LearnedLeague and the Joy of a Truly Trivial Pursuit

I. Introduction

For 25 consecutive business days, four times per year, about 17,000 players from all over the world gather online in the LearnedLeague, a private digital trivia competition. Each day’s match pairs players head-to-head, mostly with strangers, to answer a series of six difficult general knowledge questions. The goal is to win as many matches as possible in a given season. For this privilege, players pay $30 per year, after a free introductory season.

As digital communities go, LearnedLeague is, perhaps, unfashionable. The website is spartan and has not kept pace with contemporary trends in website design (modularity, infinite scroll); its capabilities do not serve much beyond gameplay. Message boards and a private-messaging function are used by few.

The site occupies an unusual space in the social-networking firmament. Most players I talked to are enthusiastic users — but spend very little time on the website itself. Rather, on a daily basis, users answer the day’s questions, generally in the morning, and then retreat to other, neutral communications platforms (SMS, email, WhatsApp) to discuss the questions with a small group of their real-life friends throughout the rest of the day. 

My research suggests that this usage pattern — a short burst of activity on the site in the morning, followed by a low-pressure and pleasant group chat elsewhere during the day — is generally very satisfying to players. It is driven by three aspects of LearnedLeague: the shared experience of answering each day’s questions, common to all players; the website’s comparative lack of functionality; and the referral-based nature of network growth. Most users I interviewed consider their relationships to LearnedLeague, and LearnedLeague itself, to be healthy.

This paper is based on interviews conducted over the phone, email or Gchat with five current players and one former player, as well as with the league’s commissioner. I open with a history of the league, briefly describe the mechanics of gameplay and assess the commissioner’s control over the game, before moving into an exploration of the LearnedLeague community and a survey of members’ impressions of the social experience there. Section VII concludes.

II. History

The beginnings of LearnedLeague could have been a plot in a Mike Judge script. Back in 1995, Shayne Bushfield and about two dozen other underemployed creative types sat each weekday in an office in midtown Manhattan leased by a moneyed law firm. Bushfield and his cohort were charged with coding medical records that had been subpoenaed from plaintiffs in wrongful-death lawsuits against big tobacco firms. The firm wasn’t representing the plaintiffs.

“It was mind-numbing work, and it was evil,” Shayne said in an interview.

Shayne and his friends sat in an office separate from the law firm proper, with little supervision. Given the nature of the work, they felt no compunction about wasting their paid hours, and they began to play little games to pass the time. Shayne organized the first edition of a trivia tournament that year, though it wouldn’t take on the moniker LearnedLeague until a later season. (“Learned” is the surname of one of the early players.) He distributed general-knowledge questions to colleagues on paper each morning and collected them at quitting time, tabulating the scores for the next day.

Back in 1995, Shayne had no inkling that a digital trivia phenomenon would spring from these decidedly analog beginnings. He moved on from the law firm and went to business school — during which, in the summer of 2000, he decided to learn computer programming. He set out a project for himself: to create a digital version of the trivia tournament he and his colleagues had so enjoyed.

The first season of LearnedLeague online took place that year; the same friends from the law firm could find the questions online each day and email their answers to Shayne — who operates under the nom de jeu Commissioner Thorsten A. Integrity, which he says he picked because he “was looking for something that conveyed power, honor, and Northern European engineering.” Because most game-players know him only by his pseudonym, in subsequent sections of this paper he will be referred to as Thorsten.

Interest grew almost immediately; Shayne said the first season that included someone he didn’t personally know was the third.

From that initial roster of 23, the number of active LearnedLeague players has now grown to about 17,000. Each player may refer one new player during each off-season; some, including one of my interviewees, pay a slightly higher membership fee for the opportunity to refer more.

New inductees to LearnedLeague must use their real last names and first initials when signing up, except in extraordinary circumstances. (You won’t find WinfreyO on the membership rolls, for example, either because she was granted a rare exception to the real-name rule or, perhaps, because she doesn’t play.)

III. Game Mechanics

LearnedLeague players are currently organized into about 75 groupings, which are based on the real-life social networks represented by the referrals. (I am in the “Outback” division, as is the person who referred me and those I have referred.) 

