A couple of months back, I wrote a K-pop-themed Pointless-style quiz for a few friends. I’ll reproduce each question here just before each corresponding section. The questions draw heavy inspiration from a Pokémon-themed quiz I took part in, authored by lovemathboy. They deserve all the credit for their creativity in writing the questions. I had fun with the Pokémon quiz and wanted to create something fun and new for my friends. Plus, I hadn’t written puzzles in a while and I was itching to create something puzzle-adjacent I could release. I re-hashed the questions with a K-pop theme, but it wasn’t as simple as I had assumed—I ended up with a lot of observations of K-pop culture and media along the way. This blog post is essentially my constructor’s notes and unstructured observations, but I’m using it to explore K-pop as a cultural phenomenon by examining its potential for generating decent trivia questions.

Pointless Quiz Rules:

Pointless is a quiz show where the core gameplay involves trying to answer questions correctly with the most obscure answer possible. In the quiz I ran, all participants were asked to give up to 50 answers for each prompt, and select three answers they think are the most obscure. Each answer is given an obscurity score equal to the number of times that same answer was also on someone else’s submission. The three selected answers are used to score each question, while the rest are only used to penalize other answers. This means that if you are the only person to submit an answer, then it is pointless. If you chose that answer as one of your three to be scored, you are awarded zero points. The goal is to accrue as few points as possible. I’ll reproduce exact rules as worded in the quiz below, for posterity:

  • NO LOOKING STUFF UP — Please do not consult any outside sources. Your answers should come entirely from your own knowledge base. Try your best!
  • The goal is to have the fewest possible points. (Hence “Pointless”.)
  • For each question, you may enter up to 50 answers. The score of an answer is equal to the number of people who said that answer minus one.
  • Your first 3 answers will be scored. With your second and third answer incurring a +1 and +2 point penalty respectively. Your final score for that question will be the best (i.e. lowest) score out of those 3 answers.
  • If an answer is wrong, it will score MAX + 3, where MAX is the number of people who said the most common correct answer.
  • After your first 3 answers, all of your other answers will count towards other people’s scores until you enter 3 wrong answers. All further answers after the third wrong answer will be ignored.
  • Separate multiple answers with commas, newlines, or any other sensible delimiter.
  • There are no passes. Your highest-scoring question is automatically dropped. Good luck.

Adapting the format to K-pop

Lovemathboy’s Pokémon quiz delves into various corners of the franchise, covering the main series games, competitive play, anime, card game, and side games. Within the main series games, it explores music, human characters, moves, and fishing. Pokémon, as an intellectual property, boasts an abundance of content. Despite not acing that quiz, my ballot was solid and I felt I knew a similar amount about K-pop. This prompted me to consider whether K-pop, with its vast culture, could also serve as quiz material and if I was capable of reproducing a similar quiz for my friends.

My K-pop quiz consists of six questions, down from the original ten. I planned to have fewer questions mainly because I wanted to avoid intimidating potential participants. I also planned for the questions to be easier than lovemathboy’s, since I was writing for people who would probably be seeing this game format for the first time. Truthfully, I struggled to think of many more compelling questions or topics to include anyways. Regarding ubiquity, in the realm of K-pop, you do pick up bits of information beyond your immediate interests, primarily revolving around songs, idols, albums, and a handful of viral moments and memes. However, there are many more aspects that diehard fans are well-versed in regarding their favorite groups, but that aren’t as widely known in general pop culture, such as lyrics, idol personalities, physical albums, and B-sides.

With K-pop trivia, you could write thousands of questions like “what is the fandom name of ‘X,’” “the real name of ‘Y,’” or “name this single with precisely ten letters and starts with Z,” but those have little play—you either know it or you don’t. People who could answer those questions already know the topic because they follow those groups, so nobody is really gaining anything when playing. Writing my quiz was an exercise for exploring how permeable various aspects of K-pop are, even among dedicated fans. It was about identifying what aspects are widespread or viral enough that they’re known by more than the diehard followers of those specific acts. Instead of exploring an iceberg, it’s an exploration of the common language shared by the “collective fandom.” Much of K-pop culture is depth-related, where you accumulate extensive knowledge about your favorite groups and pick up bits here and there otherwise. I aimed to tap into the latter when composing the quiz. I also wanted to write questions that could be gettable from some provided context that could jog your memory. That way, you don’t immediately give up on a question if you don’t know it immediately.

