About PoliQuiz

PoliQuiz is an interactive political trivia game designed to appeal to political junkies and novices alike. PoliQuiz provides a fun way to test your knowledge and learn more about politics and the U.S. Congress. A project of the Sunlight Foundation, it was built by Publi.us, the guys who brought you Fantasy Congress.

How do I play PoliQuiz?

PoliQuiz is a multiple choice political quiz. The object of the game is to earn the most points—those who accrue the most points can earn the envy of others by displaying their names on the game's 'leaderboard.' Players start with three lives and must advance through 10 levels of questions, increasing in difficulty as the player reaches each new level. You can earn extra lives by advancing through five levels or gaining enough points. Each level requires you to answer 10 questions correctly before you can advance.

Questions are worth 10 points each. However, if you answer five questions correctly in a row you will be on a “streak,” and points with double; 10 correct answers will multiply points by three and 15 correct answers will multiply points by four. You have 30 seconds to earn full points on a question. If you take longer than 30 seconds, you will be awarded only one point.

The tenth and final level does not end (sorry kids, no “Kill Screen”). However, you can continue playing until you accumulate enough points to rule the leaderboard.

What’s unique and fun about PoliQuiz?

PoliQuiz is not just a quiz on a Web site, it’s also a widget that you can grab and play on your blog, Facebook page, or your own Web site. Even better, you can create a team and play against other blogs and Web sites.

Create my own team? What does that mean?

When you grab the PoliQuiz widget to add to your site, you’ll have the option of setting up a team associated with your Web site. (See here.) When visitors play PoliQuiz on your site, their score is added to your team score. That way, you can compete with other blogs and sites to see whose users can get the highest score and the higher political IQ.

Where do the questions come from?

There are two types of questions, automatically generated questions and user-submitted questions. Automatically generated questions come in 36 varieties for 535 members of Congress, resulting in approximately 3 trillion possible permutations. You may be asked to recognize the name, state, district, party or even birthplace of a member of Congress. Although the possibilities are for all practical purposes infinite, they are not pre-generated, and will be created as needed while you play. This means you may encounter the same generated questions if you play PoliQuiz more than once, but you will never encounter the same question twice within one quiz.

The questions that are not automatically generated can be submitted by anyone playing the game. There are close to 400 questions that have been generated by the Sunlight Foundation, but you can also contribute by submitting questions for approval by our moderators. Just provide a question, a correct answer, a few wrong answers and a source for us to verify.

What is PoliQuiz built on?

PoliQuiz is built on Publi.us' own J2EE web-application framework, J2Free, utilizing Hibernate for object-relational mapping to a MySQL database and Ehcache for second-level object caching. PoliQuiz is deployed in Glassfish application servers on Softlayer hosted machines running Fedora 7.