can be useful to achieve educational goals in encouraging learning Peter Klappa, “Promoting active learning through `pub quizzes' -- a case study at the University of Kent,” Bioscience Education 14, no. 1 (2009): 1-6. and learning itself Tom Bourner and Linda Heath, “The pedagogic potential of the pub quiz,” Innovations in Education and Teaching International 51, no. 1 (2014): 105-14.. Another format is a TV quiz. As Holmes has studied, quiz shows started to be broadcasted in the 1940s Su Holmes, “`The Question Is - Is It All Worth Knowing?' The cultural circulation of the early British quiz show,” Media, Culture & Society 29, no. 1 (2006): 53-74., and the genre has been developed into hundreds of different formats all over the world. Researchers tend to analyze these formats as well as these shows' role in cultural life rather than their content.

For instance, Fiske argues that quiz shows in the United States depict educational systems in the West as well as capitalist ideology by giving an equal chance to win a game for people who are not equal in their real opportunity to do it. Moreover, the scholar promotes the division of knowledge used in such shows into “factual” (or “academic”), which is based on facts, and “ordinary” that resides in the human interactions in everyday life. According to the structure and design of a quiz show, it might celebrate different features of their participants; while “factual' knowledge shows promote “specialness” of players, the “human” knowledge shows celebrate “ordinariness” John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 2011).. Arguing with this perception of TV quizzes as a marginalized genre, Holmes suggests that ideological construction of knowledge in such shows should be reexamined. First, she proposes that class which a player belongs to is not the only factor that determines difficulty level of a particular question. Second, design of these shows has moved from depiction of entire class to representation of personalities whose own subjective experience “push the genre's structural contradiction to its outer limits” Su Holmes, “Not the final answer: Critical approaches to the quiz show and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8, no. 4 (2005): 500..

An extremely limited number of papers is devoted to the content analysis of TV quiz shows, and two of them are written by Hestroni whose interest relates to the worldwide famous show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. In his first paper on the topic, he argues that the previously mentioned critique on these shows does not perfectly evaluate the real situation. Hestorni compares the content of American and Israeli versions of the show to demonstrate that both “academic” and “everyday” knowledge can produce “difficult” questions while the former one is apt to be granted with more valuable prizes in the case of correct answer to the question Amir Hestroni, “What Do You Really Need To Know To Be A Millionaire? Content Analysis Of Quiz Shows In America And In Israel,” Communication Research Reports 18, no. 4 (2001): 418-28.. After three years, Hestroni has expanded his data adding questions from other national versions of the show which were broadcasted in Saudi Arabia,

Russia, Poland, Finland and Norway. In his later study, the researcher compares questions asked in these seven countries to demonstrate how the content of these national versions vary according to local cultural particularities. This Hestroni's paper analyzes three main hypotheses, which are as follows: (1) questions asked in culturally close countries are more similar in terms of topics' distribution, (2) more questions are related to for eign cultures in countries which are less isolated from the globalized world, and (3) questions based on facts which are culturally recognized as related to “academic” topics bring more valuable prizes for a player.

Within the proposed division between “academic” and “everyday” knowledge, Hestroni puts history which is described as “events and issues that are two years old or more” into the former category. At the same time, the author provides definitions for universal and local scopes of knowledge where the first one is characterized as “issues which are known outside the country in which the program is broadcast” whereas issues known specifically inside this country are related to the second category. Hestroni concludes that topics of questions in culturally close countries have a lot in common, while in more “isolated” countries such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States these topics relate more to local knowledge. Moreover, in all studied countries “academic” questions are recognized as more difficult, and therefore they bring bigger prizes for players Amir Hestroni, “The Millionaire Project: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Quiz Shows From the United States, Russia, Poland, Norway, Finland, Israel, and Saudi Arabia,” Mass Communication & Society 7, no. 2 (2004): 133-56.. I consider this research framework offered by Hestroni as a possible base for the study of SChGK, but it requires a set of modifications because of significant difference between two games. A clearer explanation of this adaptation is described in Chapter 3.

Relations between the local and the global in the field of popular history is an aspect De Groot is also interested in. The researcher claims that while many fictional representations of the past such as films and TV series are nowadays available worldwide, the majority of the international audience rarely care about authenticity and truthfulness of the depicted past. As De Groot explains, this happens because a representation might be a traumatic experience for one group or nation and practically a fairytale for others. Simultaneously, the past of others is as alien as one of ourselves, and the former one does not produce active discussion and numerous confronting comments. De Groot concludes that ongoing commercialization and commodification leads popular historical works to be therapeutically calming the audience in its interaction with the alien past Jerome De Groot, “«Perpetually dividing and suturing the past and present»: Mad Men and the illusions of history,” in Public and Popular History (New York: Routledge, 2013): 134.. In this context, SChGK is a high-potential case. On the one hand, this game is based on the Soviet and later Russian TV show, it is played in Russian, its administrative body and the majority of authors reside in Russia; thus, the game might be labelled as Russia-centric. On the other hand, numerous teams play abroad, and the distribution has been growing from generally former Soviet republics to practically any country where sufficiently big Russian-speaking diaspora resides. How does this highly diverse community coexist in perceiving the past through questions they try to answer? More specifically, how do they perceive their common Soviet past?

