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

As it has been illustrated, the two versions of the game are significantly different; they have almost split their ways and have been co-existing practically in parallel with each other. Maksim Potashev, one of the most successful players for both TV game and its sport version,

explains that this divergence is based on the opposition between two formats' key ideas - while the show is priorly a show, the other version tries to be as sportive and competitive as possible, and this contradiction provokes many players' antipathy toward the opposite version. Potashev's vision is supported by Mikhail Skipskii who has also made significant achievements in both formats. He highlights that popular consciousness still strongly connects playing the sport version with the TV show which for its part is widely associated with respect and prestige having “a positive reputation” (polozhitel'nyi imidzhf. Therefore, even after years of mutual distancing, the original show and its sport version are considered as interconnected spiritually and ideally.

Arguably, the 2010s have become the most flourishing time for the sport version due to ongoing commercialization of this game and emergence of another “parallel world” which at the same time converge with the sport version. Earlier, the game was not attractive for many people because tournaments took place in airless universities' rooms and culture centers (doma kul'tury) where players were sitting on inconvenient chairs and listening to unprofessional host's voice; therefore, mostly true fans came to compete. The situation began to change in 2009, when a Moscow-residing event agency “Intelsport” started organizing games in bars and restaurants for people who have never played the sport version before. The company's founder Leonid Edlin shares that he “started with a tournament for three teams in a pub, then this number doubled, then a dozen of teams came, then we were forced to split all participants into two leagues, then into three, then we opened our first branches in St Petersburg and Izhevsk. So, we have been growing exponentially”; currently, the project unites more than 10,000 players in 13 countries. Some years after the company's initial events, the sport version also partially relocated into bars and restaurants, and the number of participating players has been significantly increasing due in no small part to players flowing from the commercial project to the sport version and inversely. With the growing demand, authors supplying questions began earning noticeable fees; as it has been shared, an author who is popular among the community might earn 5,000 dollars per his authorial synchronized tournament Ibid.

As I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, the sport version's history was not linear for the last thirty years. Being emerged on the crucial crossroad on the initial TV show's history, SChGK has experienced a relatively similar transformation from an almost non- commercialized hobby to a business which allows organizers and authors to have an income. However, it has not lost crucial features of the game such as collective brainstorming, finding a correct answer with players' creative thinking instead of mere erudition and its international character combining with using Russian as the only (or at least the most widely used) language of communication and playing.

The described commercialization simultaneously led to one of formats Voroshilov tried looking for the perfect design for his show and which was qualified by Khazanov as a “house party” 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): 277.. Although the sport version allows znatoki to play practically everywhere and for almost unlimited amount of time independently from restrictions of the television's schedule, the very idea of this game is hidden within its questions. Therefore, the following chapters are dedicated to examination of how this content is created and what representations of the past it contains.

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

As it has been stated above, any content-based game consists of three main elements. The first one is this game itself, the process of gaming and perceiving narratives hidden within its content. The second element is game designers who create such narratives embodied into the game's content and develop its gameplay. Finally, there are players who consume the result of designers' work, perceive offered narratives and give feedback to creators of any game. This structure of three elements is sometimes complemented by an official body which is needed to control all processes and regulate relationships emerged because of a game Matthew W. Kapell and Andrew B.R. Elliott, eds., Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)..

While originally Chto? Gde? Kogda? is a TV show concerned much more about the audience instead of players, the described structure might be applied for its sport version, and in this case game designers are authors who compose questions that teams answer at tournaments. They are exactly those people who choose what and how to ask about, how to filter facts and stories the participating audience is expected to be acquainted with. Simultaneously, authors are not all-powerful - indeed, they are indirectly controlled by tournaments' organizing committees that order a set of questions (paket voprosov or simply paket) from these authors. Also, players have a knock-on effect on authors not giving them feedback as much as voting with their feet; in other words, there are numerous authors and tournaments, and players might stop participating in ones prepared by an author who does not work factually or ethically correct. Players' satisfaction seems to be the only or at least the most important indicator of authors' success - by contrast with television quizzes where authors' main goal is to entertain audience, not a player John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 2011); 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)..

