Playing at the Convention of Thorns 2
In October this year I played the second run of the Convention of Thorns (CoT), a blockbuster larp at a castle in Poland by Dziobak Larp Studios. You can get more details on the larp itself (including the planned 2018 run) here: www.cotlarp.com.
You can watch the trailer for CoT below.
TLDR version
It was great. The castle was amazing. The set dressing, scenography and costumes were all stunning. The mechanics were elegant and worked very well. The structure and pacing was solid. The day play workshops were fun and added a nice extra layer of depth to the game.
My main (hopefully constructive) criticism would be that the big cannon characters had a bit more access to fun and agency than the unique characters, particularly for the political side of the game. A way for player characters to change the leadership structure of their clan during play might help address that.
My background and context
For context, I’m an experienced player and writer/organiser of parlour style (i.e. not-boffer) live action roleplaying (larp) games in Canberra, Australia.
Canberra currently has a pretty good scene for one-shot games organised informally by a variety of people in the local larp community. A lot of that community are informed by the games and playstyle of Phenomenon (Pheno for short), the annual Canberra roleplaying game convention. Pheno has a pretty good reputation across the eastern part of Australia for having high quality original tabletop roleplaying games and larps (often called freeforms at Pheno). There are many people who regularly travel across the country for Pheno each year.
Pheno has a bit of a signature style, focused mostly on emotion, character and story with no or minimal mechanics. That said, in recent years games using a pre-existing system have been welcomed, as well as original games with custom mechanics. Generally, the best (or at least most interesting) tools, techniques and mechanics showcased at Pheno are quickly adopted and adapted by the Canberra larp community and inform games at the following Pheno.
Most people in Canberra would not describe the local style as “Nordic”, or even claim to be particularly familiar with Nordic-style larps (and Convention of Thorns is fairly firmly from the Nordic tradition). However, I think there are some similarities between the Nordic and Pheno/Canberra traditions. I think most Canberra larpers would feel familiar enough in a Nordic-style game that some of the tools and techniques are probably transferable to our local games. So I am doing this write up in part to identify particular elements that I think we could adopt or experiment with in our local games.
I’m also writing to provide encouragement and advice to players from Australia (and the Canberra style tradition in particular) who might be considering playing in future runs of Convention of Thorns.
Of course I’m also hoping to offer constructive feedback to the organisers, on both the things they did very well and possibilities for improvement.
The basics
Convention of Thorns was held in the stunning Ksiaz castle in Poland, beautifully decorated by the Dziobak scenography team. We slept and ate in the hotel on the castle grounds and played in the many rooms and ballrooms and hallways of the castle.
The game is the Vampire: The Masquerade Dark Ages, set at the Convention of Thorns (in the Abbey of Thorns in England) in 1493. The idea is that all the important vampires from across Europe have come together to end the Anarch revolt by agreeing to a set of Traditions or laws that the new Camarilla will follow. Players could play one of the cannon characters from the White Wolf fiction, or a completely unique character. And if the end result of the convention turned out differently than in the cannon fiction, well that was perfectly okay.
The larp was over three days; Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, from about 7pm to 3am, since vampires operate at night and sleep during the day. There was also optional “day play” available during the day for those who didn’t want to just sleep all day.
The castle and set dressing
The castle was beautiful. The pictures don’t do it justice. And the Dziobak team did a fantastic job adding loads of cool details and set dressing. I really can’t stress enough how much the amazing venue added to my game experience.
The extra details added to the atmosphere, made it feel like a more real and richly detailed world, but were also just fun to explore. Several times I wandered off and spent time just exploring the castle, opening doors and peering in rooms to see what was there. Exploring is one of my favourite things to do in computer games, so I really enjoyed being able to do it in real life.
Since we don’t have these kinds of buildings at all in Australia exploring the castle even without the game would have been pretty cool. But being immersed in the castle made the whole game a lovely experience. Even little “boring” moments still felt pretty cool.
