FUN

Defend the indefensible 

Sanne Visser

Lively debate activity where participants creatively defend a universally unpopular or absurd viewpoint. Each participant is called upon to vigorously defend a topical theme for roughly thirty seconds.

The game generally has three rounds. Participants are usually conference sponsors as well as conference speakers, with room for additional participants volunteering from among the conference delegates.

Game mechanics

Two participants at a time each receive a random indefensible statement which no matter what that says they have to defend with all their passion. After each short pitch, the gamemaster measures the loudness of the applause from the audience. The applause is measure with an applausemeter app. Loudest applause means one of the two participants progress to the next round.

This continues until the first group have all had a turn. Then round 2 starts and so on. As such the group of participants halves each round until the final  round which has a single champion.

SPeaker Bio

Sanne Visser is a test manager and quality lead at Bartosz in the Netherlands. She has over a decade’s worth of experience in software testing. Throughout her career she has worked on a wide variety of projects from insurance systems to railway software solutions. Her main technical focus is E2E testing in complex software systems. She was chairperson of the blockchain testing community from 2018 to 2021. Sanne is a part-time stoic and loves talking to her team about learning resilience using stoicism. Her motto is “Every effort is beautiful, you are what you do everyday”