Hitball is based on a martial arts environment:

The ring, unlike a boxing ring, is round. The weapon is a light plastic ball tethered to a bungee. Players attempt to hit each other with the ball in accordance with simple rules.

The ethics of the game have more in common with martial arts. Personal transcendence rather than competitiveness, personal honour over gamesmanship.

Points are scored when one player is hit by the ball, and confesses the HIT.

Playing HitBall provides the benefits of regular competition and sparring without the injuries.

The mental and physical exercise of HitBall is almost universally applicable to any fighting style and weaponry, including hand guns and half-bricks.

Two players attack and defend with all their energy, speed, fighting spirit, intelligence and intuition.

Finding the ‘zone‘, accessing totality is a necessity, not an objective.
The experience of physical combat – without the injuries and the attendant recovery time

The action occurs within a 3m circle which is the area involved in almost all human combat - including handgun use.Hitball is a freestyle competition and training environment for human combat. The structure the game and rules are designed to allow fighters to experience and improve their speed, coordination, fighting-specific fitness, balance, strength, agility, strategy and control.

The rules are as simple and as few as we have been able to make them. This bypasses a common difficulty of many forms of martial arts competition and training which can result for instance in a fighter not using an effective “illegal” technique, or focusing a blow short in a realworld situation on account of the habits of restraint learned in most forms of martial arts competition.

Fitness is specific to activity, and HitBall develops fitness appropriate to intense bursts of extreme physical activity, variable in duration.
As the maximum possible efforts of the fighter can be used, there is continual improvement of fitness levels, strength, speed, strategic thinking and control for even the most experienced fighters.

Personal discipline in the heat of battle is a key objective of much traditional training, and HitBall encourages this in the discipline of respect for the line rule, and more subtly in the convention that only a player reports his hits.
Psychologically, the release (in fact, constructive use) of anger energy is highly beneficial, and the rule covering interruptions keeps the players in the game and out of arguments.

Totality: Just as surfers find a spiritual bliss in their sport, tennis / zennis players find the “zone” and kendokas and karatekas find their zanshin, HitBall players report a zen experience of dissolving into the fighting, no thought, just the happening moment.
The intensity of the game, and the need for mind to be as totally involved as body and chi, makes it a very useful tool for meditators to cleanse the body, mind and spirit of frustration and aggression.

HitBall encourages and supports one to become more open, more aware, and more present in the moment, no matter how intense the present circumstances may be.
Mastery of self is the true challenge of the ring.

Be total in your action, conscious in your strategy, integrous in calling your hits.
Drop attachment to the scoring of points, looking good, or other ego concerns.

The rules - who makes them, and why these crazy rules?

The  rules of Hitball are determined by duellists who have held the title and who have deigned to get involved in the discussion.

The core principles which guide them are:

1) Hitball is a simulation of fighting.

2) Rules should be as few and as simple as possible.

From this follow rules which would be quite bizarre in most sports.

The player calling his own hits, for instance, not a judge - and no objective criterion, such as electronic sensors as in fencing - the player uses his own SUBJECTIVE judgement of whether or not he is hit!

In terms of the "sportsmanship" present in most games, this is ridiculous. A player can obviously cheat with impunity!

Experienced duellists call their hits reflexively. Interestingly, many will still strike at the opponent while calling the hit, or in the moment following. Stopping fighting takes a moment longer because it requires thought. Calling the hit happens before there is thought about it. The hit is called before there is time to run the mental processes of dishonesty.

Another rule that relates to this is that of replaying the point from service in the case of disagreements. No decision can be made as to whether someone gets a point or not - if there is disagreement - the point is replayed.

As a player calls his own hits, there is little to argue about. He might have second thoughts, remembering that the opponent seemed too close to the line, or tangled on the string (bungee), and if he's sufficiently convinced of it, he can have the point replayed.

The bottom line is that no player has to accept a point against him if he believes it not clean. He has to extend his opponent the same courtesy, however, and he cannot successfully insist that he scored a point if opponent or line judge disagree. No satisfaction is available for argument. There is no point that can be made, no cleverness with loopholes or obscure rule exceptions, because the result is always a foregone conclusion - play the point again!

There is also little point of taking the attitude that maximum advantage is to be had by pressing to the very edge of what the rules allow. You only get a point when you hit your opponent such that he acknowledges it.

Since the rules were first formally laid down, few changes have been required.

Changes have tended to involve the reduction or removal of a rule, rather than adding to the rules.

An historic example is the change in the rule of SERVICE. Previous to the change, service had to be "indirect". This rule was removed on the basis that a duel, bar-fight or MQR boxing match starts when it starts.

The original rule existed because it was felt that being able to murder your opponent with a direct hit at the start of play was too much of a conferred advantage.

In the course of a game, there can be many moments when a player has the ball, well controlled, and can hit it at his opponent HARD! So, why not right from the start!

Feedback on this rule was mostly favourable. Starting a game with total intent seems easier when the intentions are unambiguously clear.