Martmez explains that while after the dissolution of the Soviet Union all Eastern European states had to reconceptualize their pasts, these countries followed different ways in solving this challenging task. For the Post-Soviet Russia, this process has turned into retrofitting history and led to copying a well-known frame without filling it for the public, and inside this frame “historical accuracy plays a secondary role” Francisco Martinez, “To Whom Does History Belong? The Theatre of Memory in Post-Soviet Russia, Estonia and Georgia,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 26, no. 1 (2017): 117.. The governmental policy of restituting the country's prestige and self-confidence is accompanied with the boom of popular historical publications. Regardless quality of these works, Martmez presents three factors that caused such a flourishing: (1) Zeitgeist of post-socialism, (2) development of visual forms of representations and (3) widening access to the Internet that allows to easily share and discuss different opinions towards the past Francisco Martinez, “To Whom Does History Belong? The Theatre of Memory in Post-Soviet Russia, Estonia and Georgia,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 26, no. 1 (2017): 120.. Although this process has led to the growth of pseudohistorical studies such as Fomenko's New Chronology, these changes also allowed trained and educated professionals to familiarize the public with new popular historical projects.

In the previously described process, an understanding of the Soviet past together with its incorporation into the general narrative of Russian history occupies a special place. While many other former Soviet republics promote the idea of distancing from the USSR and reconstructing national cultures and histories after the Union's breakup, Russia as a legal successor of the communist state must design a unique model of building relationships with its 20th century. Oushakine highlights that the Post-Soviet Russia follows a method of connecting people with the past emotionally instead of rationally, repeating old forms of commemorating without filling it with new content, making it familiar and co-remembering instead of understanding and reconceptualizing; obviously, the Soviet past and the Great Patriotic War above all has become the key subject for this approach's realization. As the researcher exemplifies, “facts and events of the past are not registered for their historical significance; they are emotionally relived and reenacted” Serguei Oushakine, “Remembering in Public: On the Affective Management of History,” Ab Imperio 1 (2013): 274..

It could be concluded that the aforementioned process leads to turning the Soviet past into being purely nostalgic within the contemporary Russian society whereas Kalinin confronts this view. He argues that the Russian government's policy in the 21st century aims at “recoding” simple nostalgia into the “new Russian patriotism” blurring specificity of the country's communist experience and harmonizingly including this period into the narrative of ceaseless Russian history and culture; in other words, “a project consists not in restoration, but neutralization of the Soviet past” Ilya Kalinin, “Nostal'gicheskaia modernizatsiia: Sovetskoe proshloe kak istoricheskii gorizont,” Neprikosnovenny Zapas 6 (2010): 6-16.. The government embodies this approach to prevent any debates on the issue and provide a basis for the public consensus, using past (not history) as a resource for the shift towards modernization, and the public mostly supports this paradigm Ilya Kalinin, “The Struggle for History: The Past as a Limited Resource,” in Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe, eds. Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 255-65.. This process' pace has been accelerated after the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 and consequent change in Russian foreign policy, as Kurilla suggests, and officials began to search for historical episodes in both Soviet and Pre-Soviet times to use. As the researcher highlights, “in a broad sense, history in Russia is really the only available language for societal discussions about political issues”; therefore, it might be suggested that embodying the past into questions might cause numerous discussions within the game's community.

Studying SChGK promises a contribution to the observed fields of academic expertise thanks to several reasons. As for Game Studies, this area of knowledge lacks research on the content of quizzes that happen outside broadcasting studios because in the West these events are atomized; more specifically, each organizer possesses his or her own audience, venue and content which is subsequently not accumulated into one database. For Popular History, the thesis provides an opportunity to examine how content creators (who are mostly not professional historians) work with the past within the environment where factual correctness is crucially important for a true game. Finally, studying the game's community and content might reveal how Russian and Soviet past have been represented and perceived within a purely private, nongovernmental and self-regulated context of the activity that used to be almost properly late-Soviet and Russian one and have been experiencing the growing internationalization.

