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How to Score the Soap Opera Game
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Every week your local newspaper runs a page of soap opera plot recaps. Your supermarket carries several magazines with features and summaries, too. Here's a harmless game you can play with this prose. There are no losers in the Soap Opera Game!
Look at these sentences (made-up ones, not taken from real soap pages):
- Maximus surprised Agrippa.
- Julia admitted to Claudius that she told Valerian how Maximus surprised Agrippa.
We like to see sentences with lots of proper names, so we give them high scores. The first sentence is straightforward and clear, but, well, it only has two names in it; give it a 2. The second one has more juice and gets an outstanding score of 5.
You could simply add up the scores, sentence by sentence, but that would give an unfair advantage to the magazines (more sentences). To level the playing field, take the highest-scoring sentence for each title and record that. Then compare all the scores to determine the winning story for the current week.
Tiebreakers: In a dull week, there may be three or four stories that score 3. To break ties, go back and count how many three-name sentences appear in each summary. If you still see a tie, be philosophical. Soccer fans don't mind draws; maybe you shouldn't either. Think of the long-term health of the genre. You don't have to despair because All My Children had a middling week; trust that the series will come back strong! Besides, in 100 years, many of the characters will be dead.
Details of scoring:
- Don't award full points for names in lists (see the note at the bottom of the page).
- If a name appears twice in the same sentence, count it only once: Julia asked Messalina to watch Julia's baby Secundus scores 3, not 4.
- Don't include the teasers for next week's stories.
- Byzantium doesn't count as a proper name.
- Agrippa's villa counts, but the Julian compound doesn't.
- Job titles like torturer don't count.
- Multiple personalities, pseudonyms, dream identities and hospital-assigned names of amnesiacs get full points.
About lists of names: The judges have asked me to explain why you don't give full points for lists. Some stories stage their revelations to one or two characters, others to platoons. Since our focus is on scoring the summaries, not the stories, we try to even things out this way; identifying Catilina's real father to an audience of seven shouldn't get many more points than the same announcement to an audience of two.
Even so, some of you have complained that there are too many fractions. If that troubles you, use the "not quite" method: Every time you see a list such as Marcus and Publius or Marcus, Publius, Cornelius, Vesalia and Ursulina, simply count "not quite 2."
If you are up for decimals, use the following table to get the scores. Consider the sentence Julia, Maximus, Germanicus, Claudius and Aetius watched Agrippa get a surprise, which contains a list of five names plus a single. Score 1 for Agrippa. Just look on the fifth row of the table below to find the score for all the others. Then add to get the score of 2.9375.
- One name, score 1
- List of two names, score 1.5
- List of three names, score 1.75
- List of four names, score 1.875
- List of five names, score 1.9375
- List of six names (pretty unlikely), score 1.96875
- List of seven names (come on), score 1.984375
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