On the Campus - March 25, 1998
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Jeopardy! proves a dangerous lure toward computer geekdom BY NANCY SMITH '00 | |
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SINCE I HAD SURFED THE WEB only once before I came to Princeton last year, I used to think the Internet was something new. But only after I hooked my computer up to the cable in my dorm room and began to browse did I learn that a precursor to the Internet existed as early as the 1960s. Back then, it was used by the Department of Defense to allow researchers to share computerized information. While those scientists were experimenting with the early Internet, the rest of America was plugged in to another 1960s phenomenon: TV game-shows. By the middle of the 1990s, the Internet had been integrated into the popular culture. As my friends and I recently discovered, this now-ubiquitous technology has also brought another ancient phenomenon into the Information Age -- procrastination -- by ganging up with the TV game-show Jeopardy! I was first introduced to "Internet College Jeopardy" (www.station.sony.com/jeopardy) one Sunday afternoon, when my roommate asked, "Which First Lady was known as the 'Hostess with the Mostest'?" |
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"What class is this for?" I replied. "It's not for a class. I'm trying to win a Pontiac Sunfire," she told me. The prospect of a new car was infinitely more attractive than the German essay I had been writing. "Go for Ancient History for $1000! I took that class last semester," I said. With each new question, I began to see the growing value of a Princeton education. We were hooked. The Internet version of Jeopardy! works basically like the TV show, complete with Jeopardy, Double Jeopardy, and Final Jeopardy rounds, as well as strategically placed Daily Doubles. But instead of ringing in and shouting out the answer, each player selects from four choices with a few simple mouse-clicks. Each student competes individually, challenged only to get the highest score possible. The object is to increase your individual-and -- thus your school's -- average score through your performance on the five games allotted weekly to each registered player. If you place among the top scores for the week, your name goes in a prize drawing -- the grand prize, of course, being the Sunfire. Playing our five games per week soon became a ritual, as well as a source of disappointment when, like children on Christmas, we'd play all our games in one night. With each Monday came a renewed challenge to prove ourselves superior to students from other universities. But each week, Princeton failed to make the rankings, and we couldn't get a shot at that car. Since our Princeton-groomed academic merit wasnât enough, we decided to cheat. The secret of success in College Jeopardy, as we accidentally discovered, was for one of us to play all five games and remember the correct answers and the locations of the Daily Doubles. When the next person began her five-game series, we'd hope some of the same games would be repeated. Playing Jeopardy was like gambling in international waters; unrestricted by Princeton's well-known Honor Code, we were out to win. On the occasions when the computer would outsmart us and actually force us to think about new questions, we felt slighted. Worse, even our dishonest scores were never quite high enough to place us in the grand-prize sweepstakes. We brooded over the thought of teams of students in other Ivy League computer labs with encyclopedias and phone lines open, furiously churning out trivia answers. We just hadn't quite mastered the strategy. What we needed to do, we determined, was to register all of our friends and play 15 or 20 practice games under all of their names. The only drawback was that we'd have to involve them in our plan, since registration required an e-mail address for each player. We fell silent. Involving other people would mean we'd have to admit to everyone that we were hooked and had crossed the line from recreational surfers of online auctions and free screen-savers to full-fledged computer geeks. We had already damaged our academic reputations. Was it worth our social images as well? Surely we were the only Princeton students who'd ever had this trivial obsession; the rest of the late-night procrastinators who tried to boost our school's average would forever (and wisely) remain unknown. The following night, however, a crowded dining hall forced us to share a cramped table with a boisterous group of freshmen. In the middle of a conversation about upcoming midterms, we were interrupted by a victorious pledge. "Tonight is the night we're going to win the car!!" Our forks went down and our heads turned to see a fist raised above a cluster of heads at the end of the table. "Whose names will we use tonight?" someone asked. Offended by our apparent lack of originality, and the loss of our competitive edge, this incident forced us to rethink our Jeopardy mission. Perhaps we'd turned a pickup game of procrastination into a trivia Super Bowl. Apparently, with all the other conniving college students out there, we had as much chance of winning that Pontiac as we did of graduating with a 4.0 grade-point average, or, perhaps more appropriately, of winning a $64,000 scholarship. Faced with this reality, we did the only thing we could: we gave up. No longer the Charles van Dorns of the Internet, we now see College Jeopardy for what it really is: a waste of time. Sure, we could claim it expands our knowledge beyond what Princeton can provide-Dolley Madison was the "Hostess with the Mostest"-but we'd only be fooling ourselves. From now on we're dedicating ourselves to spending all our time doing homework . . . that is, until we get the urge to play Wheel of Fortune.