This chapter aims at explaining how authors compose questions within the structure descripted above with a specific focus towards questions dedicated to the past events. Eleven authors have been interviewed to achieve the aforementioned goal. All of them have been working as authors for no less than ten years and have written at least 1,000 questions for at least 90 tournaments of different levels and formats (both local and international, regular and synchronized) and later published at the open-access online database. In the thesis, these authors are called with randomly assigned numbers while anonymized information about the interviewees is summarized in the table in Appendix A and describes the authors' sex, age, field of education and city of residence. During the interviewing procedure questions related to verification of facts, (self-)censorship, cooperation with tournaments' organizing committees and receiving feedback from players have been asked. The exemplary questionnaire I was relying while taking interviews is annexed to this thesis (see Appendix B).

2.2 A brief history of composing questions

Composing questions has always been the sport version's integral part because the game is not possible without them, especially because each tournament is intended to offer a set of questions repeating none of already published ones. At the same time, being an author has never become an exclusive right requiring specific permission by the IAC or any other organization as well as passed examination; thus, everybody can compose questions. The overwhelming majority of authors are also players who understand the community's internal features what allows them working better. According to the interviewees' experience, composing questions usually starts on the very local level such as university or city championships and later transforms from pure hobby into a permanent work that brings additional income after some years of practicing.

At the game's dawn in the early 1990s, such an activity was extremely challenging due to a very limited number of available sources and absence of the Internet. As Author 9 remembers, “In 1994, I came to Moscow together with two other authors, we checked into a hotel and received from the tournament's organizer a compilation of questions' drafts and an encyclopedic dictionary. For one day, we were supposed to sit in this room writing questions and editing others' drafts for the coming event” Author 9, interview by author, St Petersburg, March 8, 2020.. Although younger authors did not share similar experiences, some of them highlighted that the lack of sources had correlated with small number of tournaments that had taken place in the 1990s and 2000s: “Each year, there were five significant festivali, the city championships and some synchronized tournaments, so the community did not demand that many questions” Author 8, interview by author, St Petersburg and Moscow (via Skype), March 14, 2020. Ibid; Author 11, interview by author, St Petersburg, March 12, 2020.. Some interviewees mention that many authors started their careers that time because for many tournaments each competing team should submit a set of questions as a peculiar kind of participation fee, and only in the beginning of 2010s those authors “stopped composing questions because of their eagerness solely (na golom entuziazme)”11; thus, two processes gradually started in parallel with each other - commercialization of content production and professionalization of authors.

Since the beginning of the 2010s, authors who compose questions are paid for their work, and ongoing commercialization of the game imposes a framework authors work within. While practice of paying authors existed earlier, it was not wide-spread and compulsory Author 9, interview by author, St Petersburg, March 8, 2020.;

the situation has changed only some years ago. Amount of money authors receive for questions varies according to one's experience, availability and willingness to follow requirements an organizing committee imposes to him or her Cooperation between authors and tournaments' organizers is described and analyzed below in this chapter.. A price of one question starts from three dollars up to thirty and even more; therefore, an author who prepares a tournament usually consisting of 75 questions might earn hundreds of dollars. If he or she runs his or her own tournament instead of cooperating with external organizers, the income could be even higher. Also, after a tournament its set of questions might be sold to event agencies An example of “60 seconds” club is provided in the previous chapter, students' clubs and companies that hold their own internal championships out of the IAC's jurisdiction - because of this, the number of such tournaments is extremely difficult to count due to the lack of united databases, and their audience intersect in many cases.

According to some interviewees' opinion, the change in the community's internal bureaucracy became the most important trigger for the process of commercialization. Although the IAC ran a special commission for certifying authors, this confirmation was not actually necessary; therefore, the commission was abolished last year. Interestingly, none of the interviewees even mentioned this official body. While authors, like any other member of the community, have been indirectly controlled by the IAC's Disciplinary Commission and Ethics Commission (abolished in 2019), a team of enthusiasts who ran the ranking system established the Synchronized Tournaments' Supervisory Council (Nabliudatel'nyi sovet sinkhronov, or NaSoS). This partly official body aimed at regulating the number of synchronized tournaments and quality of their content; thus, it was slightly impossible to organize such a tournament without the NaSoS' approval Author 8, interview by author, St Petersburg and Moscow (via Skype), March 14, 2020; Author 11, interview by author, St Petersburg, March 12, 2020.. In the beginning of 2010s, the council started losing its legally non-backed monopoly under the community's pressure, and finally expired ca. 2013. Consequently, the “market” started being open, and any author (alone or together with an organizer) obtained an opportunity to conduct as many events as he or she wants to, but this change was not rapid as Author 8 concludes Author 8, interview by author, St Petersburg and Moscow (via Skype), March 14, 2020..

