Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg resides in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he slaves away daily as a contributing editor for UGO’s Gamesblog as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.
Relentless Software’s Buzz games are multi-stage quiz challenges modeled after television game shows, right down to the snarky announcer. Players compete for points in multiple rounds, each one revolving around a different gimmick for rewarding or punishing correct and incorrect answers. The thing about Buzz is that it’s always been big in Europe, but not so much over here in the States. The series debuted in the UK back in October 2005 with Buzz!: The Music Quiz and it saw three sequels before hitting North America in October 2007. The PS3 debut, Buzz! Quiz TV, featuring both user-created quizzes and online play, is Sony’s most focused attempt to establish the series in America. When I approached the new American Culture Quiz Pack expansion, I wondered: how does the ‘American angle’ come out in a game so firmly rooted in its British origins? Is American trivia the key to Buzz’s potential cross-continental success?
The allure of a game show is, after all, rooted in the American Pop Dream. When television first proliferated as an entertainment medium during the 1950s, quiz shows were some of the biggest attention-grabbers. All of a sudden, Joey Everyman could stand in front of a camera, answer some trivia questions and go home several thousand dollars richer. Fame and fortune; just what every American wants. Buzz’s rewards are, admittedly, lower. In the absence of Fabulous Cash Prizes, you get bragging rights over how much smarter you are than your friends, relatives or faceless entities you connect to via the PlayStation Network. So it’s no surprise we Americans prefer the immediate thrills of dart-throwing in Wii Play to the challenge of Buzz’s quiz show. Let’s face it folks: thinking is an awful lot of work.
Hard work at that. As my fiancée and I crossed wits in a series of matches, I learned quickly that I know surprisingly little about American Culture. I don’t think I’m alone either. How many of you readers out there really know who created Jell-O? Or any specific state mottos outside of your own and New Hampshire’s (hint: title of Die Hard 4)? The American Culture Quiz Pack is made up of five-hundred questions, five-hundred disparate bits of trivia, culled from the collective history and geographical makeup of fifty states, that are bound to stump anyone who isn’t a full-fledged US historian. Even my fiancée, with her PhD in American Studies, got more wrong than she did right. (She trounced me easily enough, but that’s nothing new in our relationship.)
Like a rear view mirror, our country is bigger than it first appears when filtered through Buzz. The minutia of culture, pop and proper, ends up far deeper than you expect it to be. That’s the American angle in Buzz. Will it capture an expanded American audience? Probably not.
