Mindmade Debatable - A hilarious party game for people who love to argue

Product Information

Give students a statement and ask them to give all the reasons why they disagree with it. Make sure that the statements are absolute but difficult to disagree with.

Students will learn to keep their cards for when they have a very important point to make so you can reward players with extra cards for making excellent points or asking important questions. If we were to completely nerd out, we could even record the game, get a transcript and analyse which rabbit holes debaters chose and where they could’ve taken a different route. We could then repeat the game to see how we improved. Since every issue can be broken down into subtopics and corresponding arguments, it can be a great brainstorming exercise to map out this territory. It’s a cruder, more applied method than systematic research; a method that makes us reconsider what we know about an issue and how much we’ve actually thought it through. Next, ask the student teams to change their positions and argue the opposing viewpoint. (Perhaps the group of observers might change places with one of the other groups.)It’s a bit of a silly practice of course. This is one of the debate games that encourages us to justify ourselves until we run out of sensible things to say by running into the so-called Münchhausen Trilemma. From my experience, people usually start by giving thoughtful and complex explanations until they feel the pressure mounting. Soon they’re forced into nitty-gritty terrain where they simply run out of things to say. They grow more and more defensive by the mere fact of having to justify themselves until their mind shuts down. Even though the rules don’t say, you have to reply in a heartbeat. Conscious Choices

But perhaps they’re the type of person who’d claim to prevent Russia from acquiring SS-20 ICBMs in accordance with the START II treaty. Now they may come across as pretentious experts who know enough to clarify the ICBM acronym, but not enough to know that SS-20 missiles have long been out of service. Second, compared to the first two, Speed Debating is less public. Individuals talk to individuals, they can ‘hide’ in the crowd and the general noise the parallel debates create. So it lends itself to participants being able to practice what they say and how they say it. They could be encouraged to make one claim (see: If I ruled the world…) and give one explanation (see: The Why Game) before the other side responds. Debaters take turns making a single move each so to speak. It’s a bit like playing several rounds of fast chess. That’s a lot of thought given to a simple statement. In any of those cases, we would’ve kind of played the game, but haven’t accomplished anything. So, what should we say instead? How about something we truly believe in. Something we’ve already given a lot of thought to. The good news is that this helps us to choose our words more carefully, too. We want our suggestion to be as well-received as possible, so being able to tailor our wording accordingly will have a positive impact on our audience. Rather, he recommends the positive playful voice as a standard one. Smile while talking, be encouraging and keep it light. That leaves us with the calm soothing voice, which he dubs the late-night FM DJ voice. It’s a much slower, quite deep reassuring way of speaking. In that, it not only soothes and slows down the minds of our audience but also our own. So try it if your audience is rather nervous or if you are. In fact, you can test this right now by reading this sentence in an erratically aggressive tone first and then as a late-night FM DJ.Let’s take the peanut butter angle from game one. Each participant gets up in front of the group and makes their statement again. Now the crowd comes at them. Not with pitchforks, not with moral judgement, but with a simple question asked in unison: In sum, a big part of arguing is not being able to come up with something meaningful to say under pressure. That makes the Why Game an effective stress drill that can increase our confidence and ultimately our control over a debate. Of course, in an actual exchange of arguments, we’re confronted with counterarguments and rebuttals. Nevertheless, we’ll be more cognoscente of our ability to steer the conversation in directions we consider more productive. 3. Speed Debating Have students form small groups. Give each student an object (e.g. a pen, a pair of sunglasses, a phone charger). Within the small groups, students should convince others that they should ‘buy’ their object.

While they don’t need to compare with every other proposal, they should be comparative with at least some. You may wish to begin by making a mind-map of possible ‘trump’ categories on the board.If they had homework time before the lesson, they will hopefully have made a mask ready for the debate. Similarly, this activity can be done individually by putting statements on index cards and responding to them as you draw them out of a hat. Not everyone is as argumentative as the late Hitch himself. But everyone has to make a convincing case at some point in their lives. As useful as mastering the skills of the debate are, as much there’s often not the time, place, let alone motivation to practice something so seemingly basic as talking. Not to mention the image that comes with debate clubs and all the rest of it. That makes debating perhaps one of the most overused and undertrained skills. What better way to practice these skills than with debate games?