On-Line Trivia Games Popular With Subscribers

Addictive “Jeopardy!”-like games have become a gold mine for on-line services. Moderators who can keep people paying to answer Trivial Pursuit-like questions are becoming sought-after talent.

Trivia co-hosts David Schrager and Angela Stevenson were recently lured away from America Online by Prodigy, for example, which touted a 72-hour trivia marathon over the Labor Day weekend. Not that this would stop America Online from continuing its own trivia programs.

Neither AOL nor Prodigy spokesmen would own up to outright talent piracy, but Brian Ek, Prodigy vice president for public affairs, confirmed that Microsoft had “approached virtually all our chat room hosts” to staff the company’s new network that comes with Windows 95. And, he said, “I’m sure it was the same over at AOL.

“We make a lot of money from trivia,” Ek said, because on-line competitive trivia games played in chat rooms with moderators are features that cost extra. Some games last 90 minutes, while the meter is running. Winners on both services receive extra free hours, but the services make a lot more from the rest of the also-rans.

“You might as well be sticking quarters in the disk drive,” Ek conceded. He says that Prodigy’s “Guts” game, a noncompetitive trivia contest, “is right now the most heavily played on-line game anywhere.”

“Prodigy is not known as a game network,” he said, “but in the first six months it surpassed other on-line games and has now blown way past them.”

There are usually about 25 people in a game, and for the regularly scheduled games on AOL, for example, would-be players crowd the rooms as long as 40 minutes ahead of time. Prodigy now regularly schedules nearly 60 games a week, timed so that players on both coasts can participate.

At one recent AOL game, chatting before the game began brought out a discussion of how costly the games can be, and some players referred to possibly apocryphal tales of monthly AOL bills of $1,000 among trivia pursuers.

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