Game Mechanics
Is the Risk vs. Reward Ratio in Ultimate Frisbee sufficiently balanced?
Thesis
Crafting a balanced and rigorous Risk // Reward ratio in all types of sports is both an artform as well as a science. If the Risk // Reward ratio is to low, the game is too easy and doesn’t evolve. If the Risk // Reward is too high, the game is too difficult and no one will play it (no matter how brilliant it is). The thesis of this article is that the Risk // Reward ratio in Ultimate Frisbee is extremely low and is a strong candidate for consideration of a significant revision upgrade.
Premise
There are two different main genres or classes of team sports, namely Continuous Action where the action happens somewhat indefinitely (such as basketball) and Serialized Action where the game action starts, it comes to a stop, the game resets, game action restarts, and so on. (such as football).
Which one is Ultimate Frisbee?
Is Ultimate a Continuous Action (CA) Sport (like basketball) or is it a Serialized-Action (SA) Sport (like football)?
Surprisingly, it’s both.
It turns out that Ultimate Frisbee is a mashup of both types of frameworks and therefore the risk-reward ratio throughout the entire game is objectively unbalanced and skewed in favor of a very low risk/reward ratio and that has resulted in a game that is significantly less challenging, engaging, competitive and intellectually stimulating compared with other sports.
What is the problem
Along with psychology, fun and spectatorship, risk and reward are a couple of the key ingredients of a sport’s mechanics that are used to interpret input to an athlete’s decision-making algorithm, their emotional responses and how they play.
In sports, when we talk about risk in this context, we’re talking about the likelihood of losing something valuable, such as possession, field position, momentum, girlfriends and leverage. When we talk about rewards in sports, what we’re referring to are the chances gaining something worthwhile, including possession, scores, Nike endorsements, victory and accolades. What’s important to consider is that both risk and reward can be related to performance within the sport, or to the player's own emotions and ambitions.
Depending on the sport's category (Contiguous-Action or Serialized-Action), theme, and target demographic, a well balance Risk // Reward ratio will have a significant affect on a player’s perception of:
Degree of information
Degree of control
Degree of difficulty
Armed with a well balanced sense of these three components, a player will be able to more effectively navigate the parameters and outcome of the game, be more competitive and naturally evolve.
A game, any game, is just a framework for learning.
A well vetted Risk // Reward ratio will optimize this learning potential. Conversely, a poorly balanced Risk // Reward ratio (at either end of the spectrum) will stunt developmental learning from happening with the acceleration and comprehensive thoroughness that the game could have been capable with.
Developmental Learning Issues in Ultimate
Let’s look at just one random, hypothetical example from Ultimate Frisbee, stepping out to throw around the marker and in this example, the thrower’s movement results in them committing a small, but clearly perceptible traveling violation.
The risk/reward for choosing this tactic is approaches absolute zero. There’s no penalty for the traveling violation, people rarely call it and if they do, you get a ‘do-over’.
The reward is significant as it’s a way to get a throw off for a completion that would be hard to do in conventional offenses without stepping out. This level of risk/reward ratio approximating zero creates a systemic level of learning impairment. In other words, the virtually nil risk/reward ratio disincentivizes players from being challenged developmentally and they prematurely plateau as a player.
Look at all these other examples in Ultimate where the risk/reward ratio approaches zero:
Stopping ‘as fast as you can’ or ‘in as few steps as possible’
Momentum out of bounds or pivoting out of bounds does not result in a turnover
Momentum out of bounds or pivoting into the endzone does not result in a turnover
Offensive fouls do not in a turnover
Defensive fouls are unlimited in both quantity and severity
There are no consequences for making an illicit pick call (and players virtually always set up significantly closer to the offensive player than where they were when the bogus pick call was made)
Laying out for a catch, or throwing a disc where the only chance of catching it is a layout
A thrower holding the disc out in front of the marker without any concern of the marker knocking the disc out of his hands
20-25 yard deep endzone has higher risk than most of the rest of these in this list, but compared to a 10 yard endzone, the massive endzones present significantly lest risk.
When you factor all these examples together, the risk/reward ratio in ultimate across the board is extremely low. The corresponding developmental impairment that results from this lopsided risk/reward ratio is extremely high.
It’s ironic really. In a game with an well known and significant offensive bias in the rules, the game has barely advanced at all in the past 50 years. It doesn’t take an expert in Von Neumann’s game theory or a Nash Equilibrium wizard to predict this would be the result. The current revision of the rules for Ultimate simply isn’t challenging enough.
