NBC Sports Launches Trivia Games

NBC Sports has launched a set of sports trivia games produced by Bunchball. There’s one for golf and one for NHL hockey. Being a Canadian I decided to try my hand at the hockey game.

The flash-powered game let’s you play alone or with another user. I played mine against someone logging in from Manila who went to school in Boston. The flash module incorporates chatting and Skype so you can actually communicate with the person you’re playing against.

The gameplay itself isn’t unusual but the twist that NBC and Bunchball have added to the mix is that players can submit their own question to add to the game. Users can rate the questions that other players have added and the best one make it into the game. That’s cool, but I wish there was a place that people could add their names so that they could get some bragging rights.

Adding this type of social media certainly makes the NBC Sports site sticky – as they used to say in the dot-com days. I can see someone returning again and again to the site and perhaps reading some of the editorial stories there or watching videos.

Of course the whole thing is ad supported and I wonder what kind of click-thru NBC sees on the adds. Pretty low would be my guess.