They are then divided further into subgroups, or “rundles,” of about 25 players each. Rundles change each season. They are ordered “A” through “E” (plus “R” for newbies), and your placement in any given season’s rundle depends on how you did last season: The top 3 advance; the bottom 5 are demoted. Most often, your opponents are strangers, but it’s possible to end up in a rundle with a real-life friend, as I did this season. (For the record, she beat me.) Standings in the rundle are determined not by the total number of questions you’ve answered correctly in a given season, but rather by the ratio of wins, losses, and ties.

Each day of a season represents a head-to-head competition with someone in your rundle. In addition to answering six questions each day, a player must play defense, by assigning point values to each question based on their guesses about what their opponent does and doesn’t know that day. Each player’s history of correct and incorrect answers, and their percentages scored for any given subject area, is available for any other player to view.

“My experience is that people seem to either love it and do it forever or pretty quickly decide it’s stressing them out and cycle off it,” said Matthew, a 36-year-old player.

There’s one last step after answering the questions and assigning points. Each player must tick a box that reads, “I’m ready to submit and I DID NOT CHEAT TODAY.” After a user submits, that user can immediately view the correct answers in red below each question. 

Often, thus commences a day’s worth of wondering whether the commissioner will be generous with misspellings in his day’s grading. Thorsten A. Integrity personally examines each day’s answers and marks them right or wrong; with the help of a clever algorithm, an explanation of which can be found in Appendix A, he completes this process for all 17,000 players in about a half hour each day.

“One question is like calling balls and strikes; the next question is like three seconds in the lane in basketball; the next question is like judging the prettiest hog at the state fair,” Thorsten said of the subtleties of grading.

In the end, there isn’t much on the line. In addition to bragging rights, the champion each season receives a scarf handmade by Thorsten, and that’s the only prize distributed. 

That means for players, any pressure the game engenders is internal. “It occupies a lot of my mental space not reserved for work/socializing/family as a pastime that simultaneously is deeply engaging and has effectively no stakes other than personal pride,” said Daniel, a 31-year-old player.

IV. The Commissioner’s Mark

In the 20 years since it moved from analog to digital space, the LearnedLeague interface has developed — but not a whole lot. “It hasn’t changed considerably in quite a long time. I got it to where it was working, and then I just kind of left it alone,” Thorsten said.

In a January 2018 “Letter of Recommendation” singing the game’s praises in The New York Times Magazine, Hannah Goldfield wrote that “visiting the desktop-only, confusing-to-navigate website on which it lives is a little like time-traveling to Y2K.” 

That’s intentional, Thorsten said. “The more you try to get intricate in design, the more you run the risk of losing people who prefer the more primitive stuff. So there’s partially a conscious decision to keep it really simple.”

In fact, pretty much everything about LearnedLeague — how it looks, how it is played — comes back to Thorsten, and he intends to keep it that way. “Everything on this website is a reflection of me, since I run it,” he said. “So I want to be careful about that.”

Thorsten prizes his sense of control over the community: If something goes wrong with the site, he says, he can probably fix it, which wouldn’t be the case if he hired a design firm to create a slick new site. 

My interviews with players indicated that, in general, they seemed to appreciate the game’s lack of functionality. “LL feels analog in a useful (as opposed to ornamental) way,” said Charles, a Los Angeles-based player.

Thorsten left his job at Microsoft in 2014 to dedicate his working hours to LearnedLeague, and though he hires contract workers to fact-check and copy-edit, he writes all the questions himself and is still the site’s only full-time employee. During the lead-up to a season, when he’s writing questions, he works 10 to 12 hours a day, he said.

He has a group of testers he asks to keep him honest about question bias in the lead-up to each season, he explained. “Some of the feedback that I’m seeking from them is, ‘Hey, what’s the balance of these questions? Is this all about old white dudes? Is this all about pop music from the ‘80s?’” He said inclusiveness was a matter of great concern, and listed Asian, African and Latin American history among some subjects he consciously tries to represent.

V. The Community

LearnedLeague players come from all 50 states and from 80 countries, Thorsten said. In the most recent season, 70.4% of players identified as male and 27.4% identified as female.

By and large, the community members I interviewed are fiercely devoted to LearnedLeague and eagerly anticipate each day’s questions. “I answer the questions within 30 minutes of waking up out of a self-destructive sort of excitement and impatience,” Daniel said. “I definitely have missed questions that another cup of tea and hour of contemplation would have placed within my grasp.”

“I do feel like an LL lunatic. I really like it, I have to say,” Matthew concurred.

