As much as it's important to keep your body fit and healthy by watching what you eat and drink and taking regular exercise, it's also important to keep your brain fit and healthy. This can be achieved in several small ways, including taking the time to de-stress once in a while and (conversely) exercising the ol' gray matter with brainteasers and puzzles.

I regularly attend pub quizzes. Not only do these make sure I'm putting my brain to the test on a regular basis, the socializing is good for my sanity, and there's beer available literally on tap. Unfortunately I cannot attend a pub quiz every night of the week, because I'd be both broke and an alcoholic. Thankfully there are plenty of alternative ways to quiz online, including a new Spotify app called Mr. Quizter.

Mr. Quizter

Mr. Quizter is the catchy name of the app recently added to the music-streaming service. It's one of only two apps in the 'Games' section on Spotify at the time of writing, and it's rather addictive. You can either play quizzes created by other people, or play your own, and both options provide hours of innocent fun.

Although I sold this app in the title for its ability to test your music knowledge, it's actually capable of doing a lot more than that. Music can merely be the backing track to quizzes about anything and everything. And with everybody using the app invited to create quizzes of their own for others to play, Mr. Quizter could soon be filled with more general knowledge questions than even Wikipedia can handle.

Playing Quizzes

As soon as you add the app to your Spotify you're given a Mr. Quizter profile. You can provide as few or as many details as you want, or connect your facebook account to have it all done automatically. Thankfully there is always the option to play quizzes without passing on any details, in which case you'll be listed as a guest.

For every quiz you play, and question you answer correctly, you'll be awarded points. As you accrue more points you will rise up the ladder with new levels being attained. You can track your progress via your profile page, where you can also view your stats, which include your world ranking and the percentage of correct answers you have given in all the quizzes you have played to date.

Finding new quizzes to play is an absolute doddle. There's a Quiz Of The Week, and you can also sort all of the available music quizzes by 'Trending', 'Latest', and 'Top Rated'. Using the 'Explore' tab you can search by keywords, or view different categories including genre, decade, and subject matters such as movies, video games, and sports.

The app tracks what quizzes you have played, meaning you can always give them another go if you feel you could have done better. You can also create your own quiz, but doing so requires a verified email or Facebook connection. Still, if you're comfortable doing so then a whole new world of Mr. Quizter fun is opened up to you.

Creating Quizzes

Creating quizzes on the Mr. Quizter Spotify app is deceptively simple. However, before you start there is one very important thing to remember: when Spotify plays a song it displays the title and artist in the bottom-left corner of the screen. Therefore you cannot ask people to name the band or name the song that's playing, as they will merely glance across and have the answer presented to them.

You start by creating the card that will sell your quiz to other Mr. Quizter users. You pick the language, symbol, and pattern, and then add a name and short description to finish the process. From here you add one question at a time until you're satisfied with your quiz.

Each question can be set as one of three options: a Text Question, a Picture Question, or Picture Answers. Text questions consist purely of text, picture questions add one picture, sourced from the album art or artist profiles on the Spotify database, and picture answers adds four pictures, one for each of the four possible answers, again sourced from the Spotify database.

Once you have concocted a question to ask, you then add the song that will play while it is being answered. This is done by simply searching the Spotify database right from within the app. You select the song, choose the point at which it will start and stop playing, and then add it to the question. You can choose the song in a number of different ways: it can be directly related to the question, it can offer a clue to the correct answer, or it can just provide musical accompaniment for those playing your quiz.

Once you're happy with your quiz you can save it and publish it for others to find and play. If you set it to Private it will only be playable to those with a direct link, while Visible To Friends and Visible To All are self-explanatory.

I created a short quiz for the purposes of this article, designed to test your knowledge of British music between the 1960s and the present day. Only those who follow this link will be able to play it, so please feel free to let me know your score in the comments section at the end of this article. Alternatively, let us know what you think of the Mr. Quizter app or provide links to any quizzes you create using it.

Conclusions

It should be noted that the image at the top of this article isn't Mr. Quizter himself, but if the people behind the app ever wanted to put a face to the name then that surely has to be it. I've already had hours of fun using this Spotify app, and I hope more developers create games and apps for the Spotify platform. If Mr. Quizter is anything to go by then there is definite scope for experimentation in this area.

Image Credit: JD Hancock