doombot » The Debating Game

I have enjoyed watching this year’s presidential (and vice-presidential) debates, but I also find it very frustrating. Why define rules and ask questions if there are no real repercussions in the debate itself for ignoring both to harp on your own talking points? (See Figure 1.) Thinking about it today, I decided that there’s just got to be a better way to get candidates to follow the rules and serve us before serving themselves.

And so, I submit to you The Debating Game (rejected name: “Broodsport”). Here are a few simple rules meant to encourage tougher questioning and harder thinking.

1. Halftime

The debate is broken into two halves. The first half looks a lot like what we watch on TV now already. During a brief halftime, a panel of independent journalists and academics spend a few minutes fact-checking certain key, contentious issues that came up in the first half. At the end of halftime, the moderator may immediately reveal the results of some of this fact-checking to the audience, and some questions may be selectively revised or re-posed.

2. Time-outs

Each candidate can call a time-out once per debate, in either half, for instant fact-checking by the independent panel of a selected statement by the opponent. After a brief break, the panel reveals its results. If the moderator rules that the result differs significantly enough from what the challenged candidate had spoken, there may be a penalty.

3. Penalties

If the moderator rules that a candidate completely eludes a particular question, a penalty may be applied. This may come in the form of an additional time-out or bonus rebuttal time to the opponent.

4. Lightning Round

Near the end of the debate, the moderator asks a very simple and direct question. Each candidate has 30 seconds to prepare an answer of 10 words or fewer. Failing to address the question in the answer may result in penalties.

I leave it to you to decide whether this plan is a scathing satire of our entertainment-saturated society and its loss of political integrity, or just the best idea ever. Feel free to suggest your own rules in the Comments.

8 Comments so far

How would the penalties work?

I guess what I meant was that I think the penalties need to be more severe, especially if they accumulate. Maybe loss of an answer to a question or ejection from the debate.

It doesn’t feel quite right to me penalizing someone by making them forego part of the debate. I think the penalties should be something to make their answers more challenging. Either the moderator starts asking more taboo questions or the debators have to do something like answer in iambic pentameter

I’m running on fumes here in my little corner of the world, but I can at offer some further ideas.

mystery question, where the candidate must answer without having been asked anything.
mo’ monkeys mo’ problems, where the moderator is a team of monkeys that will rip the candidates arms off if they bend the truth, elude a question, or otherwise anger the monkeys.
drinking game, where each candidate chooses ten of the other’s favorite phrases (hockey mom, etc.) and when they get used, the speaker has to drink. the debate is over when one of them can’t stand up any more.
weasel pit.

Jordan & Jeremy: Valid points, and I wonder if we might combine all of our thinking to come up with a solution. Like, if the penalties which manifest as rewards for opponents seem insufficiently penalizing, the “lightning round” might be conceptualized less as a single round and more as a forced answering format for circumlocution.

Jacob: Excellent suggestions. If we were to conceptualize this less in terms of distinct “rounds,” I think that some of these suggestions (e.g., the drinking approach) might make for excellent penalties.

Is there a way we can work a giant gong into this somewhere?

I refuse to endorse any debate plan that does not involve slime and/or physical challenges.

[...] while still being informative. It might not bring integrity to think of the debate as some kind of game show, but my group of friends really did wish that the moderator had his own buddy with an iPhone on [...]

good game i think it is very educational

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The Debating Game

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