Playfish Launches Quiztastic - The Newest Quiz Game on Facebook

For one reason or another, quizzes have certainly been one of the types of applications that have always been widely used since the birth of the Facebook Platform. Whether long or short, educational or horoscopes, these lists of questions have been taken countless times by Facebook users. However, Playfish is hoping to take the social quiz experience to a new level with its just released game Quiztastic. Quiztastic takes the visual style of a television studio with each quiz being a game show. As with all Playfish titles, the game feels well produced. The visuals are high quality, the sound works well, and the atmosphere feels very much like a game show. Of course, making a game look good isn’t too difficult. Making the game actually fun is what proves to be a bit more of a challenge. Nevertheless, Quiztastic is, well, a quiz game, so a lot of it is pretty straightforward. Players pick a category to play from, and are presented with a random test on their knowledge of things such as entertainment, culture, history, friends, and more. If you answer enough correctly to score above average, your QI (quiz intelligence), as the game calls it, increases, and if you do poorly, it drops. This is the key in determining your ranking compared to other players. In addition to QI, players are also rated according to their “reputation.” Quiztastic is not all about taking quizzes, but creating them as well. Players can create any type of quiz they want with any sort of questions they want. They can select the name, the host, and even the answers for each query. Once the quiz is published, then others can take it, and if users rate it highly, the creator’s reputation increases. In theory, this reputation mechanism would mitigate the dangers of user-generated content. Users aren’t designers, and when you give them the tools to create anything they want, you end up with a lot of… less than quality content in return. Sometimes the quizzes are far too hard, sometimes too easy, and sometimes intentionally vulgar. Many of the quizzes currently circulating fall into one of these categories. There is also the challenge of language filtering. Yes, Quiztastic allows you to create a quiz in multiple languages. Indeed this is a fantastic addition to the game as it is available in English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, and about a dozen more. Unfortunately, when taking random quizzes, there is no filter, and even when you use “Find a Quiz,” all the languages pop up. Frankly, this is the biggest issue with Quiztastic. The existing filters are far too lax. At best, players can sort quizzes by rating or type (entertainment, culture, etc.) but that’s about it. Quiztastic looks great, and is bringing the production value around the Facebook quiz experience up a few notches, but still needs better filtering. When it comes to playing a game, the content created by the actual game designer is always better, because they actually do this for a living and tend to be good at it. We'll let you know how the game's doing in the coming weeks and months!

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Playfish Launches Quiztastic - The Newest Quiz Game on Facebook

Christopher Mack

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Christopher Mack