Disclaimer: I've never taken part in such debate organizations. What if debates also had a word limit in addition to a time limit. Say, if each side has four m

Disclaimer: I've never taken part in such debate organizations. What if debates also had a word limit in addition to a time limit. Say, if each side has four minutes to talk, they need to keep it under 500 words, with 500 additional "flex" words throughout the night. Teams going over the word count regularly would be penalized. Ideally it would force debaters to remain concise. Of course, what would probably happen is the game would devolve to one of memorizing the thesaurus, so it's a hard problem to tackle... But that's okay! Modern video games have balance changes when a certain "meta" becomes too overwhelming. Professional sports leagues modify their rules every year to combat teams giving themselves an edge that isn't within the spirit of the game >coughNewEnglandPatriotscough<. It's a constant battle that any "game" manager needs to address over time.