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Words to live by in March, along with No-Doz and a thesaurus by Kelley King '98
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HERE I SIT AT 3:37 A.M. thinking, "I should really be writing my thesis right now." Instead I'm writing about it. I guess that's a better excuse than those of many of my peers, who might be uttering this nine-word phrase while playing video games or watching the latest made-for-TV-movie. This is procrastination for profit. I'm writing this column about my thesis to help finance a post-thesis trip with my girlfriends to the Caribbean. It's a shame that between talking about one's thesis and celebrating its conclusion, there is the pesky problem of the thesis itself. I encountered a similar problem in kindergarten, when I bragged that my newborn baby brother would knock everyone's socks off at Show and Tell. I was devastated to learn that my mother, though magical with shoelaces, could not possibly produce the highly publicized sibling overnight.
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 Illustration by Chris Brooks '97 |
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Despite the hopes of many of us who swill the Student Center's caffeinated sludge and stay up all night before the due date, theses, like babies, are not wrought overnight. We labor for months, in one of the dangerously unpadded cells in Firestone Library called carrels, thumbing through dusty books from the 1950s and trying to keep reign over note cards, which, like socks, consider themselves free-rangers. We then become emotionally saddled with an "idea." The support of that idea may even include rekindling a friendship with your freshman-year roommate from Tel Aviv so that she might translate the perfect sourcebook, which just happens to be written in Arabic. I've heard that when it really gets down to the wire, some students sneak bedding into Firestone Library, which closes at midnight. To work past the witching hour, they'll spend the night in their carrels. I can't think of a better plot for a B-rated horror movieÑbut one is moved to admire such tenacity. We are told that writing a thesis is just like writing ten 10-page papers. That's supposed to make hills out of the Himalayas, but this doesn't make the task sound any less Herculean to me. Writing is something I actually like to do, so I was tickled, during my college search, when I heard that every Princeton senior does independent work. This conjured up images of Emily Dickinson romantically cloistered at her writing desk, marrying wit and eloquence with elegant stationery. I suppose that some particularly punctual students can incorporate repose and reflection in their thesis experiences. The rest of us prepare for the month of March armed with No-Doz and thesauri, as if it were Armageddon. According to some recent publicity about Princeton academics, we should have no trouble throwing together 100 "semiliterate" pages. Naturally we'd then be awarded an A with a gold sticker, along with a conspiratorial wink from our thesis adviser. I must have gravitated toward those cagey illiterates who beat the Princeton admission system, because most of the people I know work pretty hard and still don't get the grades they want. You might be wondering what my thesis is about, and if you think I'm stalling about that, you're right. If you must know, I am writing about the female-child character in the work of three major American authors. Feel free to gawk; I've found that the disclosure of my topic precipitates a ponderous silence. It's the response of a trapped animal looking for a means of escape. Most English majors elicit lukewarm responses about their thesis topics. Unless they're writing about some figurehead who drinks a lot, like Hemingway, or some soul-searching beatnik who swears a lot, like Jack Kerouac, they aren't providing much fodder for lively discussion. When asked, my roommate, also an English major, says she is writing about film. No apologetic colons, no bumbling subtitles; just "Film." It rings of the cosmopolitan, of the exotic; her audience is captivated. I'm thinking of adopting a new lead myself, just to field such questions. It'll be something that will look flashy, embossed in gold on the binder of my final work at Princeton. Let's hope what's inside the binder does it justice. After Kelley King '98 finishes her thesis, she faces the pesky problem of finding a job, somewhere beyond the reaches of her hometown of Malvern, Pennsylvania.
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