Most of my interviewees said they answer the questions as soon as they wake up or, in the case of Matthew, at an appointed time shortly thereafter. “I typically now do it in the morning, but after I’ve had a cup of coffee,” he said. 

Some of the community architecture that now looks prescient happened by accident. The real-name rule, for example: When Thorsten started the league, he personally knew everyone in it, and playing pseudonymously wouldn’t have occurred to anyone. Now, though, it serves as an enforcement mechanism. 

“It’s one of the safeguards that we like to think protects from people cheating,” Thorsten said. “Because if you’re on a website and your handle is something totally random, then you feel like a different person and you feel like you can do whatever you want. But if you’re on this website and it’s your real name and first initial and you’ve revealed where at least where you live, and there’s someone who’s vouching for you who’s also named, then there’s that accountability.”

The community’s sense of exclusivity could be a double-edged sword: It lends a sense of trust, but perhaps any locked community ought to consider who’s being kept out. “I think part of the appeal is the fact that it’s private and you feel like you’re part of something that’s not available to everyone. And you know, it’s exclusive,” Thorsten said, before shifting course. “I mean, it’s not that exclusive; it’s 17,000 people and all you need to do is know someone in it to get in.”

Indeed, each of the players I talked to said they weren’t too concerned about the clubbiness of the league, because the pool of people who would want to pay money to participate in a digital trivia tournament was self-selecting anyway. “It seems pretty natural in an effectively value-neutral way; there are only so many people interested in trivia,” Daniel said.

“If there are a zillion people desperate to join who can’t, I haven’t encountered them. I usually have to sell someone on it to even use my one referral a season,” Matthew said.

“Basically every friend I have who I imagine would be into LL has wound up being either a member or a prospective member,” Hillary, 32, said.

Multiple players echoed this idea: that the referral system is an accountability device but doesn’t actually function to keep out anyone who might really want to get in —  Daniel, for example, actively sourced a referral on Twitter to be able to play — and that the “insider” aspect of the league isn’t a cause for concern. “I kind of like it because so many games online are saturated with bots and people who just stumbled on,” Charles said.

I did find one exception: Hannah, 33, who is not currently an active player — despite having written that Times Magazine “Letter of Recommendation.” 

When Hannah moved to a new time zone, she began to miss a day of competition here and there and suffered a temporary suspension. The tribalism of the game began to grate on her, she said. “I think I felt like, ‘These fucking nerds kicked me out of their stupid group and I don’t want to come back,’” she said. “All the language around it, if you’re delinquent, is so serious. I remember feeling like I was in trouble, and I didn’t like that.”

Hannah was referring to the social pressure in the game not to “forfeit,” or fail to answer a day’s questions. A forfeiture automatically awards a win to that day’s opponent, but many players consider it a Pyrrhic victory. This social contract is both useful — the fun of the game depends on commitment, and Thorsten aims for a forfeiture rate of less than 4 percent each season — and, at times, wearying. Much of the message-board activity, among those who participate, constitutes forfeiture apologies in a so-called “Shame Forum.”

“That some users, for instance, take part in a subforum in which they apologize to the community for forfeits seems unhealthy; forfeits happen, it’s okay, and feigning passionate regard for the health of the community to this degree is rather performative,” Daniel said.

Another common, exasperating theme on the message boards is what Daniel called “show trials” over cheating, in which players accuse other individuals or conjecture about the prevalence of cheating more generally. LearnedLeague depends on the honor system, which generally works: Thorsten said he ejects between 40 and 60 players per season for cheating. (He declined to explain how he knows who has cheated.)

“I do know people who sometimes get heated up about their theories of people cheating, but I never really think that much about it,” Matthew said. “I just don’t care that much, and I actually think if you’re in the self-selected pool that takes this seriously, you probably are NOT cheating generally speaking?” 

In at least one case, the fun of LearnedLeague has inspired a player to create his own off-season tournament. Michael, 37, now writes questions for about 50 players while waiting for the next season of LearnedLeague to begin. 

(It’s perhaps a powerful demonstration of the game’s particular network effects that two separate players I interviewed referred me to Michael.)

“It is way more work than I should devote to it. Way more time,” Michael said.

VI.The Social Experience

“I have made no friends (or enemies) within LearnedLeague on its own,” Daniel told me. I share that experience, as did the players with whom I spoke.