External factors such as development of the Internet and opening the “market” of organizing tournaments have influenced the entire practice of composing questions. Author 6 characterizes the general change in a following way: “In the infancy of the game, questions mirrored their authors' nature, hobbies and personal experience. Growing geographical dispersion together with commercialization turned questions from pieces of an author's oeuvre into products which very first goal is to satisfy players” Author 6, interview by author, St Petersburg and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 16, 2020.. In other words, if an author was a fan of specific field of knowledge, he or she wrote questions devoted to the same field disregarding players' expectations and audience's features. As some interviewees share, this change overlapped with succession of znatokfs generations explaining this in two different ways. First, there is an opinion that “ten or twelve years ago, there was one voice for the entire community, it was the voice of older generation who had grown up in the Soviet Union and preferred particular topics (especially historical ones) in questions. Nowadays, the situation is different - this older group is accompanied by people at their thirties and forties who grew up in the 1990s and students together with yesterday's graduated people who are numerous and have never lived in the USSR. All these groups have different attitudes towards questions, especially ones about the 20th century. They sometimes struggle without hearing each other” Author 3, interview by author, Moscow and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 15, 2020.. Second, as the older authors critically claimed, “the community grows thanks to younger and not really intelligent people who are not znatoki in this word's traditional sense. They mostly consume information from the Internet and media instead of more fundamental sources, and this instils array of information they want to cooperate while playing; therefore, authors are intended to work with the same topics” Author 11, interview by author, St Petersburg, March 12, 2020..

2.3 How to compose questions about the past

The vast majority of the interviewed authors made a statement that there is no big difference in composing questions based on the past in comparison with ones devoted to other topics. At the same time, there are several nuances that contribute to both advantages and disadvantages of such questions. Author 7 shares an opinion that players appreciate questions about the past, because these “delicatessen” remind them watching the television version of the game during their childhood and youth - the author explains that currently many questions in SChGK are not devoted to “serious” topics such as history or high culture whereas playing questions that touch on such topics gives for players an opportunity to stand in “true” znatokfs shoes Author 7, interview by author, Kyiv and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 20, 2020.. Moreover, the community thinks that demand for new questions grows faster than unasked “interesting stories from the past” are discovered, therefore composing such a question shows that an author has undertaken a lot of efforts. As Author 2 says, “there is no more a possibility to write questions about events mentioned in student books for history classes” Author 2, interview by author, Rostov on Don and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 14, 2020.. At the same time, while questions about the past are more difficult to compose and edit according to the interviewees, on the flipside it is easier to work with them because these historical facts are “actual” for either everybody or nobody in comparison with questions about current or recent events that only some players probably aware of. In other words, composing a question always leads to guessing whether a fact is “worth knowing”, and the time has done selection for historical facts whereas questions devoted to recent events are always risky. As Author 3 explains this, “It is difficult to evaluate an event's significance if it took place tree years ago. In contrast, if fifty or a hundred years passed, you have much more footholds - an event is mentioned in student's books or turned to be a plot for movies or novels; therefore, I can conclude that this fact seems to be significant not only for me, but also for many people and subsequently many players” Author 3, interview by author, Moscow and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 15, 2020.. Arguably, it might be concluded from the author's statement that authors do not cooperate with the past directly; instead, there are mediators such as secondary schools' and universities' curricula, popular culture and media they rely on while composing a question about the past events.

Among all interviewed authors, only one holds a degree in history, while the distribution of classifications obtained by them is wide - from engineering to medicine, from linguistics to business analytics. Commenting this contradiction, interviewees highlight that no specific training is required to compose questions based on historical facts due to the entire nature of gaming activity; as Author 5 states, “Even taking into account this game's claim to seriousness, Chto? Gde? Kogda? is not a science, it is just an entertainment” Author 5, interview by author, Moscow and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 22, 2020.. Author 6 agrees specifying that his approach towards verification of facts is designed by his questions' task: “I rely on requirements towards a product I create, and this product's very main idea is to entertain people but not to teach or even inform. If I wrote a book, I would check my sources more meticulously, but for questions a source of average seriousness combined with my own expertise is enough. If not, it is easier to throw a question's draft away” Author 6, interview by author, St Petersburg and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 16, 2020..