Hitching up my heavy skirts and running desperately through the many stone corridors with high vaulted ceilings trying to find someone to give them a message about a betrayal before it was too late felt really cool. I got to do a renaissance style group dance in a beautiful baroque hall to music being played live on the piano. I had an angsty emotional scene in a moonlit courtyard. I had a gossipy Toreador meeting on a balcony that overlooked the Ventrue room so we could spy the Ventrue clan meeting through the window and speculate about what was happening. It was awesome.
Costumes
The standard of costuming was extremely high. While not everything was perfectly historically accurate — far from it — everyone looked cool and in keeping with the setting.
Dziobak offers costume hire to those who don’t have something appropriate or don’t want to buy a costume. But the rental is not cheap, 150 Euro, or between 230–300 AUD depending on the exchange rate at the time. That’s generally going to be cheaper than buying a decent quality Tudor outfit, and if you end up getting a costume custom made to your measurements rather than just pulled from their existing costume library, it’s a great deal. But if you’ve already got something that might work, or if you are looking for an excuse to buy a new costume piece, then you might be better off organising your own.
Player Characters
Characters were written for the first run of CoT in 2016, with a few edits and amendments for the 2017 run. Available characters included a mix of cannon characters, including the canon founders of the Camarilla, historical figures imagined as vampires and completely original characters. So you could play Tyler and Haardestadt and all the other big name White Wolf NPCs from the books if you wanted to. Or you could play a Borgia or Ragnar Lothbrok, or anyone else historically appropriate.
When I had originally booked to play CoT in 2016 I’d asked for an original character and Agnes York was written for me. She was a Toreador Ancilla and harpy of Antwerp. I ended up not being able to play in 2016, so Agnes ended up going to someone else that year, but I got to play her in 2017 instead.
I’d wanted to play a character that would be flexible enough to allow me to have access to whatever looked fun at the game. Someone sociable enough to engage in gossip and romance, but savvy enough to participate in the politics. Someone interested enough in the supernatural to get into the occult weirdness or spirituality if the opportunity presented itself, but real enough to play some
I think this was a reasonable choice for my first larp of this style, but if I were to play again I’d focus more on one type of experience and pursue that a bit more diligently. I often felt that I was involved superficially in quite a few things, but not particularly deeply in anything. I had a couple of great scenes and moments, but nothing really profound. I think that’s because I spread myself a bit too thin.
If I played again, I’d probably try to play one of the important canon characters, perhaps one of the founders or one of the leading Anarchs. If you want to play politics, they have the best access to that side of the game. But I’ll get into that a bit more later.
Character relationships
Characters were pre-written with a fair bit of back story and a few paragraphs of relationships with other characters from the same domain as you. Other than that we were invited to make up other relationships ahead of the game (or during the day play on the weekend). I made a few relationships ahead of game on the facebook group, and one on the bus from Berlin to the larp. Some of these were great and really added a lot to my game, others ended up not seeing much action. But the same could be said of my pre-written character relationships, and indeed any character relationships in any larp.
Game structure
The game was structured into three phases. By the end of the first phase the characters were to decide which clans would chair each of the councils on each of the traditions, as well as who from each clan would sit on each council. The second phase for each council to vote on the final wording of each tradition. The final phase concluded with each of the clans deciding whether or not they would join the Camarilla and then each individual vampire deciding whether they would join or not.
Players were strongly encouraged to use these as opportunities for betrayal and shenanigans, but asked to respect the basic structure so we wouldn’t get bogged down in boring and unfun arguments or situations with no resolution.
Generally I’d say the structure was pretty solid. It gave us a good frame for political machinations and knowing it in advance meant you could cut deals for favours in later stages. Even if you weren’t playing politics, you still got a good sense of things moving along and the tension ramping up as the game progressed, so you could plan your own plots and character arcs accordingly.
Plots and Non-Player Characters (NPCs)
Now is probably a good time for a quick note about plots. Beyond organising this structure, and keeping it running to schedule through the use of ghoul NPCs, the organisers didn’t have any of their own plot. If you had a scene you wanted to happen you could just do it. If you needed some NPCs or a prop you go to the organisers’ room and ask for one and they’d arrange it for you. They had a team of people doing costumes and props and playing NPCs at short notice.
