Sporcle
Encyclopedia
Sporcle is a trivia quiz website launched in July 2007. According to the website's founder Matt Ramme, the name Sporcle is inspired by the word 'oracle'. Offices for the website are located in Seattle and San Francisco.
The website was founded in response to Ramme's own desire to learn trivia, and his accompanying frustration that there was no existing website suitable for his needs.
Sporcle's mission statement is "We actively and methodically search out new and innovative ways to prevent our users from getting any work done whatsoever."
; however, the website also has educational value. Some frequent users have been known to use the word as a verb – "Sporcling" – to describe their use of the site. Students often use the site to study as well, mentioning quizzes relating to anatomy, the periodic table of elements, languages, geography, and other academic subjects as useful for their learning.
Since October 2010, Sporcle has featured a 'College Rankings' competition on the site's home page, which tracks students registered on the site from a variety of universities, and ranks the top 25 schools according to their weekly usage of Sporcle.
Sporcle also features games that engage the ears with sound and music clips. There are speed challenges, word scrambles, and word ladders that are posted on a daily basis. Users may also create quizzes. Games can be found easily as they are filtered by category but also ranked by most popular, most played, newest, and favorites. Each game comes with recommended links to games in the same category. Users may also search for games with key terms and are presented with a list of both Sporcle-created and user-created games.
Sporcle created something known as the Quizmaster Score, an algorithm designed to rate users on the quizmaking prowess. The Top 100 users based on their Quizmaster Score are shown on the User Created page under the tab Top Contributors. The Quizmaster Score is derived from several factors, which include (but are not limited to):
The Quizmaster Score may fluctuate each day as a user's games are played more, rated higher or lower, and favorited. The Quizmaster Score rankings are updated daily.
application which had 250 games to the App Store. The price is $1.99, but a lite version is available for free. On July 1, an update came out that added new games daily.
Later in 2010, Sporcle released an app on the Android Market
. Besides the incorporation of Android styles, it is mostly identical to the iPhone app.
Sporcle has also introduced three more apps for iOS devices based on their Daily Dose series of games: Mixed Word, Missing Word, and Minute Morsel.
Daily Dose quizzes are shown beneath the daily publications beside their respective categorical icon, rather than an icon representing the quiz itself.
The website was founded in response to Ramme's own desire to learn trivia, and his accompanying frustration that there was no existing website suitable for his needs.
Sporcle's mission statement is "We actively and methodically search out new and innovative ways to prevent our users from getting any work done whatsoever."
Categories
The games in Sporcle fall in 15 categories: Entertainment, Gaming, Geography, History, Holiday, Just for Fun, Language, Literature, Miscellaneous, Movies, Music, Religion, Science, Sports, and Television. As of August 7th, 2011, Sporcle had 209,466 games (6,387 Published; 203,079 User Created) that have been played a total of 576,392,737 times (551,462,685 times online; 24,930,052 on their mobile apps). The 500,000,000 milestone was reached on April 23, 2011.Gameplay
Most games on Sporcle require the user to name all of the items within a given subject — such as presidents of the USA, Best Picture Oscar-winning movies, or countries whose names are also legal words in Scrabble — in any order, within a preset time limit. In most quizzes, wrong answers are ignored for scoring purposes but must be deleted by the user from the answer box before another answer can be typed, whereas a correct answer clears the box automatically. In some games specific questions are asked and in many such cases they must be answered in order unless the user explicitly skips to a different question. In still other games questions are not revealed until previous ones have been answered, and there are other variations as well. A new Sporcle feature, released in April of 2011 , allows wrong answers to end the quiz or simply make the user unable to guess again for that particular hint.Appeal
Despite Ramme's expectation that Sporcle would appeal to older users, the website has become particularly popular among students, with many admitting to checking the website frequently for recently added material. As the slogan "mentally stimulating diversions" suggests, the website is often used to procrastinateProcrastination
In psychology, procrastination refers to the act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of low-priority, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time...