Denying the game's “seriousness” does not mean faking facts which questions are constructed on. The interviewed authors agree that author's task is to present facts in his or her question truly, and players' biggest disaffection is usually caused by factual mistakes in questions, as Author 7 highlights Author 7, interview by author, Kyiv and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 20, 2020.. He also accentuates that growing popularity of the game has increased author's concernment towards this issue because of a stronger chance that one of thousands of players knows a topic better than author does. This is extremely important because any player possess an opportunity to officially dispute a question's correctness writing an appeal (apelliatsiia). Each tournament possesses a special team of three experts (apelliatsionnoe zhiuri) whose decisions are announced publicly; thus, the entire community and organizing committees for following tournaments will realize that an author did not put enough efforts doing his or her job. This feature of gameplay distinguishes SChGK (and arguably all quizzes) from video games whose “users' understanding of - or, maybe more specifically, `interest' in - the past is at school level or below” Jerome De Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008): 143. in de Groot's words.

The fact that any question might be disputed forces authors to worry about maximal factual correctness of their questions. At the same time, authors admit that they often compose questions without absolutely thorough verification, and there is no trouble in doing this because it is possible to use referencing to particular authors or sources (e.g., According to [somebody] or As [somebody] writes in his/her book). Referencing to historical anecdotes, legends and rumors is also allowed if it is mentioned clearly in a question (e.g., According to one version... or It was a rumor that...) and if this version is not “idiotic” as Author 5 highlights Author 5, interview by author, Moscow and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 22, 2020.. Actually, even pseudohistorical or conspiratorial versions might become a question's core if it is explicitly stated in its text to inform players that they should perceive a given story and/or fact as something fictional; roughly speaking, this is to make “according to Fomenko” sound similar to “according to Pushkin” and therefore pull players of finding a correct answer using their knowledge of history.

Many interviewees missaid that all authors have their own approaches, and some of them even contact scholars or scientific journalists whose works they refer to Author 6, interview by author, St Petersburg and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 16, 2020.. Nevertheless, authors do cross-check of facts looking for verification by several different sources; also, they are aware that each source has its own specificity - for instance, Author 1 shares that he avoids looking for information in Soviet-time sources because of the existed censorship and prefers working with the latest books about the past: “The more recent book is, the more confidence towards it I have because previously people, I think, misbelieved more having no tools such as the Internet and widely available libraries, they simply could not check every fact” Author 1, interview by author, St Petersburg and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 12, 2020..

Authors do not work on their questions alone. Some interviewees highlight the importance of testing questions before submitting their final versions to the ordering organizing committee. In the case of SChGK, testing is a process of asking preliminary versions of questions towards separate players and/or teams who are not going to participate in a tournament. Author 1 mentioned that testing allows not only to improve questions' design and formulation, but also to predict how much a fact is widely known and “interesting” (and therefore deserves to become a question's core element) Ibid. Moreover, this process allows to do a preliminary estimation of a question's correctness and difficulty - as the author explains, “I am not interested in anything related to politics, but testers advise me on this sometimes warning that I am playing with fire and might traumatize somebody. I could do this and has avoided some possible conflicts because of testing” Ibid. Author 5 adds that “preparing a round of testing for any tournament, I try to invite as many people of age and nationality similar to its audience as possible. If all of them tell me that a historical fact is not a secret for everybody there, I would never keep this question in this set” Author 5, interview by author, Moscow and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 22, 2020..

2.4 Self-censorship, organizers' control, and feedback

As it has been already mentioned, authors are indirectly controlled by organizing committees that order questions for tournaments. Many interviewees highlight that any set of questions is a result of cooperation between an author and a tournament's organizers in a way. The latter ones do not only invite teams of players, rent a venue, solve bureaucratic problems and find sponsorship, they also establish terms of reference (tekhnicheskoe zadanie) that authors should follow while doing their work. Such terms might contain guidelines for the required number of questions, brief description of a tournament's expected participants (e.g. their geographical affiliations and average age), technical equipment of a tournament's venue allowing authors to use media in questions and a committee's wishes towards questions. Also, exactly organizing committees pay authors their fees.