This was a great (relatively) low effort way to run the larp, at least compared to the way a lot of Australian larps are run. But it also meant that it was clear from the outset that players had a fair bit of responsibility for their own fun. If you wanted a romance plot, or a rivalry, you were invited to find another player and organise it out of character. If you wanted to summon the ghost of your dead sire you could get some friends together and do a cool ritual and get an NPC from the organisers’ room to show up and play your sire’s ghost. But if you didn’t organise anything, you’d just be playing with what other players were doing, or trying to play the politics.
That said, there were a few cool set piece bits.
The larp opened with a “banquet” put on by the host. A dozen or more appropriately costumed NPCs streamed into the hall, prisoners from the local jail. We’d been told beforehand that all the NPC players for this scene had consented to feeding from the wrist (more on that later). So we had a mass feeding scene with dozens of frightened mortals and seductively clad vampires running around the hall. It was visceral and sexy and a great way to get into the headspace of being a vampire who subsists by doing exactly this every night.
At the beginning and end of each phase the NPC ghouled monks would announce the voting that was to happen and how it was to happen, and announce the results at the end. It helped keep things running smoothly without breaking the immersion too much.
At the beginning of each session the organisers asked us to close our eyes while one of them read out a mood-setting speech focused on the themes of the session ahead. When we opened our eyes we were in character, and one of the important cannon NPCs delivered an in-character speech about what we were trying to achieve. It was a nice way to get into character each night.
Mechanics
The mechanics for CoT were simple and elegant and designed to not interrupt play or break immersion more than necessary. Critically, they are all based on a principle of player consent.
Really, really
All characters had a disciplines, usually two or three, with a broad descriptor of what that power did and a power rating of weak, medium and strong. For example, my character had Strong Auspex and Weak Presence. Auspex allowed me to know the mood of my victim, and at the strong level to find out there deeply held desires. Presence allowed me to make my victim like me and favour me slightly.
The powers were activated in play by saying “really, really” before saying something in-character that would indicate what effect you were after. For example, I might use my Presence by saying, “I’d really really like it if you’d give that to me.”
We could indicate power levels by adding another really. So I could use my Strong Auspex power to say “What do you really really really really want from this situation?”
In the first phase we could only use weak forms of our powers, in the second phase we could use also use medium powers, and strong powers weren’t allowed until the final phase.
Higher level powers could effectively trump lower level powers.
But the actual effect of the power was always up to the victim to interpret and roleplay the result in a way that seemed fun for them. If it wasn’t going to be fun you were well within your rights to shrug a power off, or play out struggling against it for a moment before your will triumphed. Indicating a higher level power with an extra really might influence how the victim chose to interpret the power. However I found that often people would accept a high degree of influence from even weak powers, so long as the power use was fun and led to interesting play.
It also meant that a lot of the powers weren’t particularly distinct in how they could be used. Dominate and Presence powers often seemed interchangeable. But I’m not sure this was really a problem.
Two characters being equally “really really” strong was resolved with a bit of a chest bumping shoving impasse in the doorway, which was actually quite effective and realistic.
Combat, intimacy and feeding
Combat was likewise consent based. Nominally we all had a “combat prowess” number between 1 and 5 to indicate our strength in a fight. But even with a combat number of only 1, I roughed up a more skilled and powerful character because in the moment it was fun and added to both our games.
Combat, intimacy and feeding were all done on a strict yes-means-yes enthusiastic consent rule. If you wanted to engage in combat, intimacy or feeding with the person you were roleplaying with (whether NPC or PC), you would say “Off game” (to denote an out of character comment) followed by the thing you wanted to propose: fighting, intimacy or feeding. The respondent could then say “no thank you,” and you would have to continue to roleplay without that element. More often they would respond with “yes please” to indicate consent. You would then ask them “how would you like to do it?” The respondent or victim always got to suggest the terms. You could then agree or disagree and propose something else.
For example, I confronted an elder who had manipulated me into betraying my brother. I wanted to rough him up a bit and get into a fight.