Quiz

When writing the quiz, I set a few rules and goals as I brainstormed questions. I wanted to span as much of K-pop culture as possible with minimal overlap. I didn’t want to over-represent questions about songs, so I also wrote questions about the idols themselves, as well as albums. I also wanted to make sure that no answer would be correct for more than one question, and furthermore, minimize the amount of times a specific artist was repeated throughout the whole quiz. This would reduce the bias toward fans of a particular group. I’ll note that for my intended audience, I kept the more specific questions mostly about girl groups.

My general writing process was essentially to come up with the questions and then do research to explore how many possible answers there were to see if the question had potential. As I alluded to before, I ended up with six questions mainly because I couldn’t think of that many more interesting ones. I cut two questions from the quiz (a question about identifying lightsticks and one about survival show rankings), because I didn’t think they were that interesting compared to the others.

It was surprisingly challenging to come up with the first three open-ended questions, because you need to find a well-defined set. The sets also needed to be large enough that it would be hard to ace the question, but not too large as I didn’t want it to be overwhelming. I felt that 20-40 possible answers was a good ballpark (completely arbitrary). Initial ideas I considered, but dismissed after thinking about it for more than a moment, included topics like “groups with N members” or songs “with M characteristic” because such questions emphasize depth over breadth. I’m sure anyone could unearth an incredibly niche pointless answer, but that would undermine the value of those answers collectively (if everyone gets pointless, then the question has no impact on the game at all). Imposing constraints on the answer-space of the questions makes for a better game. There’s still depth, but it’s intentionally limited, keeping it fair.

Q1: SM idols

Name any debuted idol from SM Entertainment (former or current) whose stage name starts with the letter ‘S’ or ‘M’. Specifically SM Entertainment, and not its subsidiaries.

List of all correct answers1

“SM idols” is a surprisingly ill-defined set, as reflected in my need to bloat the question with specifics. While there’s a general understanding of who qualifies, crafting a question without loopholes proves challenging! I’m not entirely certain if members of The Grace count as idols, but considering nobody guessed them anyway, it didn’t impact the results. The process involved digging through Wikipedia for SM groups, fact-checking numerous non-idol groups, and so forth. The question is relatively unbiased toward SM diehards (as opposed to if the question focused on other groups), given that SM groups consistently rank among the most popular, frequently spilling over to general K-pop-related media through commercials, hosting gigs, gossip, and whatnot.

The question went about as I expected; the most obscure idols were either among the oldest (members of Super Junior and The Grace) or the youngest (members of Riize). There were 20 possible correct answers, by my count, and the lowest scoring ballot also had the most correct answers, 13. The most answered idols were the members of SNSD, SM’s most famous girl group.

Q2: TWICE

Name any Korean-language single by TWICE.

List of all correct answers2

Twice’s singles provide a nicely defined and unambiguous set. The primary reason I stuck to Korean-language singles is to exclude the Japanese ones, as incorporating them would introduce unfairness. The added benefit of excluding English singles prevents double-indexing on their two English releases, which would be featured on the Billboard Hot 100, the subject of question 3. It’s pretty perfect, since their Korean discography holds a significant presence within general K-pop audiences without any crossover to the Billboard charts. Their discography’s ubiquity makes this question fairly unbiased when confined to Korean-language releases. While SNSD is another group with a prolific and widespread output, considering I already have a question about SM groups, indexing on Twice’s discography makes more sense. Additionally, Twice has greater public awareness when I wrote the quiz, making it a more engaging question in my opinion.

There were 20 possible correct answers here too, but unlike the previous question, I wasn’t as sure how each song other than the most and least obscure would rank. The most correct answers on a ballot was 18. Every correct answer was answered at least once, with “The Best Thing I Ever Did”, Twice’s forgotten Holiday-core single, achieving pointless. I wasn’t sure if anyone was going to answer it at all. Unsurprisingly, “TT,” the song that launched the group’s popularity, was the most common answer. A funny outcome was that several people had “Knock Knock” on their ballot, and each thought it would be among the most obscure. In reality, it wasn’t in the top 10 most obscure. I probably would have done the same, it’s the follow-up to “TT” and completely overshadowed by it. I guess it’s memorable for being unmemorable.

Q3: Billboard Hot 100

Name any song by a K-pop act that has made it onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Specifically, I will accept any song where the primary artist is a K-pop act.

List of all correct answers3

Question 3 is an exercise in identifying groups that have made a significant impact on mainstream US radio and naming their most popular songs. Additionally, anyone who has spent time on K-pop Twitter has likely come across chart updates. There is some trivia involved, such as remembering that Wonder Girls and Psy once charted. The question tends to lean towards bias for BTS fans, given that many of the songs are either by BTS or their members. However, for the specific audience I was writing for, this bias was welcomed, considering that everyone had a similar level of unfamiliarity with BTS’s discography.