Being prepared by a tournament's organizing committee which aim is to make participation in its event the most pleasant and memorable, terms of reference rarely contain an implicit mentioning of historical topics, persons and events that are highly desirable or, in contrast, unwanted in questions. The interviewed authors managed to remember only few examples from their experience, and many of them named the tournament called “Flag of Azerbaijan” which is supported by the government of Azerbaijan and annually takes place in one of European cities. This tournament's aim is to promote Azerbaijani culture abroad; thus, the majority of questions is dedicated to its culture and history Author 5, interview by author, Moscow and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 22, 2020.. Another example was given by Author 2 who had prepared a set of questions for a tournament in Vologda, where presence of questions about this city's history was among sponsorship requirements Author 2, interview by author, Rostov on Don and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 14, 2020.. Much more often, organizers do not request including “thematic” questions into a set but ask for them without any penalty for non-performance, and examples about such organizers in Belarus, Ukraine, Austria, Israel, Poland, Germany, Turkmenistan and the United States have been received while interviewing. Sometimes an initiative comes from an author; Author 1 shares an example from his experience: “Once I was asked to prepare questions for the German national championships. Nobody required including any questions about German history or German culture, but I decided that doing this would show that I endeavored and have done my best specifically for these players” Author 1, interview by author, St Petersburg and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 12, 2020.. At the same time, none of the authors have ever faced a requirement to prepare questions devoted to the past specifically; instead, it is always combined with a city's or a country's present. Roughly speaking, the past for these situations is not only, but just a wide field for composing questions.

Prohibitions that might be evidently included into terms of reference are even rarer. Many authors say that organizing committees do not actually impose any censorship or regulation but try to arrange the best event for its participants; therefore, these committees usually have two objectives in view. The first one is not giving an advantage to teams from particular city or country - for instance, it is not advisable to include even some questions based on “domestically-known” facts from history of Russia into a set for an international tournament because it would contribute teams from Russia. This approach also works for local tournaments where teams from the same country, but different age participate in - while for older players questions devoted to the Soviet past might be too easy, youngsters would face a difficulty to answer such a question. Another incentive organizing committees follow is avoiding Russian and/or Soviet specific historical facts while composing questions for national tournaments outside Russia. As the interviewees admit, authors tend to compose less questions about Russia and the Soviet Union not because they dislike it (although they and the game's community could do). Author 7 thinks that such a desire is caused by combination of two factors - first, satiety with questions about Russia and the Soviet Union which were the overwhelming majority during the 1990s and the 2000s and second, cosmopolitanism of the most players in the nowadays community Author 7, interview by author, Kyiv and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 20, 2020.. Author 2 comments: “While in the vacuum the Soviet history seems to be the same period of history as Peter the Great's time or Pushkin's epoch, authors before the early 2010s have asked about almost all facts from the Soviet time which are both interesting and meaningful; therefore, currently it is just too difficult to find a story that deserves to become a question. Actually, the meadow of this past has been depleted quite a long time ago, and nowadays we are forced to graze on other fields, and this is actually very good, because all players are equal if they face a question about, let's say, history of Hungary. There is a gradual refusal to questions based on personal involvement - while previously we had those numerous questions about the Soviet culture that was common for all players, currently a good question should be about something equally distant from each of them both in terms of time and geography” Author 2, interview by author, Rostov on Don and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 14, 2020. Arguably, the interviewee's latter statement about this idiosyncratic equality actually prevails over the former one because it is rather difficult to believe that shoreless sea of facts dried up. It might be predicted that such a presupposition among authors is caused because their practice of composing questions - as all authors highlight, ideas for questions come to their minds from customary reading, watching films and visiting exhibitions whereas specific looking for interesting facts is superfluous if it requires too much time and efforts or extremely specific skills such as speaking language other than a native one or English.

While many authors claim that Soviet past (and the second part of the 20th century) is no longer interesting for the majority of players, Author 10 has shared his experience in organizing a tournament exhaustively devoted to that historical period. As the interviewee explains, he did not restrict the content to the USSR or particular decade, and therefore the resulting set of questions was topically comprehensive (although it was not absolutely balanced, and questions about the Soviet Union slightly prevailed). The tournament attracted significant attention due to both its content and atmosphere created by the organizing committee while the author admits that he decided to create this event simply because of his own interest Author 10, interview by author, St Petersburg and Moscow (via Skype), March 4, 2020.. It might be concluded that the dominating approach to compose questions based on stories equally distant from all participating players is not that overwhelming, and an interest towards the second half of the 20th century is alive regardless its geographical assignment.