LearnedLeague does offer ways to contact strangers: message boards and private messaging. But few players use them. According to Thorsten, fewer than 1 in 10 LearnedLeague players has ever posted on the message boards, and only about 1 in 5 has ever viewed a message board post, period. Hillary said she had looked at the boards “literally once, during I think my second day of play. They were awful and I have never looked back.”

There are plenty of innocuous and even amusing posts. A recent thread about players’ personal connections to questions led one user to share that she’d gotten a question about Nigella Lawson right because they are cousins; another aced a question about negronis because “I drink a lot of negronis.” 

But too often, the boards devolve into vicious personal accusations. “The cynicism and meanness of the boards can be troubling,” Daniel said.

In one recent thread, several players discussed their displeasure with a particular “serial forfeiter.” One brave user attempted to intervene: “Not to be an uppity rookie, but the person could have a very good reason for being a serial forfeiter (medical, family needs, disability, etc.) and it might be none of our business.”

He was swiftly rejected.

Thorsten admitted his own ambivalence when it comes to the forums. “It can get fairly toxic, and I know it’s driven a lot of people away from playing in the League, which is a bummer. So I’m a little bit torn about how I handle it,” he said. He doesn’t spend much time on them himself, either, but relies instead on volunteer monitors: “If something bursts into flames, I get notified of that,” he said.

Thorsten, who admitted he has considered deleting the message board altogether, doesn’t put it front and center on the site: On the front page, it appears only in a single tab and is not highlighted anywhere else.

A couple of my interviewees mentioned this design strategy as a reason they haven’t bothered engaging with the boards.

“Usually, when I read the messages, I found them sort of stressful, like people were fighting about various things or rules or showing off their knowledge. I wasn’t even participating in it, but it was never especially pleasant to read the message board,” Michael said. “But then he changed the design so that it wasn’t on the main page. So now I never do it.”

During our conversation, Thorsten sounded proud of the community’s capacity for self-regulation. Several years ago, he recalled, he changed the game’s logo to include a rainbow. “There was somebody who posted on the message board something anti-gay,” he recalled. He was upset, but elected not to intervene right away. “I wanted to see how people would react to it. And their reaction was awesome. It was just overwhelming, and it wasn’t even like super verbally violent against him. It was pretty calm and controlled. But it was awesome to see the community rallying against that kind of opinion.”

In Thorsten’s view, a certain degree of toxicity is endemic to message boards no matter where they exist, and it must be suffered as a price of doing business. “It’s just how it is: It’s a website,” he said. “Everyone here’s a real person and not hiding behind some online identity. But still it’s a website, it’s a message board, it’s open; it’s just going to happen.”

Still, the vast majority of LearnedLeague users neither post on the message boards nor regularly read them. 

“I have never had any bad experiences in the community, but mostly because I don’t engage with it farther than to face off against opponents everyday who as far as I’m concerned may as well be imaginary,” Matthew said. “I like the community it’s created among people I already knew.” 

Indeed, rather than communicating on LearnedLeague itself, players largely share ongoing text-message or email threads with their real-life friends on neutral platforms instead. This was the case with every player I spoke to, both active and former. Michael, for example, is in a WhatsApp group with about 10 people. He also talks to his partner in person about the LearnedLeague questions each day, as do Daniel and Hillary.

“It’s grown by network effect, but it’s grown by network effect with creating these hundreds of smaller networks,” Thorsten said.

The players I interviewed valued this state of affairs. “There are so few social media interactions with no chance of threat or disagreement or rejection in some form. Maybe the fact that I don’t use the message boards and talk with friends through text is a circuit breaker,” Charles said.

“I’ll have conversations with my husband about the questions in the morning — I invited him to join after my first tournament — and I’m in a group text that’ll talk about the questions as well, but only after we’ve all answered. I have… maybe too many friends who play,” Hillary said. 

By way of example, Daniel, Hillary and I all participate in the same SMS chat about the game. The following are a few representative snippets of our conversation, the tone of which is generally pleasant, playful and supportive.

There’s a joy, as well, in discovering unanticipated connections in the community — probably in part because LearnedLeague isn’t a huge network like Facebook, so it’s not a default assumption that anyone else in your life would be on it. “That, to me, was part of the appeal at the beginning, was realizing that all these other people were doing it,” Hannah said. “I remember feeling real delight when I realized someone else I knew totally separately from the people who first told me about it were on it.”

