It was trivia night, it was rowdy and then Julianne Moore came up.

Question writer Cory Tveten of Lawrenceville admits he screwed up the question on the actress's filmography. In his defense, he writes about 40 questions per week, and usually can stand by his answers.

"Suddenly this guy comes at me and throws a phone screen in my face and says, 'Look!'" said Mr. Tveten.

A website displayed on the tiny screen confirmed it. Mr. Tveten should have written the Moore film in which director Chris Columbus cameos as a wedding guest.

(Answers to questions in the article are found at the end.)

The world of ubiquitous smartphones has produced many questions but few answers for old-school trivia nights at watering holes and hipster hangouts across the country. The prizes may not be monumental, but the bragging rights and atmosphere of one-upmanship make sure there's nothing trivial about trivia night.

Quizmasters have become vigilante proctors, scanning the room for the telling glow of contraband phones with access to Google and Wikipedia. It's a sign of the times, as scientists who study mental motivation and retention examine the effects of total information accessibility.

At the Brillobox in Lawrenceville, a packed house gathered for last Wednesday's trivia night. Master of ceremonies Dave Mansueto, who works as director of Wizzard Software in his other life, opened the scene.

His introduction covered the fine print, with details on team sizes and rounds. And then:

"Here's the big part: Your fancy phones -- your iPhones, your Droid, your PalmPres, your iPads -- keep them in your pockets!"

It hasn't always been this way, Mr. Mansueto said. In simpler times, people just set up laptops at the bar if they wanted to surf and sip. That's a lot easier to spot than a pocket-sized device kept clandestinely under the table.

"Like the McCarthy era, people just tell on one another" if they see suspicious texting, said Mr. Mansueto. "You'll have a team screaming and pointing if they think someone's cheating."

But many times, quizmasters say, you can't tell by looking at someone what's on his screen. There's a fine line between texting a boyfriend and looking up the capital of Liberia.

Quizmasters across the city said teams with a perfect first round are given the hawk treatment, and most businesses have busboys and bartenders moonlight as extra sets of eyes.

Trivia guru Monk McAllister of Bloomfield has been playing for about 10 years, and cemented his legendary status the night his team-of-one bested a packed house. He's seen an increase in paranoia and accusation in the past two years.

"They say to turn cell phones off, but it doesn't register," he said. "People are just so used to constantly having them on, staying connected."

Maybe the technology just falls out of his range of interest: Mr. McAllister said his area of trivia expertise is "5,000 B.C. to 1988."

The trivia players of tomorrow may be even worse about leaning on the crutch of interactive information. More than 35 percent of teens admit using the Internet to cheat on school work, according to a June 2009 Common Sense Media study.

Cheaters during name-that-tune rounds have a perfect accessory in the Shazam app for smartphones. The product, used by more than 50 million people worldwide, can identify songs and artists just from listening to a few bars.

Some questions find ways around the app store options.

For example, an image-based section shows players an image of a famous man and woman, and asks what the woman's name would be if they married and she took the man's surname.

At the Brillobox, the pictures of these two stars were shown for identification: What if the singer behind "I Will Always Love You" married the artist always associated with a melting clock?

But even that type of question is in jeopardy of technological tainting: Some companies are at work at image identifiers for camera phones.

Mr. Mansueto said the smart thing to do, then, is embrace the technology as the next step in trivia because incorporation is inevitable.

"We could have races for information on Wikipedia," he said. "Like Easter egg hunts on smartphones."

If that's where the pursuit of knowledge is headed, some experts say it could have implications for how we acquire and retain information.

Christian Schunn probably would make a good trivia player because of his range of research. "If I got about a third of the way through what I study, you'd cry uncle," he said.

In the context of this article, he's a research scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

He said concern over uber-accessible information with smartphones is the latest education scare. Years ago, calculators put math memorization on trial, and then early cell phones with contact lists were expected to nullify the need to recall numbers.

According to Dr. Schunn, now we're asking, "Do we really need to study anymore, or can we rely on our thumbs?"

If that's the way we learn now, will we just look up answers and not even remember random facts, like who the first president was to radio broadcast his state of the union?

Trivia is information at once full of context and free of context.

The Internet turns even casual surfers into "a fake expert in everything," and Dr. Schunn says it remains to be seen how the nonstop accessibility of vast information dulls or improves our retention.

With the Internet, "More stuff is being thrown at you and each is sticking less," he said. "Is the lack of stickiness winning or is the number of things being thrown against your mental wall winning? It's a tension between those two things."

Of course, the "mashup Internet culture" also has exposed twenty-somethings to popular culture identified with previous generations, said Mr. Mansueto. This allows some flexibility in questions and is especially true during the name-that-tune round, when even 30-year-old songs first released on vinyl are available on iTunes.

" 'Rich Girl' by Hall and Oates really seems to drive people wild," he said.

Yet for all of savvy complications of 21st-century trivia nights, the primitive roots of competition don't change.

Tied scores at the Brillobox are settled by an arm wrestling match and -- at least so far -- there's no app for that.

ANSWERS: "Nine Months," Monrovia, Dolly Parton + Salvador Dalí = Dolly Dalí, Calvin Coolidge.

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