Avoiding some topics is not always motivated by aforementioned practical incentives. Several authors share their feeling that SChGK is preliminary an entertaining practice that tends to minimize the number of questions representing the past traumatic experiences of countries players live in. However, this feeling does not cause the same attitude in deciding whether a question could affect some players - arguably, because this feature is not obligatory present in terms of reference shared by organizing committees that usually apply a vague wording such as “avoiding questions that touch on conflicts and contradictory topics” Author 2, interview by author, Rostov on Don and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 14, 2020.. Together with growing commercialization of the game, this situation forces each author to create his or her own approaches to filter questions that represent disputable historical events and figures. For example, Author 6 admits that avoiding any controversy he prefers writing questions about yet unknown sides of significant people's life: “If I am composing a question about Hitler, it is about his paintings. If I am composing a question about Stalin, it is about his youth and robbing shops, something not politicized” Author 6, interview by author, St Petersburg and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 16, 2020.. Many authors' approach is based on chronological attitude - an author puts a mark onto a chronological scale and makes a bigger effort towards writing and editing a question if it contains a representation of any past event occurred after that mark. While this idea is relatively wide-spread, all authors decide variously on the exact time-mark - some of them have chosen the beginning of the 20th century, others - the 1930s, the WWII or even the 1990s. Describing their choices, many authors appeal to “living witnesses” of some events or “living memory” which is still possibly remembered by active players or their relatives.

As the interviewees admit, the entire procedure of filtering is established by themselves. Authors highlight that deciding on formulation and entire existence of each question is based on his or her understanding and predictions together with comments obtained while testing. One of the most shared distinguish authors do in their work is between two types of questions representing the past. The first one is based on knowing (relatively) specific facts while another group of questions are ones that offer a story derived from the past that players should dive into to understand this story's internal logic and subsequently find a correct answer. While questions of both types might cause players' critical comments, the former ones tend to be riskier for authors, especially if they compose a question about the Russian or Soviet culture or history. Many authors share their understanding of the game and its community as “Russia-centered” because it is by default played in Russian and the majority of teams and authors represent Russia; therefore, there is no surprise that Russian past and culture in general is the most familiar one for the biggest part of community. At the same time, even simple mentioning some historical events without requiring knowing some facts might cause problems. For instance, Author 4 remembers that people who were organizing local tournaments in the Western Ukraine asked him to avoid any mentioning of the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire in questions he was preparingAuthor 4, interview by author, Kharkov and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 25, 2020.. Author 2 agrees providing an example from his cooperation with Israeli organizers who excluded a question devoted to the Holocaust from a set of his questions without any discussionAuthor 2, interview by author, Rostov on Don and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 14, 2020. Authors highlight that preparing questions for a tournament outside Russia or an international one always causes self-censorship because non-Russian players have completely different knowledge of the Russian past nowadays. Although, similar situations might take place at local levels - as Author 4 exemplifies, “there is a big Armenian diaspora in our city [of Kharkov], so many Armenians participate in the club's internal championships; thus, we try to avoid any questions about Azerbaijan and Turkey, especially historical ones”Author 4, interview by author, Kharkov and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 25, 2020..

A resembling approach is used by Author 6 towards the Jewish past - the author explains that he has not got enough expertise in the field while the Jewish community of znatoki is extremely sensitiveAuthor 6, interview by author, St Petersburg and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 16, 2020.. Author 2 agrees concluding that no author in right mind would provoke the community submitting a question where contradictory historical event or figure is presented in an obviously wrong wayAuthor 2, interview by author, Rostov on Don and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 14, 2020. If it is not “obviously wrong” for an author, a testing group would inform him or her about this; if an author does change nothing, the community of players tells him or her and just starts avoiding playing his or her questions in the future.

As it could be already concluded, feedback that authors receive from players is usually takes an indirect form. The interviewees say that comments devoted specifically to how the past is represented in questions are rare. Nobody of the interviewees managed to recall any experience of private discussion with a criticizing player while some members of the community share their opinion via comments on the Internet. Traditionally, many authors publish questions after the end of a tournament on LiveJournal to obtain the community's feedback and only after that on the database. At the same time, only few players regularly participate in these discussions - arguably, it is because of outdatedness and inconvenience of LiveJournal, but some authors explain this in another way: each tournament consists of dozens of questions that go for each other; therefore, players do not have an opportunity to thoroughly discuss a question just after it and already forget about it preferring to talk with teammates about something else during the break.

