The Corrosion of High School Debate
&gt; This was because if a team “dropped” an argument by its opponent—if it did not respond to the other side’s claim—that argument was conceded as “true,” no matter how inane it was. Chief among the strategies exploiting this rule was “spreading” (a combination of “speed” and “reading”), where debaters would rattle off arguments at a blistering pace. Their speeches often exceeded 300 words per minute. (A conversational pace is about 60 per minute.)<p>This is a failure of the &quot;game&quot; rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was&#x2F;is). Making a game with winners and losers and any kind of objective scoring system out of something resembling a real activity is <i>really</i> hard to do without distorting that activity until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to. It&#x27;ll happen as soon as someone who&#x27;s willing to consider <i>only the rules of the game</i> in constructing their strategy comes along, and easily crushes all their competitors while making the whole thing un-fun and entirely unlike what was intended.<p>It&#x27;s unsurprising that the attempt to fix this (Lincoln-Douglas style) ended up with similar distortions of the spirit of the competition becoming the only way to win. Designing a game like this is <i>hard</i> if people are playing to win and not playing for some other purpose (<i>i.e.</i> they&#x27;re not willing to wholly voluntarily and with no fuss take fewer points than they could to work toward the common good of maintaining the spirit of the event—at which point you&#x27;ve introduced role-playing elements, basically)