On Tuesday I play Ultimate. I’ve alluded to it a couple times on this blog, but this is the first time I’m saying it outright – I have become a player of Ultimate.
Ultimate is the sport with the frisbee. (Frisbee is a brand name, so technically it’s the sport with the flying disc, but that genie is never going back in the bottle, so.) It’s not quite like any other sport I’ve come across in a number of important ways. Most importantly, it has no referee. From a game design point of view this is very interesting.
How it works:
- Players call their own fouls or other violations; if the call is disputed, the disc is flipped to provide a 50/50 decision. The game is then got on with. (There’s a bit more to it than that, but this is sufficient summary for now.)
- Play stops when the frisbee goes out of bounds or hits the floor. To restart play, a member of the team winning possession grabs the frisbee from wherever it lands, taps it on the floor, and play begins immediately.
- The only breaks in play occur after points are scored. Then, teams can take time-out for discussion, and freely switch around players with their bench. When both teams signal their readiness to resume, the team who won the last point throws the disc to the other team and play begins.
- The only aspect of play external to what is happening on court is the clock; this ticks down the game time and never needs to be paused or reset. Its alarm signals the end of the game.
What has impressed me the most about the game is how efficient it is at delivering fun and avoiding ill-feeling. Every rule in the game is geared towards getting people out there throwing the disc with minimum time spent on anything else.
It’s a very elegant ruleset, and I have come to admire it greatly. I expect some of my own game design efforts will be affected by it in due course…
I choose this week to make a post about Ultimate because the Tuesday just gone, the team I’m in ‘Happy Creature’ posted a draw with top-of-the-table ‘Not 2 Serious’. It was a hell of a game. I didn’t play my best but I didn’t suck either, and I realised that I actually know how the play the game now – I have the basics down, I can see how the play comes together, I know how to work situations and set up defence. Of course, I don’t do all this with any great ability yet – mostly this knowledge manifests in ‘these are all the ways you royally screwed up this week’, but it feels good to know what the hell’s going on out there and it feels very good when I do stuff right.
So I have a new sport. It will never unseat the hallowed basketball in my personal sports pantheon, but it’s a mighty good time nonetheless.
(Oh, and for those few readers who were there that time years ago when we knocked Jon(not Gav) unconscious trying to play Ultimate – yeah, I can conclusively say it isn’t meant to be played like that. Poor Jon(not Gav).) (Edited because, um, I’m a dick with a bad memory basically.)
Gav? I thought it was Jon!
Um. I wasn’t there at the time – I missed the incident by half an hour. But I remember it as Gav being knocked out.
You guys did well. 🙂
The thing I really love about Ultimate is that it is very simple. I was trying to explain Cricket to a Canadian friend a few years back, and it made me realise just how complex a beast it is. Frisbee is: give a person a disc, tell them to catch it in the scoring zone, that the game is non-contact and they’re good to play.
Uh, it was me, knocked out by Gavin. It was one Sunday, after we had played American Football (managing to avoid any injury). And I stumbled and collided with Gavin, he who is stocky, and took a knock to the head.
there I go, blaming the victim again.
sorry JB!
I was there, and poor old JB went down like a sack of spuds. Admirably, he got up after a while and got back into the game as I recall.
We surprisingly injured a lot of people playing american football without pads, often shoes, helmets, gloves, mouthguards or any kind of protective equipment at all…..
Hi, my name is Morgan and I’m a frisbee-holic…
😉
“technically it’s the sport with the flying disc”
Technically, it does not fly. It is thrown.
Welcome to the fold. 😀
Reading your post made me want to play a game right now…
Play stops when the frisbee goes out of bounds or hits the floor. To restart play, a member of the team winning possession grabs the frisbee from wherever it lands, taps it on the floor, and play begins immediately.
You only need to tap the disc in if it goes out of bounds. On the court you can just pick it up and throw it. Also, the nice way to tap the disc in is to get the person marking you to tap it… if they aren’t there, go ahead and tap it on the ground. 🙂
Technically, ‘flying disc’ is the generic term for plastic discs which, when thrown correctly, ‘fly’.
😛
I’m interested, if you’d care to expound further, how Ultimate’s rules (or culture) cope with a player who has the psychology of “can win, will win, must win at all costs,” or, perhaps, the ‘rugby dad’ situation where someone is being encouraged to believe that no matter what they do, it was right?
“I’m interested, if you’d care to expound further, how Ultimate’s rules (or culture) cope with a player who has the psychology of “can win, will win, must win at all costs,” or, perhaps, the ‘rugby dad’ situation where someone is being encouraged to believe that no matter what they do, it was right?”
That happened to us once when someone’s partner (husband?) was brought along. The result was a very mingy complaint-ridden game and I’m not particularly sorry that he didn’t come back. The fun games are highly competitive without anyone being nasty about it, and I (and I think most people) will happily cheer on the other team for making good plays. And that’s the way I like it. 😉
(I don’t think that Morgan mentioned the Spirit award. After every game you rate the opposing team for Spirit – basically how nice/friendly they were, and winning the overall award is a very big deal at the end of each league.)
Stephanie has the right of it. Attitude is a big part of the game. I don’t know how much it’s something embedded in the rules and how much it’s just cultural accretion, but it’s definitely the case that ultimate ppl have the positive attitude.