A Trivial Intelligence Test

The idea of having a trivia game for an intelligence test to determine if the player should be considered sentient or a pet was a very obvious and is actually a reflection of modern day IQ tests. This leads back to my college days. I was taking an introduction to psychology course when the teacher gave our class an IQ test. This test was an older test that was targeted at a different culture so a lot of the references in the questions Most of the class fell below average on the test. I actually did quite well on the test, but I attribute that to always being the guy outside of the loop so had developed a bit of a skill at decoding slang. The point that the professor was trying to make was that by it’s nature any type of IQ test is fundamentally flawed as it must by necessity be focused on a subset of what makes a person intelligent. The creator of the intelligence test is biased by his or her beliefs in what makes a person smart that the test is targeted at that type of person.

This leads to a question as to how aliens would determine intelligence. The first answer I came up with is mathematics. Having a simple math test but have the numbers in some type of alien script or using a different base would be somewhat interesting but sadly, a lot of people don’t like math. This lead me to the second idea for an intelligence test, which was astronomical knowledge. I was originally going to have this feature all sorts of space-related things such as quasars, black holes, and novas. The problem is that not everybody has knowledge of such things. At the time I was planning this game out, (it was actually going to be episode 39) I hadn’t started work on the earlier episodes in the day as I plan out the whole day in a single planning session. I realized that meeting the professor could be shifted to the next day so I shifted episode 36 up leaving room for a knowledge based episode 36.

Traveling through the universe was way too big of a scope for episode 36, so it got converted into a tour of the solar system with information about the planets appearing as the players travelled by the individual planets. Knowledge of one’s own solar system is also something any space-faring race should have so made the ideal topic for the intelligence test that the player is given.

This is presented to the player as a simple trivia test. To keep re-playability, there are 24 different questions (three per planet) with only 12 of the questions being asked. The player is allowed one mistake. The next section contains a list of the questions and their explanations but I would recommend not looking at the list until you have beaten the episode at least once.