To sum up, composing questions devoted to the past has changed for the last three decades because of two main reasons. The first one is commercialization of the game that has turned authors' hobby to authors' work. Questions for SChGK tournaments are not self-representation of an author's views and preferences anymore; instead, it is a product that might be demandable or non-demandable as any other product. Therefore, if an author does not follow some (unspoken) conventions, he or she is not demandable and would never be invited to work on a set of questions for a prestigious tournament. This marketization led to the increased concern about the audience and correctly representing past events in questions. Here, commercialization meets the second main variation in authors' work - there is a demand towards questions devoted to the past and simultaneously lack of supply because “the majority of historical facts have already been used in questions”. This contradiction brings authors to explore new sources and new ways to compose questions about the past such as studying histories of smaller countries or previously unknown details of great people's life. Another related trend was described while interviewing by Author 6: “Many interesting stories and facts from the past have been already mentioned in questions, and questions turns to be postmodern (in a positive sense). Nowadays, a question is based on allusions, connections and rhymes between the past and the present instead of simple historical facts.

For example, in the 1990s an author would compose a question about Napoleon who had lost the battle of Waterloo and therefore the word “Waterloo” became a synonym for failure in French. In the 2000s, a question would be about two synonyms for failure in French emerged because of Napoleon - Waterloo and Berezina. Finally, in the 2010s an author would switch his attention towards a contradiction that Waterloo had been a symbol of losing and despair and later became a title for ABBA's cheerful song that brought this band a triumph at the Eurovision” Author 6, interview by author, St Petersburg and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 16, 2020.. Therefore, the past in questions is always demandable, but choosing a past to represent is different in comparison with previous years. This transformation is a subject to the analysis implying digital methods, and results of this are presented in the next chapter.

Chapter 3. “We started grazing on new fields”

3.1 Representations of the past in the game's content

The previous chapter began with a statement that a game's designers (authors in the case of SChGK) are as essential as content (questions) they create and offer to a tournament's participants. The latter ones are toehold authors rely on while choosing interesting facts and stories as cores of their prospective questions and filtering topics that could lead to players' indignation and unsatisfaction. This chapter is an attempt to check the authors' opinions they shared while interviewing towards trends in representing the past in SChGK questions.

Analyzing representations of the past within the game's environment requires studying its questions. They are stored at the online open-access database that contains more than 250,000 questions, and a team of volunteers regularly replenish the repository. Questions are grouped by tournaments they have been played at. Importantly, uploading questions to the database is not obligatory for authors and tournaments' organizers; therefore, this collection is not comprehensively complete. Considering aims of the research, it is not necessary to study all questions presented at the database because the vast majority of them have been played at local or relatively unpopular tournaments; in other words, their audience is small and consequently not representative. To define tournaments of the interest, it is important to consult the website of the IAC's official rankings that presents statistics for tournaments including number of teams participated.

For a closer examination of the game's content, questions of the Russian Synchronized Open (Otkrytyi vserossiiskii sinkhronnyi chempionat) have been selected. This annual competition is one of the oldest and most prestigious tournaments within the community, and approximately 1,500 teams regularly participate in it. Each edition Considering that this tournament takes place in the end of one year and in the beginning of another, for

a reader's convenience each edition is labelled with a more recent year, e.g. 2008/09 edition as 2009 edition. of the tournament consists of six separate tours (36 questions each) that take place monthly since September to February Except for the initial one, each edition consists of 216 questions. In 2004, an additional round was played; therefore, 252 questions constitute a set for that year.. Taking into account its open status, teams from any country can participate as well as authors from any edge of the universe can submit his or her questions or work as an editor. In total, 3,276 questions of the Russian Synchronized Open in 2004-2018 constitute a dataset which has become an object for the analysis in this chapter.

In the online database, each question is presented on an individual webpage.

A question consists of five major elements: its text, a correct answer, a comment, list of sources and its author's name. Also, a question might be appended with handouts and error reports left by the database's users. For purposes of the research, only the first three elements are needed because others do not contain representations we are interested in. To extract this information from the database, a parsing program has been written with Python computational language. In the resulting file, all questions are supplemented with metadata that describes a tournament this question was asked at.

As a following step, the entire dataset has been divided into subsets according to a year questions had been played. Each of these subsets was being annotated by two independent assistants, and later I have compared results of annotating and made final solutions for contradicting cases. In their activity, assistants consulted the guideline designed on the basis of Hestroni's approach 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. he applied studying the content of Who Wants to be A Millionaire? TV show. First, annotators were asked to identify whether a question from a subset contains a representation of the past, more specifically whether an event or issue that had happened at least two years before the question was asked. If such a representation is present in a question, an assistant should identify its topic choosing between ones given in the guideline:

War & Armed Conflicts

State, Law & International Relations

High Culture (history of art)

Literature

Science & Technology

Religion

Business & Economy

Light Entertainment (history of television, music, cinema etc.)