(As an aside, another small pleasure of LearnedLeague is sleuthing out which “celebrities” play. Unsurprisingly, Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy! champ, is a formidable competitor. In my group chat, at least, texts flew when Mick Mulvaney, a LearnedLeague player and the Trump administration’s former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, failed to correctly answer a question about Treasury notes.)

Because these outside-the-game text threads are generally small in size and spring from existing, real-life friendly cohesion, they tend to more closely mirror real-world interaction than the message boards do. Daniel called his own three(!) group chats “nicely uncompetitive (because we’re really playing the game and random strangers, and rooting for one another).”

Which isn’t to say there’s not at least a little room for exclusion, as evidenced by Matthew’s experience. “The chat actually got too big and too diffuse in terms of people not really knowing others, so now there’s a secret shadow chat of the original group that’s more active,” he said, adding that he personally had not been responsible for the offshoot group.

A perhaps unwelcome revelation.

VII. Conclusion

Throughout my interviews, players’ characterizations of the place LearnedLeague occupies in their daily routines were positive and uncomplicated. “Among my friends, I call it a little life enhancer,” Michael said.

Even Hannah, who quit, mostly expressed sentiments about the game that didn’t seem particularly tinged with animosity. She quit, she said, because she kept forgetting to do it. “It just stopped being a value-add. It just started to feel like an obligation in a way that wasn’t fun.”

It could be, she added, that writing an essay extolling its virtues for a major publication exercised her enthusiasm. “I think I’m a writer first, trivia player second,” she said. “I think once I wrote that I was kind of like, this provided me with something and now it’s like that’s over and I could let it go.”

None of the current users I interviewed said they’d ever seriously considered quitting. 

“I don’t see why I would do that,” Michael said. 

“I would never quit I don’t think?” Charles said.

And most of them specifically said that they considered $30 per year to be a good bargain for what it brought to their lives.

“$30 is a very fair price for something that gives me as much joy as LL has,” Hillary said.

“I think for $30 a year it’s a remarkably valuable little diversion,” Matthew concurred.

“I cannot speak for LearnedLeague as a community more broadly, but its use value in my life has been almost entirely affirming, positive, fun, and only frustrating when I don’t get a question right!” Daniel said.

LearnedLeague is not an expansive social network; its goal is not to be all things to all people, and this is to its credit. Rather, it encourages a short, focused rush of attention to the platform itself each day, followed by a languid daylong conversation with real-life friends.

“It’s a solitary activity, but I like the fact that it can translate into a communal activity with your friends,” Thorsten said. “That’s how it’s meant to be.”

APPENDIX A.

The precise method by which Thorsten decides which misspellings and other variations will count as correct answers for any given question has little bearing on the game’s digital community and is thus probably outside the scope of this paper. However, it was easily the question my interviewees brought up most often about game mechanics, and the method is very clever and perhaps of interest to some readers. The following is Shayne’s summary of how his personal dashboard for each day’s answers works, edited only for clarity.

“It’ll show me, on a webpage, a question and then all the answers that were given for that question by more than three players, I believe. If they’re given by more than 3 percent, they’re clustered at the top, and then below that is just an alphabetical list of every answer that was given by more than three players.

“So let’s say the answer is Abraham Lincoln. The code of the page will go through the answers and pull out every text string of three letters or more, and then highlight every answer that includes one of those text strings. So if the answer includes the string LIN or INC or OLN, then it’ll highlight it in green. So that way I have this huge list. The stuff at the top is the stuff that was commonly answered. So that’s really easy to do. And then there’s a big long list of answers with the ones highlighted in green that that could possibly be the right answer. I’m fairly sure that if an answer given doesn’t contain any of those text strings, it’s wrong. And so I can skim through that really, really fast. 

“I do that sometime during the day. I’m marking the ones that are right, and then by default everything I don’t mark is wrong. And then what will happen at the end of the day, after 10 o’clock, I’ll download all the answers from the database into my little system, which is kind of like a souped-up Excel, basically. And what it does is it’s already determined, it’s already marked right and wrong, all those answers. So all I have left are answers that were given by like one or two players and it does the same thing with the tech strings and it sorts it alphabetically. So then I can just go through those pretty quickly and find out, okay, somebody like one person spelled Lincoln LINKON, or something. But I caught it, and so I marked that right. And so I do that for each one. So that process probably takes about 20 minutes at the end of the day.”