Just what we need

This morning, an idea hit me for a new debate format. First I'll describe it, and then I'll work back through my thinking. It's probably not practical, but it is intriguing, and sometimes the early versions of ideas become the springboard for really good refinements.

Presidential Debating

• One person versus one person, like LD or IPDA.
• Topics are non-research driven; philosophical or fun, based on general knowledge, e.g. "Cats make better pets than dogs."
• The topic is announced, and there is sixty seconds of preparation time. 
• No outside research may be consulted after the topic is announced: no files, no electronic devices. The knowledge one carries in one's head, and that the judge recognizes as reliable, is the sole inventional resource.
• Speeches proceed as follows:
• First Affirmative: Two minutes
• Negative: Three minutes
• Second Affirmative: One minute
• After the debate, the judge has sixty seconds to rate each debater on a scale of one to ten for that debate, and to select a winner.
• There are seven debates in a round, and the debaters switch sides.
• The judge keeps a running tally of points through the first six debates. A tie in points at the end of debate six is forbidden, so the judge must ensure that one debater or the other has higher points. The debater with higher points gets to choose her or his side in debate seven.
• The round is decided by number of debates won.
• Tournaments are run single-elimination bracket only, with no prelim rounds.

Honestly, I got to thinking about this because of my odd relationship to sports. I find it entirely baffling that people get so worked up over football, baseball, or any other kind of athletic competition. The only sport I pay the slightest attention to is tennis, and even with tennis I can't bring myself to sit down and watch an entire match: I just read the results to see who won, by what margin, what the commentators said about the highlights, etc. I recognize references like "kick serve" or "inside out forehand," but I have no idea what such things actually look like.

Tennis interests me because a lot of the organization, and a good measure of the psychology, seem to parallel debate. Just like debate, tennis is either played one-on-one or two-on-two (although in debate the two-on-two formats tend to get more attention and emphasis, whereas the opposite is true for tennis). Just like debate, it's played in tournaments with a single elimination bracket. I've even found myself reading the draw for a tennis tournament and thinking So, if Isner beats Tomic in this round, then he debates Federer in the quarters before I corrected myself.

One element that's both similar and different is the correspondence between service games/receiving games and going affirmative/going negative. In debate, negatives have to take what affirmatives "serve up" and improvise on the spur of the moment. But the big difference there is that within a single tennis match, each player gets to switch between serving and receiving multiple times, which makes each match a legitimate test of each player's ability in both modes. That got me to thinking, What if there was a format of debate where your opponent stayed the same, but you got to switch between affirmative and negative multiple times?

They do something like that in the "debates" held during presidential campaigns: a question is posed to one candidate, who gives a short answer, and the opposing candidate gets to rebut the answer, and the first candidate gets a brief follow-up. So I thought, what if we set it up that way? Give the affirmative time to make one developed argument, or possibly two or three briefly described arguments, give the negative time to refute and time to make an argument for the other side, then give a follow-up. 

And in tennis, there are no "prelim rounds;" it's just single-elimination from round one to the final. But because players play so many games within each round, their survival in the tournament isn't based on the outcome of each particular game, so they can have one go badly but still mount a comeback. That has some appeal.

The academic in me chimed in and pointed out that the interval of public address is getting shorter and shorter: the speeches in the actual debates between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln were as long as ninety minutes. In fact, this format matches the original LD setup pretty closely as far as speech order and ratio: they had a sixty minute 1A, a ninety minute N, and a thirty minute 2A, so take it down by 30:1 and you've got this format. 

But the point is that in 1858, audiences stayed tuned in to political speeches that went on for an hour and a half: it was a pre-media, pre-internet epoch of human history, and people's attention span for spoken messages was a lot longer. Today, sad though it might make me, people's attention spans are shorter, the utterance length is a lot shorter, and it's a very useful skill to be able to boil one's argument down to just a few powerful sentences.

Now, this format would put a lot of wear and tear on judges: a decision plus points every seven minutes for an hour, and only sixty seconds to make that decision and assign those points. But it might hold out the promise of tempering weird judge reasoning a bit; any one apparently inexplicable decision that the judge made would be only one out of seven, and the odds are that each side would be a little mystified at the outcome of at least one of the debates.

And because it fits into an hour block, it could run at the same time as an IE round, or it could be double-flighted and put into the block for a policy round. If there was space for four IE prelim rounds in a tournament schedule, then sixteen debaters could enter Presidential Debating; round one would be octofinals, two would be quarters, etc.

As for pairing: tennis pairs the first round of a tournament with a hybrid of power rankings and random draw: the top players are seeded, and are distributed among the quadrants of the bracket. Players below a cutoff point are paired by random draw. In Stoa, Speechranks point totals could be used to identify the top two or top four contestants, and distribute them across the bracket so they can't hit earlier than the finals or semis, and then other pairings could be random.

I'll go so far as to call it an interesting thought experiment. Generating enough topics, and enough of a diversity of topics, would be pretty labor-intensive. For a four round tournament, there would need to be twenty-eight good, debatable topics that didn't require research. But it would definitely be a change of pace, and would address some of the flaws of other formats, while rewarding spontaneity and brevity even more than debate already does.

Possible funky variations I'm already starting to think about:

• Re-seed after each round, using total wins and total points from all previous rounds.
• Give each debater a total of three minutes preparation time for the first six debates, and let them use as much or as little as they like in any of their affirmative debates.
• Allow the judge to stop the match as soon as one debater wins four debates, and use the balance of time for discussion and oral critique.
• For the final round of a tournament, do it like a tennis-style tiebreaker: first debater to win at least six debates, but by a margin of two, is the champion. The round continues until one debater pulls at least two debates out in front of her/his opponent. One problem: at some point, you run out of topics, unless you truly have the mother lode of topic lists prepared.