So who are the people making decisions about the future direction of the game?
It’s the players who are all developmentally impaired that are on the rules committees, etc.
Why is it a problem
It’s important to to point here out here that there is no right or wrong way to design the mechanics of a game in terms of the Risk // Reward ratios. Every game is different and it’s all a matter of what you core principles are and what you’re trying to accomplish with your design. At a minimum, the Ultimate community should at least be aware of this process and understand what the game’s tenets were in this regard and whether or not there was ever an earnest attempt to properly balance this ratio.
If you think about it, in 1969, there was virtually no gaming industry at all. All we really had were a few Board Game companies with maybe a handful of games popping up at Christmas time every year, most of them flops and we really haven’t had a new team sport since Dr. James Nesmith invented basketball in 1895.
Now, in 2024, in the past 10-15 years, Gaming has become a massive, multi-Billion dollar industry and while there are not many new sports being invented, the science for designing the mechanics of a game and balancing the Risk // Reward ratio is a fairly well understood phenomena. It's become more and more of an objective proposition over time because games that flop due to poor game mechanics get exposed overnight (Valve Artifact being a well known example of this).
Today, there are many universities that offer Associates and Bachelors degree in game design and while a significant amount of the course work relates to graphic design, computer science and things like monetization, etc., there is a strong emphasis on game mechanics and the art & science of balancing Risk // Reward ratios.
Individuals trained academically today in the Nash Equilibrium, Von Neumann's Game theory and various other schools of thought regarding balancing a game’s Risk // Reward ratios would objectively would be highly critical of Ultimate’s severely tilted game mechanics.
They would aptly point out that virtually every single rule inherited from football all result in a low-risk, high-reward system of game mechanics that has created an environment that lacks rigor, complexity and learning enhancement. You don’t need to be a psychic to predict that someday in Gaming 101 classes at Universities across the country, there will be Case Studies on how not to design a game, using Ultimate Frisbee as a template.
Historical Evidence
After approximately 55 years of the respective sports below (football, baseball and basketball) there were enormous crowds.
Ultimate Frisbee after 55 years, not so much….
What’s the solution
When designing the mechanics for a sport, the formula for determining the balance between risk and reward is an inexact science. That said, various tenets and values are helpful in producing an optimal Risk // Reward ratio and a sport whose mechanics or more engaging. For instance, consideration should be given to reinforce the sport’s primary goals and trajectory by striking a balance that is consistent with the basic tenets of the game and the advancement of the sport.
While it’s important to note that a properly balanced Risk // Reward is a critical component that results in producing fun games and sports, fun itself is a subjective experience so the objective of any balancing of a game shouldn’t be to result in fun, but rather fun should simply be a healthy bi-product of a well designed game.
Furthermore, the games mechanisms should be tiered, based on the cadence and flow of the sport to produce an ascending, intrinsic level of knowledge of the sport. Lastly, the Risk // Reward ratio should be finely tuned based on the player's athleticism, game IQ and and output characteristics, so that the mechanics of the sport provide a meaningful challenge for everyone from complete beginners to the most exceptional players.
To identify how the tuning process of a sport’s Risk // Reward ratios can be managed in a given sport’s mechanics, it’s valuable to consider instances from different types of sports that have been vetted over the past many decades and ascertain the various ways those sports have adjusted their mechanics to achieve balance. In the category of team sports, we can do an analysis of baseball, cricket, football, soccer, rugby, hockey, basketball, Australian rules football, volleyball and field hockey and see how they have done it.
We can identify in the above list, two distinct categories of game mechanistics, that we can call Continuous Action sports (like soccer, basketball and hockey) and Serialized Action sports (like baseball, football, cricket, volleyball, etc.). Again, serialized sports are games where the teams setup, action then begins until the current play or ‘point’ (such as volleyball) runs its course and the action is once again halted, only to be resumed, etc. You can think of these games mechanics as square waves, where the game is in action, or it is not in action.
Continuous actions sports are just like it sounds. They are games where the action basically continues indefinitely until a timeout, an intermission (half time), a score (soccer), etc. but for the most part you can think of continuous action games’ flow more like sinewaves.
The Game Mechanics of Ultimate Frisbee
For the sake of this discussion, it’s vital to understand that the game mechanics are significantly different between sports that are Continuous versus those that are Serialized and that Ultimate Frisbee undeniably has a framework that is a combination of both of these genres incorporated into a single game.
In other words, Ultimate can’t decide which genre it is, and this lack of identification has given the mechanics of the game a lack of specific direction, purpose or structure. You could say that Ultimate Frisbee has an identity crisis in this regard.
