When I was in tenth grade, a boy asked me to prom by securing a giant, puff-painted, glittering poster over the entrance to my high school. "Molly: Will You Go To Prom With Me?" As much as I pretended to be just, oh my god, so embarrassed, the public declaration left a fluttering pride in my stomach. I'm more than a little ashamed of how long I left the sign up that day so as many people as possible could see it and then talk to me about it.
I thought it very clever, but that gesture was nothing compared to what a kid named Jon Wyatt pulled off. Instead of hanging a banner on the cement facade of his school, Wyatt used Trivia Crack, the wildly popular trivia quiz game, to ask his date to the prom.
Wyatt's ally in this stunt was Joe Levy, a Microsoft program manager who has taught himself how to hack a variety of apps and games. Levy gets a lot of comments on his stories about how to "hack" popular apps like Candy Crush and Trivia Crack. Levy's hack of the browser-based Facebook version of Trivia Crack not only lets a player see the answers and cheat the game, but it can also be used to insert custom questions and answers.
Obsessed players began using Levy's browser hack, and the blog post drew a lot of comments. But one commenter made a request that stood out to him.Wyatt, a high schooler, wanted to experiment with Levy's Trivia Crack "cracker," altering the output to ask a girl to the prom.
The idea of not only helping a young kid act on his interest in programming but also getting him a prom date (does that make it "promgramming?") was too good to turn down. "I never thought my Trivia Crack-ing could have such humanitarian uses!" says Levy. The exploit only took him a few hours to create, and it was well worth it (she said yes).
While Levy "cracked" Trivia Crack to help a boy stand in front of girl and (with a computer screen between them) ask her to prom, plenty of users are happy to use the app's built-in social features for such conceits. Débora Nara of Etermax, the company that develops Trivia Crack, calls the game a "worldwide phenomenon" thanks to its social edge; people in offices, schools, and in social groups interact with each other in the game and in the real world, she says.
