I don’t know how HQ Trivia is doing. I don’t know what their financials look like, I don’t know what new developments they’re rolling out, and I don’t know how morale is at HQ HQ.
From appearances, though, they could use a boost. The trivia app that took The Internet™ by storm has, predictably, settled down into an environment in which it commands sparse public attention. People are still playing, but the boom has settled down.
I play fairly frequently. I was nonplussed when the app came out, partially because I didn’t have any storage space on my phone for new app’s, but a few months later, a friend raved about it to me, so I stepped up and deleted a lot of pictures and old text conversations (tip: you can clear the most memory by deleting your most prolific conversations, especially if those have a lot of pictures involved). I’d been told Scott Rogowsky was kind of annoying, but call me a contrarian, because I love the guy. Also, I won almost $400 a few weeks into playing, which was as addicting as a girl saying hi to me unprovoked in middle school. When you get a rush like that, you keep walking in the same general area around the same time of day.
Anyway, I was playing HQ Sports last night (not my favorite, but every now and then I feel compelled to play, in a prime example of money’s intoxicating allure, referenced above), and I forget how exactly this went down, but basically, the host said her dog couldn’t host HQ Trivia because he doesn’t speak English.
This makes sense at surface value. I understand that a dog could not communicate what the host communicates. But aside from someone who inexplicably, over a year after the app ascended to prominence, is playing their first game of HQ Trivia, nobody really needs to hear the host. Yes, some things might get confusing without a human being speaking instructions to you, but as someone who played quite a few rounds of HQ Trivia on mute from my desk while I was in the corporate world, I can attest to the fact that sound is not a necessary element of the game.
What is a necessary element of the game is that the host entertains. If you’ve ever caught an HQ host on a bad day, you too know that it can be grating. But you know who never has a bad day? You know who always entertains?
That’s right.
Dogs.
Which is why HQ would benefit from switching, at least now and then, to dog hosts.
People, especially citizens of The Internet™, will do just about anything to watch a dog be a dog. Right now, I’m glancing back and forth from my computer screen to my neighbor’s balcony because that neighbor is a dog and that dog is on the balcony being a dog. It’s pawing at the concrete right now. It’s wagging its tail. It’s sniffing. All normal dog things, and let me tell you, they are CAPTIVATING.
A lot of HQ’s initial allure was Scott Rogowsky, who, as someone has hopefully already noted, just does all the things dogs do:
- He gets really excited.
- He’s always happy, and demonstrably shows it.
- He has fur on his face.
- He makes noises humans don’t make.
- He takes dumps where he isn’t supposed to every now and then, but who can blame him because I mean he doesn’t know any better and to be fair, the rules about where you can and can’t take a dump are kind of arbitrary (I assumed on this bullet point—I have never watched Scott Rogowsky defecate so I can neither confirm nor deny the allegations I just made).
To conclude (*clears throat in preparation for the delivery of a decisive closing statement*):
HQ exec’s, if you’re listening, or reading, which seems more likely, but hey maybe if you do well in the tech industry people read blog posts to you aloud, give me a dog hosting HQ, and give me that dog as soon as possible.
Thank you.
Editor’s Note: At press time, the dog on our neighbor’s balcony stood still for a moment, steadying itself, and then shook its whole body.
