The game
What is Noillirk?
Noillirk is a survey game: you see an open prompt and try to give the answer most people would give.
A normal quiz question has one right answer. A survey prompt such as "Name something people lose all the time" has dozens, and they are not worth the same: keys, phone and glasses all feel like the top answer, and only one of them is. The skill is reading the crowd, not knowing facts.
Each climb in Noillirk is 7 prompts on a 15-second clock, and your points become altitude. You set off from a pond on the forest floor on a bright morning and rise through the trees, into the sky and, if you keep going, into space.
- heights an answer can reach, Grounded to Sky High
- 6
- points for the survey's number one answer
- 100
- reached by a flawless 700-point climb
- 14 km
A short history
Where the survey quiz comes from
Counting what people say first is older than television, and the studio audience has been polled for decades.
1969
The first answer tallies
Two psychologists, William Battig and William Montague, have hundreds of students write down examples of 56 categories and publish the counts. In nearly every category a few answers collect most of the responses.
1976
A hundred people surveyed
The American game show Family Feud, hosted by Richard Dawson, first airs on ABC on 12 July. Each question has been put to a hundred people, and contestants are paid for matching their answers, the top one most of all. Britain adapts it as Family Fortunes in 1980.
1998
Ask the Audience
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? arrives on ITV in September with a lifeline that turns the studio into a survey: the audience votes on the question, and the contestant can follow the crowd.
Now
The survey, without the studio
The Noillirk game keeps the survey's aim, the most popular answer, and judges each answer against people at large, from the top of the board down to an answer nobody else gave.
Why it works
Why do so many people give the same answer?
Put the same prompt to a crowd and the replies pile up on a handful of answers. Research on memory and coordination explains why.
Every category has a best example
In the 1970s Eleanor Rosch found that people treat some members of a category as more typical than others: an apple is more of a fruit than an olive. The typical member is the one people name first, and the one most of them name.
What comes to mind first wins
The availability heuristic, described by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1973, is the habit of judging how common something is by how quickly examples come to mind. For a survey prompt, the answer that surfaces fastest for most people is usually the one at the top.
Strangers can coordinate
For The Strategy of Conflict (1960), Thomas Schelling put puzzles to an informal sample of people in New Haven. Told to meet a stranger in New York with no way to agree on a place, an absolute majority chose the information booth at Grand Central Station; asked separately for a time, nearly all said noon. Told to call heads or tails and win only by matching a partner, 36 of 42 said heads. He called such shared defaults focal points. The top answer to a survey prompt is one.
The wisdom of crowds
When is the crowd right?
A crowd can be startlingly accurate or badly wrong, and the difference is who is in it.
An ox at Plymouth, 1906
At a livestock show in Plymouth, about 800 visitors paid to guess the weight of an ox once slaughtered and dressed. The statistician Francis Galton collected the tickets, kept the 787 he could read, and found the middle guess was 1,207 pounds. The ox came to 1,198, so the crowd was out by less than one percent. He published it in Nature in 1907 as Vox Populi, the voice of the people.
The poll that asked the wrong crowd, 1936
The Literary Digest mailed ten million ballots for the American presidential election, got about 2.4 million back and predicted Alf Landon would beat Franklin Roosevelt, 57 percent to 43. Roosevelt won about 61 percent of the vote and 46 of the 48 states. George Gallup, with a sample of about 50,000 chosen to look like the country, called it for Roosevelt. A huge crowd that leans one way is still leaning.
Ask the Audience
In The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki reports that on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? the studio audience picked the right answer 91 percent of the time, while the friends contestants chose to phone got it right 65 percent of the time.
Galton's crowd was right because its errors pointed in every direction and cancelled out. The Digest's was wrong because its errors all pointed the same way: its mailing lists leaned on telephone directories and car registrations in the middle of the Depression, and the people who bothered to mail a ballot back leaned further still. A survey board is a crowd of the first kind, and your own first answer comes from a crowd of one. The fix in Noillirk is the pollster's fix: picture the whole country, not the people you know.
The trap at the top
Why your own first answer is not always the top one
The answer that comes to you first is usually common. It is not always the most common.
In 1936 John Maynard Keynes compared investing to a newspaper contest in which readers win by choosing the faces other readers will choose, not the ones they like best. A survey game is exactly that contest. Your own life leaks into your first answer: a driver thinks of car keys, a parent of a lost sock, a student of a pen.
The fix is to answer as the average person rather than as yourself, and to prefer the plain, general word. When several answers feel equally obvious, the top of the board usually belongs to the one that is true for the most people, most of the time.
The method
How to find the most common answer in 15 seconds
A routine for any prompt in Noillirk, in four steps.
01
Say the first three answers to yourself
The top answer is almost always among the first few that come to mind. Get them all out before you choose.
02
Picture a hundred strangers
Not your friends, not your job, not your country's quirks. Ask which of your three a hundred ordinary people would say most.