By my count, there were 65 total possible correct answers. I was fortunate that there’s a Wikipedia page for “List of K-pop songs on the Billboard charts,” but I still sifted out songs where the K-pop artist was a featured artist. The nature of the pop charts ranking system in recent years meant that a lot of these 65 songs didn’t really chart for very long or at high positions. Stans front load their mass streaming efforts to get songs to chart, and the songs drop in rankings the next week. So as I mentioned before, guessing recent releases from big groups would be a pretty good strategy. The most correct answers on a ballot was 21 and that was their strategy.

The least obscure answers were a tie between BTS singles “Butter” and “Dynamite,” and viral TikTok hit “Cupid” by Fifty Fifty. All of these songs are among the top 5 for weeks on the chart. The most obscure correct guesses were previously alluded-to brief, unmemorable chart appearances by BTS, Lisa, Twice, Blackpink, and NewJeans. Surprisingly, PSY’s “Gentleman,” his follow-up to “Gangnam Style,” was pointless (“Gentleman” charted for 15 weeks and “Gangnam Style” for 31). As a result a few participants got pointless and overall, the scores were low for most participants, so it wasn’t too impactful a question. Regardless, I like this question because there is some strategy to it if you know how charts work.

Of the 65 possible answers, only 33 of them were guessed. I’m not surprised by this; 27 of the remaining 32 songs were single-week, low-position chart appearances mostly by BTS or their members’ solo songs. The notable misses were also BTS songs, but “Make it Right”, “Fake Love,” “IDOL ft. Nicki Minaj,” and “Like Crazy” by Jimin all charted for two to six weeks. The only other notable unguessed song was Pinkfong’s “Baby Shark,” charting for 20 weeks. Looking back, I don’t really think counting them a K-pop act was correct, but it didn’t matter since nobody had them on their ballot anyways. Plus it was fun trivia to include when sharing the quiz results.

Assessing the difficulty of the first three questions while writing was challenging, but I’m happy with the results. Each question yielded a few pointless answers, and there was a range of scores for each. There is no overlap between the first three questions, which is surprisingly elegant. I’m very happy with that. No SM artist has a Billboard Hot 100 entry (as of writing), and Twice’s only entries are English, despite their popularity among K-pop fans.

Q4: Debut songs

Each audio clip is from a debut song. Identify the song. Link to audio files (volume warning)

List of all correct answers4

For this question, I went with the theme of identifying the artist based on the initial moments of their career—your first impression of them. These snippets are all the first few seconds of their debut songs. I thought the theming was clever and it helped constrain the question from both the writing and solving side. Going through a playlist of debuts, it was interesting to hear how distinctive, or not distinctive some songs can be. The hardest part was finding songs I wanted to serve as more difficult questions, but without choosing no-name groups. I ended up using older songs, “AH” by After School (2009) and “FIRE” by 2NE1 (2009) for these. Truthfully, there were plenty of songs I could have chosen overall, and my primary consideration in selection were minimizing references to a specific group throughout the quiz and varying the release years to mitigate bias. This question provided much-needed flexibility for the subsequent ones. However, I violated my double-index rule by including an SM group with a member that was the correct answer to question 1, but I felt “Jopping” was too good to replace (its distinctively SuperM), especially since the quiz lacked representation of boy groups.

What surprised me the most was that “POP!” by Nayeon was the least obscure song; it wasn’t a song I personally heard very much of. I was also surprised that “Glass Bead” by GFriend was tied for most obscure—for exactly the opposite reason as “POP!” Other than that, the distribution of obscurity was as I had designed. If anything, I initially thought this question was too easy, because one of the first submitted ballots aced this question. This question turned out quite fair—no pointless answers, but everyone got different subsets of songs.

Q5: Album portmanteau

Each image is the left half and right half of two different albums that form a portmanteau with each other. (i.e. The end of the first answer is identical to the start of the second answer). Portmanteaux must overlap at least 2 letters. The first and last letters, as well as the enumeration, have been given to you.

Q5: Album portmanteau

List of all correct answers5

The album portmanteaus involve image identification, and they are challenging since you need to identify two albums per question—no partial credit. However, this difficulty is counteracted by the potential to guess one if you know the other, using wheel-of-fortune tactics. There are surprisingly few pairs that make for good questions, especially with the constraints I set for myself. There aren’t that many well-known album covers and album names with common starting and ending bigrams. I also avoided using any bigram more than once. And of course, I didn’t use the same group twice in one question.

