We have never had information within easier reach. By the end of 2025, an estimated 726 000 people in the kingdom were using the internet, representing about 58% of the population, according to DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report.
The report also estimated 513 000 active social-media user identities in the country in October 2025, while about seven in every 10 internet users used at least one social-media platform. The figures reflect how dramatically the way we access information, communicate and entertain ourselves has changed.
A question that once required remembering, asking somebody or searching through a book can now be answered within seconds. Google can find it. Social media can tell us what other people think about it. Increasingly, artificial intelligence can go further, finding the information, summarising it, interpreting it and constructing the answer for us.
There is enormous value in that convenience, of course, but the more interesting question is what happens when reaching for a device becomes easier than reaching into our own memory. When do we still have to remember? When do we sit with a question long enough to reason our way towards an answer? And in social settings increasingly shared with screens, how often do we turn to the person beside us and work something out together?
Or, as the youngsters would put it, when do we simply touch grass?
Dr JayJay Worral has found a rather entertaining way to bring some of that back: put people around a table, give them questions and make a game of what happens next. A medical doctor by profession, Worral is the man behind Trivia Club, a social entertainment experience he hopes can become a regular fixture for friends, families and colleagues looking for something different to do together.
The premise could hardly be simpler. Gather a team, hear questions and work out the answers together.
ORGANIC NETWORKING
It is what happens before each answer is submitted that makes things interesting. Someone remembers half of it. Another is certain they know the rest. Someone disagrees. A connection is made that nobody else had considered. Then, occasionally, the quietest person at the table produces the answer everyone else has been searching for. Suddenly, knowing something matters. So does listening to somebody who might know something you do not.
Worral said that was part of the appeal. Nobody needed to be particularly good at trivia because no one person was expected to know everything. One question might reward the person who follows football religiously. The next could belong to the history buff, the music lover or the friend whose collection of seemingly useless facts has finally found its purpose and when nobody knows for certain, the team has to do something increasingly easy to avoid elsewhere: think it through together.
It is, in many ways, a gym for curiosity, memory and conversation disguised as a good time with good company. The good time matters because Worral wants Trivia Club to grow into a regular social fixture, offering something different in a leisure calendar often built around the nightlife or activities requiring more planning and finances. Trivia demands considerably less. Find a few people, form a team and show up ready to play.
“Part of the fun is discovering what you knew, being surprised by what your friends knew and picking up something new along the way. The mental exercise almost hides inside the entertainment,” he stated, explaining that teammates inevitably filled one another’s gaps.
In trying to win, players have to retrieve information, make associations, challenge one another, explain their reasoning and occasionally, concede that somebody else has the better answer.
“They have to think together. That collective element may be particularly valuable in a social environment increasingly mediated through screens. Digital spaces can create genuine communities and friendships, but sharing a physical space does not necessarily mean people are engaging with one another. Trivia gives them a reason to,” he added.
Worral said he had watched people arrive without enough members to form a team, join strangers and within the game, begin discussing answers, discovering common ground and learning how to work together. The question does the difficult work of opening the conversation. What follows is more human: disagreement, persuasion, laughter and the collective regret of discovering that the answer everyone eventually rejected was, in fact, the right one.
People who might otherwise have had little reason to speak suddenly have something to argue about, something to celebrate and, occasionally, something to get spectacularly wrong together. Just like that, knowledge becomes socially useful.
KNOWING ESWATINI
Worral is also deliberate about what that knowledge includes. Trivia Club is not intended merely to test how much people know about distant capitals, global celebrities or international sport. He wants a home among the questions too.
He emphasised that curiosity was central to the culture he wanted to build. Much of the learning happened naturally through playing, but questions about Eswatini were one area where he was more deliberate.
That can mean roads, rivers, mountains, landmarks, history or people who have shaped the country.
“There is something appealing about arriving simply to have fun and leaving knowing something about that place that you did not know before,” he said.
It is a deceptively important proposition. We have unprecedented access to information about almost anywhere in the world, but familiarity with what is immediately around us is not guaranteed. Someone may know the politics of another continent, the lyrics of an American artist or the statistics of a European football club, yet be stumped by a river, historical figure or landmark much closer to home. Trivia makes that ignorance harmless enough to laugh about, but the answer memorable enough to keep. The learning sneaks in through competition, and competition, Worral has learnt, matters. So does fairness.
He said one of his biggest lessons from hosting Trivia Club was how much people enjoyed competing and how much more invested they became when they trusted the contest.
That puts pressure on the person holding the questions. They must be varied enough to reward different kinds of knowledge, the rules must be clear and the atmosphere welcoming. Otherwise, trivia can quickly begin to resemble an examination for clever people.
Worral wants the opposite. Someone should be able to arrive convinced they know very little and discover, several questions later, that somewhere inside their accumulated experience is the obscure fact their teammates desperately need.
“The pleasure is not simply in being correct. It is in having something to contribute,” he stated, making it known that he ultimately wants Trivia Club to move beyond a single venue and become part of the social calendar.
He therefore, plans to take the game to different locations, introducing players along the way to restaurants, businesses and spaces they might not ordinarily visit.
There is room beyond the weekend too. He sees trivia working at private functions and inside companies as a less formal form of team-building. And in the workplace, something interesting happens once nobody around the table knows the answer: hierarchy suddenly becomes remarkably unhelpful.
The junior employee may know what the executive does not. The colleague who rarely speaks in meetings may carry the team through an entire category. The person everybody ignored on the first question may be the one everybody turns to on the tenth. For a few minutes, everybody around the table gets the chance to matter for a different reason.
Perhaps that explains why Worral talks as much about the emotions surrounding the questions as the questions themselves. He has watched teams debate, celebrate, agonise over changing an answer and erupt when the least expected person at the table turns out to be right. He said those moments were what made the experience memorable.
They may also explain the larger appeal of Trivia Club. It creates a room where curiosity has value, remembering something can earn applause and listening to the person beside you might get you closer to an answer than reaching for the device in your pocket.
He makes no grand claim that a trivia game will reverse an increasingly digital life. Worral’s ambition is considerably simpler: he wants people who hear about Trivia Club to think it sounds fun, different and worth trying.
That may be enough, because in an age spent making answers easier to find, there is something refreshingly human about sitting around a table, being asked a question and realising nobody can Google it for you, ChatGPT cannot reason it out on your behalf, and you cannot scroll through TikTok to find out what somebody else thinks about it.
For once, the technology in your pocket is useless. You have to reach somewhere older: your memory, your reasoning and when those fail, the people sitting beside you.
