Recently while hitting up the Hulu app without a plan, I stumbled upon The Floor, a game show hosted by Rob Lowe that’s apparently already produced three seasons. Spoiler alert: I’m now obsessed with it. I’ve tried to convince no less than twenty people to watch it, and I’ve spent more time than I’m willing to share thinking about what my category would be. I’m all in, but also, I need to talk about how it badly needs a rule change.
Before I get into it, let me explain the rules quickly in case you’ve never seen the game show. In short, 100 people stand on a large, evenly divided board. Everyone has their own square and a category they’ve chosen that they’re particularly knowledgeable about. One lady might have types of flowers, and another lady might have 20th Century artists. A randomizer picks one contestant, and that contestant must pick one person in an adjoining square to face off against in a heads up trivia match about their category.
The loser of the duel goes home, and the winner gets the other person’s square and carries on with either their own category if it wasn’t played yet or the other person’s category if that one wasn’t played. Afterwards, the winner can decide whether to keep playing or go back to the floor and let the randomizer choose someone else. Whoever is the last one left wins $250,000.
The Floor is a fun concept and Rob Lowe works well as the host, but unfortunately, it tends to reward really passive play. The randomizer only chooses contestants who haven’t played yet. So, a majority of people who win their battle simply go back to the floor and wind up sitting on their two squares, while everyone else eliminates each other. It essentially incentivizes hiding.
I wish I could knock the strategy, but under the current rules, not playing is the best way to set yourself up to win the money at the end. The show has tried to introduce some bonuses to get contestants to be more aggressive. Whoever has the most squares (or pieces of the floor) at the end of each episode wins $20,000, and if you win three consecutive battles, you get a time boost of five additional seconds which you can use during any heads up battle of your choice in the future. Those carrots do convince some people to keep going, but there are still way too many that remain passive.
Here’s my solution. Right now, the randomizer only chooses contestants who have not played before. That means if you win one battle, you can sit around and avoid playing again (if someone doesn’t pick you) until every single other contestant has played at least once. That means you can sit there while 50 or 60 people are eliminated without doing anything. I don’t like that. I think the randomizer should be recalibrated to potentially choose anyone who hasn’t played or has played exactly once.
Let’s walk through a practical example. Let’s say you have one square and you either get picked by the randomizer or challenged by another contestant. You battle and win. Now, you have two choices, you can either go back to the floor, where you can take a break but are still at risk of being picked by the randomizer, or you can keep going and play once more, with the incentive being you not only pick up another piece of the floor but also then make yourself immune to the randomizer.
Now let’s say you win again, then you still have a compelling choice. You can go back to the floor without worrying about getting hit by the randomizer, or you can keep going and try to win the third duel to pick up the time bonus. That’s now two consecutive decisions the show has given the contestant that offer a high risk, high reward scenario.
It’s a delicate balance. I do think waiting to fight another day is a reasonable strategy. I don’t think the show should force contestants to just keep playing over and over again, but I would like to see more winners who are at least somewhat aggressive during the earlier episodes. That means the players need to be incentivized a bit more to stay and keep playing. The time bonus and the money at the end of each episode help a little bit, but I think requiring them to play a second time to be immune from the randomizer would really help and potentially convince a higher percentage of people to play a third time in order to try and get the time bonus.
The Floor has already been renewed over at FOX for another season and will return to the TV schedule on Wednesday September 24th. In preparation, you can get caught up with old episodes that are available to stream with a Hulu subscription. It’s a really fun game show that could eventually become an all-time great. It just needs to keep evolving a little bit to become the best possible version.