Additionally, because of the first two questions, I didn’t use albums from SM groups (except for BoA, where I made an exception because being reminded of her didn’t significantly help with the other question) or Twice. This restriction was pretty huge. Fortunately, this question didn’t clash much with the Billboard question, as later Blackpink EPs/albums and NewJeans albums didn’t have portmanteau-friendly names. I didn’t end up with many other pairs on the cutting room floor, actually. Given the difficulty of finding pairs without repeating groups, I essentially went with the first ten that worked.

Due to the lack of flexibility in choosing the pairs, I was limited in how much of a difficulty curve I could bake into the question. I started by fixing what I figured was easiest (“KimLipStick”) and trickiest (“JohnTravoltaWannaBetter”). For the remaining ones, I aimed for a difficulty between those two and just hoped that they were gettable. I believe this question ended up well-calibrated, if slightly challenging. My predictions were correct, and I was relieved when nearly all of the pairs were gotten by more than one person. None of the participants got “JohnTravoltaWannaBetter,” but there were a few close guesses, and I think that’s okay. I knew it was difficult, but I really wanted to include it because that T-ARA album title is so iconic.

Q6: Idols from screenshots

Each picture is a screenshot with a particular idol removed. Name the missing idol.

Q6: Idols from screenshots

List of all correct answers6

This question was the most challenging for participants and also the one that took the longest to write. The primary difficulty here lies in my criteria for “ubiquity.” The questions must be reasonable enough for a non-stan to answer, leading me to focus on memes, popular music videos, and very little else. Again, I faced constraints by deciding not to include SM idols, Twice, or music videos of the most popular songs featured on Billboard. This question would have been much easier to write without those constraints.

There are a lot of popular music videos, but during my research, it became evident that popularity alone wasn’t sufficient. These videos were viral or iconic, but the visuals rely heavily on the idol the shots focus on. Removing the idol from the image makes the rest of the shot unidentifiable. The budget of the music video has a lot to do with this. Many videos end up placing members on the same sets, with solo shots against the same background. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use these solo shots, even if iconic, as they weren’t unambiguously tied to a single idol.

Interestingly, although some detractors criticize Blackpink’s music videos for filming the members in separate rooms, and as a result they don’t feel like a “group,” I needed more groups to film their videos this way. In their music videos, solo scenes are unique; they’re filmed on different elaborate sets. When the idol is edited out, it’s still an identifiable image which works for this question. However, I couldn’t use recent Blackpink music videos due to their Billboard Hot 100 appearances. Ironically, although I initially considered using an iconic moment from Blackpink’s “As If It’s Your Last,” it turned out to be unambiguous for the same reasons mentioned earlier. This scene with Lisa against a yellow background is really recognizable but it’s unusable since the other members also have their own shot in front of it.

You’d assume that JYP groups or Le Sserafim music videos have usable scenes given their budget, but many don’t. Either the backgrounds are re-used for different members or the backgrounds are unmemorable and plain by themselves. One of the few exceptions, Ryujin of Itzy in the “ICY” MV, did make it into my quiz. In the case of the NMIXX music video, despite “O.O” featuring numerous memorable sets, they aren’t member-specific. The intended solve path for the one I ended up using was recognizing the viral moment or meme and connecting the lyric to the idol who sings it, rather than recalling the music video set and associating that scene with a member. This also applies to the Wonyoung skydiving scene, which is more of a meme than an easily identifiable solo scene in the MV.

One that made the cut was 2NE1’s “Lonely” MV, an old-school video with a clear storyline, where CL is the main character. I wanted the image to ask “Does this screenshot remind you of an MV?” which you would connect to 2NE1’s “Lonely” and get to CL, who is essentially the main focal point of the entire MV. The scene in question isn’t exactly unique but it’s meant to give clues to the MV’s story. It also looked old. I also ended up using a scene from a Blackpink MV which fit the criteria and is recognizable as the same scene used for the video thumbnail, and then a Sunmi MV. I didn’t necessarily think the Sunmi MV was iconic, but it includes a full moon in the frame, so the intention was to connect it to her through context clues.

A few other groups’ MVs were also usable, such as (G)I-dle’s. However, I had already planned to use Miyeon in the context of a presenter. I really wanted to include music shows in the question as they are culturally relevant to K-pop, resulting in Miyeon’s inclusion being fixed. I couldn’t use another emcee because it would have been unambiguous. I wanted to use a current hostess, since using a past one seemed too challenging. That left me with Miyeon, Tsuki, Moon Sua, Nana, or Sullyoon. Honestly, I didn’t use Tsuki, Moon Sua, or Nana because I didn’t perceive their show, Show Champion, as a major music show or as culturally relevant as M Countdown or Show! Music Core, so the choice was between Miyeon and Sullyoon, both well-known idols.