03
Pick the general word
Keys, not car keys. Pizza, not pepperoni pizza. The broad word collects every variant, and the variants are what the crowd types.
04
Answer in time
A refused or missing answer scores nothing, and the clock is short. A common answer given in time beats a perfect one given too late.
| Grounded: nobody else gave it | 4 points |
|---|---|
| Treetop: hardly anyone gave it | 8 points |
| Kite: off the board, but a few gave it | 16 points |
| Cloud Nine: places 5 to 9 on the board | 32 points |
| Jet Stream: places 2 to 4 on the board | 64 points |
| Sky High: the number one answer | 100 points |
The balloons
A short history of being carried up by balloons
Before any person flew, a sheep, a duck and a rooster did. Two centuries later, a man in a lawn chair flew the way this game's krill does.
1783
A sheep, a duck and a rooster
On 19 September at Versailles, in front of Louis XVI, a hot-air balloon made by the Montgolfier brothers carries the first living passengers. The three animals fly for about eight minutes and come down about three kilometres away, alive: a sign that the air up there could be breathed.
1783
The first people aloft
On 21 November Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes lift off from the Château de la Muette, on the edge of Paris, and fly free for about 25 minutes, covering some nine kilometres.
1982
A lawn chair and 42 balloons
On 2 July Larry Walters ties 42 helium weather balloons to a lawn chair in a backyard in San Pedro, Los Angeles, and rises to about 16,000 feet, some 4,900 metres, where airline pilots report him. After about 45 minutes he comes down by shooting balloons with a pellet gun and lands tangled in power lines in Long Beach. The Federal Aviation Administration fines him.
Every altitude in Noillirk is a real one, so the comparison is exact: a climb passes the height of Walters's lawn chair at about 380 points.
The real sky
How high is a perfect Noillirk climb?
A flawless classic climb tops out at 14 km. Above the ground, atmospheric scientists divide the air into layers.
- Troposphere, to about 12 km
- Where the weather happens and nearly all the air is. Its top is higher at the equator (about 17 km) than at the poles (about 8 km). Airliners cruise near it.
- Jet stream, about 9 to 16 km
- Narrow rivers of fast wind near the top of the troposphere, blowing from west to east and often faster than 200 km/h. Flights from North America to Europe ride them, which is why the trip east is quicker than the trip back.
- Stratosphere, about 12 to 50 km
- Dry, calm and cold at the bottom, warming with height because the ozone layer, mostly between 15 and 35 km, absorbs ultraviolet light.
- Mesosphere, about 50 to 85 km
- The coldest part of the atmosphere, and where most meteors burn up. Noctilucent clouds, the highest clouds on Earth, form near its top.
- The Karman line, 100 km
- The boundary most often used for where space begins, named for the engineer Theodore von Karman.
- Thermosphere, about 85 to 600 km
- Where the aurora glows and where the International Space Station orbits, at about 400 km.
A perfect classic climb ends in the zone the game calls the jet stream, higher than airliners cruise. Endless mode carries on: past the edge of space to the Moon, each planet at its closest approach to Earth, the Sun, the nearest stars and the centre of the galaxy, through 52 zones in all, and every altitude on the way is a real one.
In this game
From answers to altitude in Noillirk
The board is only 9 answers deep, and how high an answer lifts you depends on where it sits on it.
Each answer the game accepts is placed by how many people would give it: Grounded if nobody else did, up to Sky High for the number one answer on the board. An answer the board does not list can reach Cloud Nine at most, however common it feels. The clock is only a deadline, so answering quickly earns nothing extra. A turned-away answer costs the seconds you spent on it and nothing more, and a new climb is always one refresh away.
Vocabulary
Survey game terms, defined
The words for a survey board, for the crowd behind it, and for choosing what others will choose.
- Survey says
- Family Feud's catchphrase, called out just before the board shows whether an answer is on it.
- The board
- The top answers to a survey prompt, ranked by how many people gave them. In Noillirk it holds 9 places.
- Top answer
- The answer the most people gave: number one on the board, and Sky High in this game.
- Plurality
- The largest share when no answer has a majority. Many top answers win this way, with less than half the crowd behind them.
- Wisdom of the crowd
- The finding that the pooled judgment of many people, each guessing on their own, is often better than any one of them. James Surowiecki's book of 2004 gave it the name most people use.
- Sampling bias
- Asking a crowd that differs from the one you mean to measure, as the Literary Digest did in 1936. Your own first answer is a sample of one.
- Schelling point
- Another name for a focal point: the choice people converge on when they want to match and cannot confer.
- Keynesian beauty contest
- Choosing what you expect others to choose rather than what you prefer yourself. Every survey prompt is one.
- Popped balloon
- What a miss costs in endless mode: letting the 15-second clock run out with no accepted answer, or passing. Any accepted answer keeps your balloons, and a Sky High answer wins a popped one back.