One of the primary, guiding mechanisms in the game flow of American Football (be it standard, flag football or touch football) is that play is halted with some sort of tackle.
On an abstract level, you could also include an incomplete pass or the ball carrier running out of bounds in football a form of “tackle”, as both of those have the exact same mechanical game flow as a standard tackle (which is that possession isn’t necessarily lost but the game halts temporarily).
Ultimate Frisbee’s design borrowed most of it game mechanics from Football, but they removed Football’s primary mechanic (tackling) and yet did nothing to counter balance the Risk // Reward ratio of the game to compensate for this omission. The game mechanics of Ultimate are ostensibly the same as Football’s, without tackles and without the game halting (except that the one time that the game does halt is temporarily after an incomplete pass and the disc is just laying on the ground, an artifact that frankly looks like an ugly duckling once you see it for what it is; so much so that it’ll be hard for you to unsee).
Ultimate Frisbee really needs to decide which it’s going to be, a Serialized Action sport or a Continuous Action sport and then the game’s mechanics need to be redesigned and reimplemented accordingly.
Historically, the balancing process of Risk // Reward in a sport’s mechanics has always consisted of an ongoing process that required a trial and error process and constant improvement throughout the sports lifecycle, until the sediment of the sport becomes solidified.
Honestly, this process never really happened at all with Ultimate Frisbee. The mechanics of the game have remained virtually untouched since the late 60s and early 70s and the only changes to the game since then have been ostensibly superficial.
I think that it’s obvious that the process of balancing a sport’s mechanics should include the presumption that the first attempt at a game is virtually guaranteed to fail so rather than debate the game’s modified mechanics indefinitely, by committee, in a state of analysis paralysis, it’s probably best just put a stake in the ground and start somewhere with a built-in assumption that revision is going to be necessary and inevitable.
After 55 years, maybe it’s finally time to consider the possibility of a Major revision in Ultimate Frisbee?
We need not look any further than the Game Theory of Johnny Von Neumann and the relevance of identifying and and responding to minmax strategies.
Specifically, the threat to the incumbent game mechanics of Ultimate have come under assault by the minmax strategy of Shredding. Players who are seeking a way to minimum their risks while maximizing their reward will begin to gravitate towards Shredding in significant numbers, thus making the viability of legacy strategies obsolete. As the legacy concepts for how the game has been played for a half century fall to the wayside, the obvious need for a complete revamping of the rules will become that much more apparent.
Humans are hard-wired to continually refine and advance our strategic thinking as we approach the event horizon of equilibrium.
As the new wave of Shredding based strategies begins to completely dominate the game, we’re going to have to be forced to re-evaluate the basic game mechanics of Ultimate and make a hard decision. Are we going to decide to A) take the game mechanics exclusively towards a Continuous Action paradigm (like basketball) or B) make the game’s mechanics exclusively a Serialized Action paradigm (like football) or C) maintain the status quo?
Does anyone seriously want to consider (B), where the play would come to a halt in a ‘dead ball’ situation after every reception?
Over the coming days, weeks and months, more and more player are going to begin to realize that maintaining the status quo game mechanics of Ultimate is an untenable position to keep in the face of Shredding.
Therefore, through the process of elimination, we’ll arrive will eventually arrive at one inescapable conclusion, which is that the only viable solution will be to transition Ultimate’s game mechanics entirely to a Continuous Action based sport paradigm.
When you think about it, once you realize that you’re going to want to place the game mechanics of Ultimate Frisbee exclusively in the Continuous Action genre and eliminate any and all legacy Football mechanisms, the new rules virtually write themselves.
Recommended Rules Revision Ultimate Frisbee
These rules suggestions were based on crafting a balance Risk // Reward ratio and were arrived at by first eliminating all legacy Downs and Tackles based artifacts from Ultimate 1.0, and with replacing them with a framework of rules more closely aligned with a Continuous Action sport, which Ultimate obviously is (and frankly always has been).
For the most part, these recommendations should all be considered to be relatively non-negotiable in the sense that all these revisions have been arrived at by stripping away any rules related to the Downs and Tackles mechanism of football. Said differently, these rules have been fairly well beta-tested, vetted and thought through so it’s recommended that rather than debate them in the dark, it’s recommended for people to actually go out and take a test drive with these new rules and then report back your results and enter into discussions about the pros and cons of this proposed ruleset.