The context clues for this question would be the co-hosts who weren’t edited out, allowing viewers to pinpoint the timeframe and particular music show. It turns out I couldn’t use Sullyoon because the two other presenters at the time had previously hosted the show with Minju, right before Sullyoon’s tenure. Minju herself had a lengthy and memorable tenure as an MC, so it would have been ambiguous. Therefore, Miyeon was locked and I couldn’t use any (G)I-DLE MVs, even though they would have worked for the question.

For the other non-MV questions, I highlighted other culturally relevant aspects of K-pop: survival shows, fancams, and social media—using my own K-pop profile pic was more of an in-joke than anything though. The iconic Hani fancam is self-explanatory, and I liked how the way I present the screenshot in this format effectively conveys the hint that it’s a vertical video.

As for survival shows, the trick lies in using the graph to identify the idol, either by recalling their final placement or tracing their rankings throughout the show. Sejeong was known for consistently staying within the top two. Considering I had already incorporated references to Iz*One and post-Iz*One groups, I opted for a screenshot from Produce 101 instead of Produce 48. While determining the specific season is tricky, those screenshots are nonetheless unambiguous.

As I had mentioned, this question was the hardest. Two screenshots remained unidentified (Jennie and CL) and there were two pointless (Ryujin and Haewon). I’m a little surprised about Jennie, though, since her scene is the thumbnail. The others I’m not surprised about. They were all music video scenes that I suspected might be tricky, but hoped I was being paranoid. After all, these videos have tons of views. During the writing process, these four shots were the ones I spent the most time deliberating and convincing myself that someone could get them. It’s when I learned that, other than some exceptions, the cinematography of K-pop music videos just didn’t work well for this question, but I was close to finishing the quiz so I just called it good enough.

The most guessed image was a tie between Wonyoung’s scene where she’s jumping out of the airplane and Hani’s fancam. Sunmi was the third most guessed, so it seems that my clueing worked there.

Final Thoughts

A recurring theme in the writing process for the last three questions is that I intentionally made it more challenging for myself by imposing additional restrictions after creating the first three. My unassuming “no double-indexing” rule led to omitting the most popular groups or their most popular songs, all for a quiz meant to reflect popular culture. It was surprisingly difficult, but evidently still possible. There is still quite a lot of common ground outside of the most popular groups. For many fans, K-pop is more than just the songs, so I knew it wouldn’t be a comprehensive quiz without also touching on the non-music side, such as idols, memes, and tv shows. It was a challenge to distill all of these parts into a short quiz, but I had fun giving it a shot. I got a lot out of having to research the discographies of groups outside of the most well-known ones. In a time where I personally wasn’t keeping up with K-pop all that much, writing the quiz was a little nostalgic and helped me catch up on recent releases. I rewatched videos I hadn’t seen in a while. I watched a lot of music videos for the first time. I watched a lot of music videos 10+ times when picking out frames. And I watched the Jopping music video over 50 times, according to my Youtube Rewind (I have no shame).

Thanks to Ryan for proofreading/editing.

  1. MARK, MAX CHANGMIN, MINHO, SEHUN, SEOHYUN, SEULGI, SEUNGHAN, SHINDONG, SHOO, SHOTARO, SIWON, SOHEE, SOOYOUNG, STEPHANIE, SUHO, SULLI, SUNDAY, SUNGCHAN, SUNGMIN, SUNNY  ↩

  2. See the Wikipedia page, Twice singles discography ↩

  3. See the Wikipedia page, List of K-pop songs on the Billboard Charts ↩

  4. A - Eleven by IVE; B - Bon Bon Chocolat by EVERGLOW; C - POP! by Nayeon; D - Energetic by Wanna One; E - Glass Bead by GFRIEND; F - Hi High by LOONA; G - Fire by 2NE1; H - WA DA DA by Kep1er; I - Jopping by SuperM; J - AH by After School  ↩

  5. A - KIM LIPSTICK; B - TOUCHAT-SHIRE; C - SUMMER ADEAR OHMYGIRL; D - WJ PLEASECRET GARDEN; E - SQUARE ONEIRIC DIARY; F - DOUBLASTAYDOM; G - GAME PLANTIFRAGILE; H - HI PRIST I NEVER DIE; I - MISS MEMORY; J - JOHN TRAVOLTA WANNA BETTER  ↩

  6. A - HANI; B - SUNMI; C - JENNIE; D - SEJEONG; E - HAEWON; F - RYUJIN; G - WONYOUNG; H - YUBIN; I - MIYEON; J - CL  ↩