Words With Friends Game Show

My Role: Game Show Writer (and occasional host, but not in this video)

Skills Utilized: Creative writing, script writing, trivia writing, editing, performing, collaborating, communications, research, detail orientation, content management systems

Problem: I was tasked with writing hundreds of sets of trivia questions that were novel, interesting, and that reliably progressed in difficulty throughout each daily show. I also needed to write interview questions, monologues, and monologue jokes that were endearing, funny, and informative. Without a strong plan, these varied tasks on tight deadlines could potentially become an obstacle to the high bar of quality that I wanted to reach.

Action: I hypothesized that strong organization was key to keeping up with the deadlines. To make sure that the topics of questions remained interesting and that the trivia questions smoothly ramped up in difficulty, I wrote thousands of extra trivia questions and organized them on spreadsheets by challenge-level and topic. This allowed me to always have quick access to fresh, novel, and appropriately challenging trivia. The time I saved with this process freed me up to produce more entertaining, fun, and fascinating monologues.

In the episode presented in this portfolio, we also made the trivia questions a bit easier so that more people would be incentivized to stick around during the inspiring interview, and we made the trivia question topics close to the topics of the interview questions so that the transitions between game show and interview portions would be as smooth as possible.

Results: The show was beloved by the Words With Friends community, and it was so adored by Garth Brooks that he was interested in guest-hosting the episode that is presented in this portfolio. Retention for this episode was especially high due to some combination of the star power of Garth Brooks, the entertaining environment we created, and the accessibility of the trivia questions. The audience and Garth Brooks said that they were overjoyed by the episode.