; however, the website also has educational value. Some frequent users have been known to use the word as a verb – "Sporcling" – to describe their use of the site. Students often use the site to study as well, mentioning quizzes relating to anatomy, the periodic table of elements, languages, geography, and other academic subjects as useful for their learning.
Since October 2010, Sporcle has featured a 'College Rankings' competition on the site's home page, which tracks students registered on the site from a variety of universities, and ranks the top 25 schools according to their weekly usage of Sporcle.
Sporcle also features games that engage the ears with sound and music clips. There are speed challenges, word scrambles, and word ladders that are posted on a daily basis. Users may also create quizzes. Games can be found easily as they are filtered by category but also ranked by most popular, most played, newest, and favorites. Each game comes with recommended links to games in the same category. Users may also search for games with key terms and are presented with a list of both Sporcle-created and user-created games.
Membership
Quizzes can be played on Sporcle without registering as a member. However, score tracking, commenting, quiz creation, and some other features are only available to members. Registration to become a member is free.Commenting
Members can comment on games with critiques, suggestions for improvements, or just to announce their scores. Comments can be reported to the administrators and deleted if thought unacceptable. Other Sporcle members can rate these comments positively or negatively.Creating games
Since September 2009, Sporcle has allowed all members to create quizzes. User-created quizzes are shown on the User Contributed Games page. On weekdays, 9 quizzes are published. Six of these are full-length quizzes and three are the Daily Dose (see Daily Dose below). These quizzes are all User-Created, save a few Daily Dose quizzes that SporcleEXP (the Sporcle Admin) creates.Sporcle created something known as the Quizmaster Score, an algorithm designed to rate users on the quizmaking prowess. The Top 100 users based on their Quizmaster Score are shown on the User Created page under the tab Top Contributors. The Quizmaster Score is derived from several factors, which include (but are not limited to):
- The number of games created since the public launch of Sporcle's game creation tools
- Total number of times aforementioned games have been played
- The average rating attributed to those games by the Sporcle community
- The number of times the quizzes have been favorited
The Quizmaster Score may fluctuate each day as a user's games are played more, rated higher or lower, and favorited. The Quizmaster Score rankings are updated daily.
Mobile app
On February 23, 2010, Sporcle released an iPhoneIPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
application which had 250 games to the App Store. The price is $1.99, but a lite version is available for free. On July 1, an update came out that added new games daily.
Later in 2010, Sporcle released an app on the Android Market
Android Market
Android Market is an online software store developed by Google for Android OS devices. Its gateway is an application program called "Market", preinstalled on most Android devices, allows users to browse and download mobile apps published by third-party developers...
. Besides the incorporation of Android styles, it is mostly identical to the iPhone app.
Sporcle has also introduced three more apps for iOS devices based on their Daily Dose series of games: Mixed Word, Missing Word, and Minute Morsel.
Daily Dose
On October 20, 2010, the Sporcle administration launched a new daily series called The Daily Dose. Each day, three new games are published in addition to the normal daily publishings. There are three categories of Daily Dose games. The first type is the Word Scramble (now known as Mixed Word), in which players are asked to unscramble a set of words (generally 10-15 words). These sets can be related by an uncommon bond (known as Mixed Word: Common Bond quizzes), or by a bond specifically stated (i.e. unscramble the dog breeds). The second category is the Missing Word, a fill-in-the-blank quiz that focuses on a specific category (i.e. movies, adages, sports teams, etc.) The third is the Word Ladder, a quiz in which users are asked to change one letter from the previous answer to fit the answer to the next clue. These are often themed, though not always. Also, a Minute Morsel is featured everyday; this is a sixty-second sampling of an already-published quiz that is available only for that day. This is done to promote the replaying of old quizzes that may have fallen off the radar. Daily Dose quizzes are almost always published under the 'Just for Fun' category (except, of course, for the Minute Morsel).Daily Dose quizzes are shown beneath the daily publications beside their respective categorical icon, rather than an icon representing the quiz itself.