As suggested above, rather than debate this in committee ad nauseum for the next decade or so, at the end of the day you have to start somewhere to this is a decent stake in the ground to begin the process. Obviously these could be tweaked and adjusted some, but this proposed set of rules rids Ultimate of any remaining vestiges of Flag Football.
I can personally guarantee one thing with this proposed and revised set of game mechanics, you’re going to find this new version of the game significantly more intellectually stimulating than Ultimate 1.0. I promise.
This is because with the 2.0 framework and a normalized Risk // Reward ratio, there is a significantly higher need for real time problem solving virtually every time you catch the disc, and this makes the game inherently more fun and challenging. In 1.0, you don't have such intellectual stimulation, because most of the problems are automatically solved for you already by the SA framework itself (eg. when you can take as many steps as you need to plant a pivot foot, there is no challenge whatsoever).
Proposed Ultimate 2.0 (aka Franktimate®) Rules
All turnovers resulting from a penalty are administered with a side-out
Substitutions can occur with a side-out
No pivot foot is required with a side out
Players are able to move two meters in either direction as they are putting the disc into play
Three steps max for travelling
Acceleration, change of direction and jumping are all LEGAL in this paradigm to make it more possible to get a quality throw off under the duress of having to plant a pivot prior to fourth ground contact.
A player is not entitle to a particular foot (left or right) as a pivot foot. If their third ground contact is their right foot, that is their pivot foot.
Traveling results in a turnover.
Incompletions, stall count violations, throws that land on the ground all result in a side-out
Substitutions can occur on any side out
A ‘Scorers Table’ for checking in for substitutions is not a horrible idea
When you layout for a catch, you have to stay down and have at least one knee on the ground. Standing up is a traveling violation.
This includes laying out for an interception on defense.
Endzone is only 10 yards deep
Ironically, this would be the one thing retained from Football, and it’s not even in the rules currently
Picks are legal
I seriously doubt that a legitimate pick rule could be authored that properly accounted for advanced dribbling skills.
Moving picks like in Basketball would be illegal though
There should be some sense in ultimate of a blocking foul vs. a charge
Harsh penalties for fouls (fouling out)
Determination needs to be made on how physical the community wants to keep the game, the lower the number of allocated fouls per player, the more stringent the anti-physicality will have been decided to be.
Possibly some type of free throw could be instituted (like a penalty kick, etc.)
You can slap the disc out of the thrower's hand
Grabbing the disc out of the thrower’s hands would not be permitted though
All of the 1.0 rules on marker/thrower contact need to be rewritten (or just abolished)
Whomever comes down with the disc has possession (The AJ Rule)
If the marker attempts to hit the disc out of the thrower’s hand and misses and hits the wrist, for example, that would be a foul and a penalty will be assessed.
Jump passes are legal
Per my conversation with Irv Kalb, they were always supposed to be
If you jump to execute a jump pass, but you don’t get a throw off by the time you land, it’s an ‘up and down’ and a turnover (traveling)
Out of bounds is a turnover
any pivoting or momentum out of bounds is a turnover
momentum or pivoting into the endzone is a turnover
This is obviously controversial, but there is an anomaly here that needs to be patched up one way or another
When you see it, it’s hard to unsee. This is a very odd artifact from the Football paradigm
It can either a turnover or
you have to plant a pivot foot (or throw before third ground contact) to a receiver outside the endzone, and then score normally
While the objective of this major revision of Ultimate’s Rules is not to make the game more entertaining, fun, competitive or to finally get Ultimate the respect from the Sporting World that we all believe it deserves, these benefits will certainly be a natural and long awaited byproduct of transitioning Ultimate’s mechanics towards a more sophisticated balance between risks and rewards.
In their infinite wisdom, the youngsters who created ultimate and cultivated it in the early 70s, left us an Easter Egg that allows us to implement Ultimate 2.0 immediately.
1.B.3
Captain’s Clause: For games not subject to the event organizer clause, a game may be played under any variation of the rules agreed upon by the captains of the teams involved. Otherwise, any rules variations are subject to approval by the event organizer.
So I would suggest primarily that rather than spending a lot of time debating the merits of these proposed rules, just go out and try them out and see how you like them!! (spoiler alert :: as long as you give your level best effort, you’re going to love them)
For more details on Shredding, Ultimate’s Downs and Tackles paradigm and my controversial experiences within the game, culture and community of Ultimate Frisbee, please check out my Frank Derangement series of article here.
My personal prediction, based on some modeling I’ve done, is that we can reduce injuries in Ultimate by as much as 90% by implementing this basic framework for Ultimate 2.0