In early September the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music released its first version of a new music trivia game that we’ve called Music Frivia .  We designed the game for those folks looking for a new online game to fritter away some time to avoid mowing the lawn or raking the leaves.  Since this was our first attempt at creating such an online game, I asked folks to write us and make suggestions to help improve it.

After receiving some very helpful suggestions from our online visitors, we have updated our programming to include new sound effects when questions are answered, and provide players with the ability to share their game scores on Facebook.  We also have included a new email link on the game site for people to ask us questions about the game and the Center’s historical collections.

Several of our online players have pointed out that not everyone who plays this game will be familiar with the Center’s music collections and their historical significance.  This makes it difficult to answer some of the harder questions on the first attempt.  So we are looking at a couple of different approaches to provide players with additional helpful information related to a given question to guide the player to a better second answer to that question.  Think of this approach as a fun informational assist or engaging breadcrumb trail to follow.  This approach will help improve a player’s mastery of music history while at the same time improving their chance for better scores when the game is played again.  Now we just need to figure out how and when to release this next improvement to the game.

If you haven’t played Music Frivia yet or were one of our online visitors who test drove our first version and passed along your thoughts, please give our revised game a spin and let us know what other things need to be improved.   Our hope is that people of all ages will enjoy playing Music Frivia.  For further information about the game and the Center’s collections email sousa@illinois.edu.