Sports

Everyday life (food, games, leisure, habits, travelling etc.)

Other

After defining a topical assemblance, an annotator needed to assign a question with geographical identification together with mentioned historical events and figures; the overview of the geographical distribution is presented in Table 1. Taking into account that the modern political map is not similar to any of historical ones, a specific rule was created - a “historical” question was generally assigned to a modern country that inherited the past one (e.g. Austria for the Austro-Hungarian Empire) while questions devoted to particular regions of the past state were identified with corresponding modern state (e.g. a question about an event specific to Hungary as a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assigned to Hungary instead of Austria). The only exception was reserved for questions devoted to the Soviet Union because of concerns towards the topic that the interviewed authors have shared. It is also important to highlight that in several cases assigning a question with a geographical identification is not possible due to its formulation; for instance, it might be devoted to the Middle Ages in Europe without any spatial specification, and it would be unfair to identify this question as one particularly devoted to any European country. As a result, the annotated dataset gives an opportunity to show what pasts attracted the game's authors (and simultaneously players) and how the situation has changed through the time.

Table 1: Distribution of “historical” questions' according to geographical assignment

Due to its specificity, the data possesses several limitations. To begin with, as the interviewed authors have explained, it is extremely difficult to define whether a question contemplates knowing something or it suggests finding a correct answer with assistance of players' logics purely; therefore, it is necessarily to admit that the annotated dataset does not reveal what historical events, figures and processes players should be acquainted with. At the same time, the interviewees highlight that they do not usually search for questions' sources specifically and mostly compose ones by virtue of information they have consumed normally. This claim allows to state that the following study reflects not “historical facts” znatoki are expected to know, but ones presented in popular historical books and media available for authors in the 21st century. Another limitation is connected to formal methods which are difficult to use for this study because of two restricting factors. First, studying time series of any kind depends on this series' length, and longer series provide more reliable conclusion. Although I have chosen the oldest tournament's content to research, it still does not allow to make many implications. Second, while numbers revealed in Table 1 look solid enough, studying combinations of a question's features (such as its topical and national assignment together) decreases these numbers significantly putting a strain on the research.

Despite clarifications presented above, it is still possible to analyze the game's content in some aspects. To begin with, although the interviewed authors have highlighted that “historical” questions are more challenging to compose, the number of such questions is not small. On the contrary, it has almost doubled during the recent years; as Figure 1 reveals, while since 2004 to 2014 the percentage mostly fluctuated between 20 and 30 percent, it spiked in 2015 and has not fallen later. A chi-square test (%2 = 89.97, df = 14, p-value = 3.845e-13) proves that proportion of “historical questions for 2006 and 2015-2018 editions reveals a significant increase in comparison with expected values (standardized residual > 2).

This significant increase might be explained in two different ways. First, as one author commented, the audience extremely appreciates questions devoted to the past, and the collected dataset represents one of the biggest and most prestigious synchronized tournaments; therefore, it is logical to suppose that authors did not put their “historical” questions into sets for other competitions reserving the most demandable materials for a crowder game. Second, the shift coincides with the change in Russian foreign policy as a turning point in the government's attempts at crafting unequivocal vision of history. Arguably, such a pressure from the above has come to the contrary, and more materials began being published during the recent years; consequently, they attracted the game's authors and encouraged the latter ones to compose new questions devoted to the past. The mid-2010s features flourishing of new popular-science and popular-history online resources as it is explained by Filipp Dzyadko, founder and editor-in-chief of such a project called “Arzamas Academy”. According to Dzyadko, this boom is explained with combination of widening access to the Internet and colossal lack of “enlightening” (prosvetitel'skie) projects previously. Simultaneously, this trend of enlightening the public has made authors' work significantly easier in comparison with precedent years.

Several authors have shared their vision that in comparison with the previous decade a progressively smaller number of questions asked at SChGK tournaments are devoted to the Soviet Union, especially in the case of international and synchronized tournaments. At the same time, Figure 2 contradicts this claim revealing that proportion of questions devoted to the USSR's past has only slightly decreased, and it is volatile around 15 percent of all “historical” questions excluding three years in the mid-2000s when this percentage exceeded a quarter of all questions containing representations of the past. In combination with ones about Pre-Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, such questions have never constituted more than a half of all “historical” questions asked at any edition of the tournament. Although, five last years of the Russian Synchronized Open's studied editions is characterized with a slight increase in number of questions devoted to history of other countries and cultures.