Friday 17 November 2006

Interactive sport

It occurred to me last night that video referees need not be physically present at the particular sporting event in which they are participating. Given the right technology, they could be lounging at home, reviewing decisions and reporting back as required.

Then I realised that, apart from actually having a say, that's just what the rest of the fans do. So why couldn't we farm out the video referee decisions to the fans? Then instead of yelling at the TV, we push a button and our voice is heard.

Obviously the biggest problem would be partiality - typically the team with the biggest fan base would get the favourable decisions. For the most part, I don't think we can actually trust the fans to be impartial, which would be the idea behind using more than one. Some kind of merit ranking would have to come into play. Perhaps votes would be weighted by seeing how often particular armchair umpires voted for and against their own teams.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The whole thing gets kind of complicated quickly.
PPS - Perhaps the home vote could just be kept as a statistic.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't feel you could ever use the home fans as a video referee system, humans are not moral enough, especially when it comes to sporting teams to be partial enough to make the call in an impartial manner, I even feel that when it came to the big game, I personally would struggle to make that right call if it meant that my team wasn't going to win the game if the call went the other way.

Erin Marie said...

Hmmm, interesting concept.

Dance it for me.

Where is Friday Zombie Blogging? Not that this isn't a great post ... but I need my zombie fix.

John said...

Yeah, true about the impartiality. That's why I don't think it's even been trialled anywhere. It's probably not even interesting statistically - you'd just get a record of viewers who supported which side.

There wasn't much zombie news this week, hence the lateness of the post. I was hoping it would pick up during the day, but no luck.