ihavebeenfloated

I rammed my knee into the door jam today. It’s got a red line across it and it’s slowly turning purple. Also, it hurts like a motherfuck.

But, the important thing today is that I wrote a quiz on OKCupid called, get this, The Proper Donnie Darko Test. Yeah, you heard it here first, folks, I wrote a quiz on OKCupid finally. So, if you have seen Donnie Darko at least once then I say, go for it. To give you a little background into it, here’s a letter I wrote to one of the other people on OKCupid who has wrote a Donnie Darko test.

P.S. You don’t need to be an OKCupid member to take the test!

I have written a Donnie Darko test of my own, and seeing that you have one as well, I figured I would drop you a line and ask you to check it out.

I state a few things on the front page of the test, but I will elaborate on them here for you: I wrote “The Proper Donnie Darko Test” in an effort to achieve what I think most, if not all, film quizzes should be like. I think too many film quizzes involve themselves with giving high scores to the lunatic fringe of the fan base for the film. I’m not saying your test is like this, but that is usually what I see.

What I hoped to achieve with my Donnie Darko test was the potential for people who have only seen the movie a few times, maybe even once, to still have a good time with the test and score in a manner that is still positive in a way, while still reflecting the fact that they are not a crazy expert on the film. Potentially my test should be a good, solid, accurate measure of how much of a fan this person is of the film.

As such there are two aspects to the quiz, a main part that asks questions that only pertain to the film directly, and only obvious things that would be apparent and easy to answer to a person if they have seen the film a number of times, such as more than five.

The second part of the quiz is relatively short, but important. There are eight questions on my quiz that deal solely with things that a fan who has “obsessed” over Donnie Darko would know, but even in that case they are not for the absolute lunatic fringe. The test only factors in figures on these scores in a positive light.

The “average” Donnie Darko fan, someone who has only watched the movie obsessively should score into the “Donnie Darko” category. These are people who score from 75-95% on the main part of the quiz as well as people who score from 0-100% on the bonus part of the quiz.

Special Editors Note: I totally fucked this up. When you score 75-96% on the main questions and 0-100% on the bonus questions, you score as “Gretchen Ross”. When you score from 96-100% on the main questions and from 0-95% on the bonus questions, you score as “Donnie Darko”. Can’t believe I fucked up describing that.

The “absolute” Donnie Darko fan scores into the “Frank” category, which is when you score from 96-100% on the regular and 96-100% on the bonus questions. This means that the “absolute” fan can only get one wrong answer in the regular section, and none wrong in the bonus section.

I’ve only included data that can come from within the film itself, with the possible exception of the bonus questions. Nothing about the website is included, because I don’t personally feel that should be included on a quiz about a film, and I don’t feel that it is canon to be accepted into the universe of the film.

Anyway, I just thought you would be interested in my perspective on quizzing people on Donnie Darko.

Further more, unlike most people who make tests on OKCupid, I actually bothered to categorize people. There are fifteen possible tiers of results, but really there are only seven possible results. Seven is a really, ridiculously, high number, IMHO. Especially when you have to factor in the fact that I had to write descriptions for each one that fit the characters they represent while still actually applying to how you scored on the test. I think this is highly important when it comes to a test.

If you don’t entertain a person with praise after they worked their ass off on a quiz, then what the fuck good are you? It also increases “quiz morale”, IMHO, when you assign an actual label to a person, and it look better on their profile page than some random number that means nothing to someone who hasn’t already taken the quiz.

Obviously, I put way too much thought into this, but happily it only took me a few hours and I had a good time. I believe I did a really good job on it, and achieved what few goals I had. Hopefully other quiz-makers will take notice of my overwhelming awesomeness and start patterning their film quizes after mine.