Q6 Trivia Game

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Q6 is a trivia game run by Microsoft to promote its web messaging system, Windows Live Messenger.

[edit] History

The contest was first run in 2005 as a contest open to Canadian and U.S. residents at the website www.playq6.com to promote MSN Messenger 7.0 and MSN Search. In February 2006, it was run as a contest open to U.S. residents to promote MSN Messenger 7.5 [1]. Another contest was open to Canadian residents to promote Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Search (now Live Search) which ran between June 29, 2006 to August 21, 2006 [2].

[edit] Gameplay

Players may register in teams of up to six members. Each Thursday night for six weeks, each player receives and answers a trivia question in a specific category. The team is awarded points for each correctly answered question based on the speed of the response. The team then receives and answers a team question and received a set number of points if the answer is correct. The team that earns the most points in a given week is awarded a weekly prize; the team that earns the most points overall is awarded a grand prize. A team that answers all the weekly individual questions for each team member and the team question will be eligible for a random draw weekly prize.

[edit] Criticism

The game has been criticized for featuring questions that are most readily answered by searching on Google or other search engines, rather than testing a player's knowledge of trivia. During the starting hour of each weeks questions the servers tend to die down, making it very difficult for players to answer without getting a "500 Internal Server Error."^{[citation needed]}