As the game consists of three main elements which are its community, its designers and its content, the thesis' body is divided into three chapters. The first one describes how the TV show What? Where? When? has been transformed into a regular gaming practice for thousands of players in the former Soviet republics and abroad as well as how the community is internally organized nowadays. Achieving this goal required consulting a limited number of scholar papers on the topic, materials issued by the TV show's producers, the sport version's online resources together with interviews and publications in mass media. The second chapter is dedicated to the analysis of how questions are created by their authors; more specifically,

I have conducted interviews to examine how these non-professional historians look for sources, verify information, and filter questions about different historical periods and events into sets depending on a tournament's audience. Finally, the third chapter is an attempt to observe trends in representing the past for the studied community with application of digital methods. To accomplish this task, I have compiled a dataset of more than 3,000 questions retrieved from the online open-access collection, annotated by independent assistants, and later analyzed via R computational language. Chapters 2 and 3 include a detailed description of methods used in interviewing and computational analysis respectively.

Chapter 1. “A people's game”: A brief history of the sport version of Chto? Gde? Kogda?

1.1 The TV show is equally interesting to play and to watch

In the case of the sport version, you can only play, because it is impossible to watch.

Maksim Potashev

The game which is studied in this thesis has outlasted numerous transformations since the mid-1970s when it was originally designed. In 1975, TV producer Vladimir Voroshilov launched a show called «Semeinaia viktorina “Chto? Gde? Kogda?”» (The Family Quiz “What? Where? When?”). A competition between two families trying to answer eleven questions was filmed at their homes and did not attract significant attention from the audience. After the very first episode, the show was curtailed, and Voroshilov had spent two years looking for the game's perfect formula. The producer turned it into a “television youth club”, substituted families with a team of six participants (znatoki) and an imagined team of TV viewers who submitted questions and were not present while filming, organized a broadcasting studio in the Ostankino television center's bar, replaced immediate individual answers with co-agreed team versions found after a minute of brainstorming, added random choosing of questions with assistance of a whipping-top and finally began regular seasons of the show in 1978. Since that time, What? Where? When? has been often labelled as one of the most successful and widely beloved TV shows on the Soviet and later Russian television.

The fact that the game has been airing live on prime time since 1986 only contributes to this evaluation.

Besides other factors of such a success, Voroshilov chose a fertile soil to plant his project onto when he decided to create a show in this style. Soviet people became acquainted with the format of quiz (known in Soviet and then Russian culture as viktorina) in 1928. That year, the widely-spread Ogonek magazine started promotion of this “intellectual game” suggesting readers to both check their knowledge and broaden horizons (rasshirit ' krugozor). The periodical provided a set of questions as well as rules explaining how to play alone, against each other or being divided into competing teams. Initially, questions were not assembled according to particular topic, and only later thematic editions started being published. Within a couple of years, this format has been adapted by numerous Soviet periodicals widening not only readers' horizons but also boarders of the format; for instance, quizzes started being complemented with images. Tantsevova has demonstrated how the format could turn to be as pedagogic as informative. In 1929, Ogonek published a series of twelve quizzes titled Geroi nashego vremeni (The Hero of Our Time) inviting the audience to check whether they are truly Soviet people as the dominant ideology wanted them to be. Forty-six years later, Voroshilov has designed the game that had been classified as viktorina by some people causing the producer's displeasure. As he explains in his book Fenomen igry (The Phenomenon of Game), this term was created by the Soviet journalist and writer Mikhail Koltsov as a title for a newspaper's page devoted to charades and rebuses. Later, any game based on questions and answers has been usually called viktorina whereas “it does not have anything to do with determining the genre's crucial characteristics”. Voroshilov preferred to call his creature “a game” emphasizing that his project's theatrical aspect is as much important as the playful one. Moreover, he did not call himself a host or a quizmaster; instead, he was a “director”.

In contrast with the sport version which is the key subject for the paper, the original TV show has attracted the academia's attention earlier. In her Between Truth and Time:

A History of Soviet Central Television, Evans has studied transformations the show was experiencing until the late 1990s. The researcher demonstrates how Voroshilov's game first solved the state television's task to create a successful and ideologically correct TV game and later restructured according to the political agenda and atmosphere within the Soviet society Christine Evans, Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).. Moreover, the show's creator saw it as one mirroring the real life and constantly highlighted that the game is about being able to solve a given situation. For “historical” questions, this might be extrapolated to applying knowledge about the past, installing known and/or given facts into context, reconstructing a narrative, and finding its logical accomplishment. Evans also points out that “the boundary between znatoki and viewers blurred considerably”, and in 1988 ten teams of “amateurs” (former viewers) from different cities across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were invited to compete in front of the TV cameras Christine Evans, “From Truth to Time: Soviet Central Television, 1957-1985” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkley, 2010): 191..

The discourse presented by Evans is supported and complemented by Khazanov.

In his recent article, the researcher connects the concept of the Soviet intelligentsia with constantly changing design of the game which creators have been promoting being “intellectual” instead of simply knowing numerous facts without an ability to apply this knowledge. Khazanov highlights how perestroika has switched the game's participants from being representatives of the Soviet “mass elite” to contrastingly oppose the previous view o f intelligentsia; more explicitly, “if both the players and the TV viewers' teams in the Brezhnev years were supposed to be reflections of the Soviet collective, they were now much more explicitly part of a transnational gathering” Pavel Khazanov, “`What Is Our Life? A Game!' : What? Where? When? and the Capitalist Gamble of the Soviet Intelligentsia,” The Russian Review 79, no. 2 (2020): 280.. New round of the game's transformation Voroshilov had performed in the end of the 1980s allowed to put his show into the recently emerged capitalist culture and economy; as Khazanov concludes, “the What? Where? When?'s transition to capitalism suggests that the occlusion of a left wing in post-Soviet Russian politics has happened due to the wiring of the collective subjectivity that brought post-Soviet Yeltsinism and capitalism into existence” Ibid, 290..

While Voroshilov was struggling the changing political, economic, and cultural landscape of the Gorbachev's Soviet Union, the game's encouraged fans developed the set of appropriate rules for playing outside the shooting area, and the International Association of Clubs (IAC) was established in 1989. The game's new transnational character as both Evans and Khazanov suggests has been appropriated by enthusiasts from the late 1980s and still appears as one of the crucially important features of the widely spread community of non-television znatoki. This desire required being technically creative to artificially unite teams from different parts of the biggest country of the world as well as ones from abroad. For instance, the first edition of the USSR championship in 1990/91 attracted 167 teams from 96 cities, and the preliminary round was conducted via phones; after this selecting round, the most successful teams gathered to play offline. So-called “telephone-based tournaments” (telefonnye turniry) regularly took place in the 1990s allowing a team to compete with other fans of the game from different cities and countries as long as the Internet has been spread widely. In 1994, the very first “electronic tournament” (elektronnyi turnir) was organized;

teams were asked to submit their applications via e-mail, and the same tool was used to share a set of questions and later collect results. Despite this willingness to operationalize technical opportunities and the claim to be an international community, all prestigious tournaments such as city or national championships took place offline, and Russian was the only language of communication. As far back as the early 1990s, SChGK tournaments took place in independent Ukraine, Armenia, Belarus' and Lithuania. In 1995, the first national championships were organized in Estonia and Georgia. Besides these events, numerous open tournaments (festival.i) appeared not only for general public, but also specifically for school children and students Ibid; thus, openness and internationality has always been the core element of this community.

During the initial years of the sport version, the IAC and the TV show's shooting team cooperated quite actively. While the form of entertainment required advice from Voroshilov and his experienced colleagues, the latter ones tried to use the recently emerged association for a smoother transition into the new reality of perestroika and later capitalism. In 1989, stock shares for the IAC replaced books as traditional prizes for outstanding performance or questions (two years later, both znatoki and viewers obtained an opportunity to win money in cash) Pavel Khazanov, “`What Is Our Life? A Game!' : What? Where? When? and the Capitalist Gamble of the Soviet Intelligentsia,” The Russian Review 79, no. 2 (2020): 283..

For the two initial editions of the USSR's championships, the final round was organized by the game's shooting team and broadcasted. In the mid-2000s, when the World Championships was launched, the team of winners was granted with an opportunity to participate in the TV show as equal to other teams of znatoki. Although, the intensity of this cooperation has been significantly decreasing, and nowadays “Igra TV” company is only involved in organizing annual World Championships as well as participates in the IAC's congresses and put its affiliated persons onto senior positions in the association's managing executive committee that in reality has a very limited power. Thus, the sport version has become practically independent from the show's production; simultaneously, the shooting team recruits the majority of new players from blossomed players of the sport version.

After Voroshilov's death in 2001, the show has not experienced reforms as dramatic as they were in the 20th century. Led by the producer's stepson and successor Boris Kryuk, it still promotes the idea that applying creative thinking and interpretation is more important than mere erudition. Chto? Gde? Kogda? is still broadcasted live and sponsored by leading Russian companies (currently, the country's second-largest bank VTB and the Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation). Znatoki still sit at the table in the Hunter's House, but nowadays one sector is reserved for a question selected by computer among those which are sent via the Internet by TV viewers during the live broadcasting Ibid. As in Voroshilov's times, the host is not present in front of cameras. Simultaneously, the sport version has been increasing its popularity, and Kriuk admitted that the shooting team did not actively resist on such a usage of the brand: “In the 1990s, the majority of people had just decided that Chto? Gde? Kogda? is like football or ice hockey, it is a people's game (narodnaia igra)”.