In the middle of yelling at him I said, “Off game; fighting?”
He replied with, “Yes, please.”
I said, “How do you want to do it?”
He said, “You could push me against the wall?”
I said, “Okay.”
Then I pushed him against the wall and continued to threaten him until I felt I was done.
Many people in Australia I’ve spoken to about this mechanic are sceptical that it doesn’t interrupt game and break immersion too much. But I found the negotiation was very quick and really didn’t interrupt the high emotion of the scene very much at all.
The big difference is that it allowed a level of physical contact that I wouldn’t normally have at all in most of the games I’ve played in Australia. I think that extra immersion and intimacy in the game more than made up for having to negotiate outcomes.
Some players also negotiated bigger scenes in the non-play hours during the day before and after the game sessions. This let them stage impressively choreographed battles and even a torture scene.
The same rules were used for sex and intimacy and for feeding.
However feeding had the additional rule that feeding should always be done by putting your own hand over the part of the victim’s body you’ve agreed to feed from and then biting your own hand or wrist, not your victim’s skin. It sounds a bit dorky, but looked surprisingly realistic.
Safety
The game mechanics were supported by safety mechanics. At any time anyone could call “cut” to stop the scene they were in. If you heard cut you were to immediately stop play and take two steps backwards to give the caller space. You were not to ask if they were okay or why they called cut, just what they would like to happen next. They could then ask for play to continue with some variations (e.g. “Can you not stand so close to me while you’re yelling into my face”), or to end the scene entirely, or to just have a break. Whatever they want. Afterwards, the other player/s would thank the person who called cut for defining their boundaries, thus enabling everyone to play in a safe and secure environment.
I didn’t see a cut used in play, but I can see how it’s important when there is physical contact and high emotions in the game.
There was also the eyes-down or look-away mechanic. If you wanted to leave a scene without interrupting play, or wanted to enter a scene without your arrival being commented on, you could shield your eyes with your hand, looking towards the floor. This was a signal for everyone else to just ignore your presence or absence until you were looking up again and to not comment on your late arrival or early exit.
I saw this used a few times, mostly for people to arrive late to scenes without having to deal with IC consequences for being late out of character. But I also saw it used once or twice for people to leave scenes that were just a bit boring, or to go for a toilet break. As far as I saw most people weren’t particularly strict about people wandering in and out of scenes anyway, but I can see it being useful in some circumstances.
At the beginning of the weekend we had mandatory workshops to practice the mechanics, especially the safety mechanics. I think actually practicing using the mechanics made them much clearer, easier to remember and made me feel more comfortable with the idea of using them.
The workshops were also a way to meet the other players in our clan and get to know them a little bit.
They were also a time for the organisers to explain logistics for the game, like how we’d tell time without clocks (they had NPC monks walking the halls on the hour calling it town-crier style).
Day Play
During the day there was optional day play. Some people used this time to negotiate scenes or nut out relationship or alliance details. In one day session I attended a workshop to teach us the steps of the renaissance group/set dance we could use during play.
But mostly the day play involved breaking into groups of 6–10 to run short “freeform” scenes to explore our characters. One person would chair the session and prompt everyone to have a turn (or two or three) playing out a short scene. The scene could be from their history, a dream, an internal monologue or a scene from your future. Other people in the session would drop in to play other NPCs, other characters or even the voices of your inner “angels” and “demons.”
These were quite fun to play with and a great way to explore the characters in more depth. But it was important to remember that they weren’t the game. The rule was that you didn’t play out actual action during these scenes (e.g. the moment when my character killed for the first time). Instead the emphasis was on playing out the feelings and thoughts leading up to or following the event. This left the actual game to focus on actions and events, informed by the feelings and emotions you’d explored.
To help players who couldn’t think of a scene they wanted to play, the organisers had decks of cards with suggestions. I’d very much like to get a set to be able to do these sorts of events myself.
Constructive criticism
As you can probably tell, I had a great time and sampled a little bit of pretty much everything that was on offer. However, any event of this size will have things that don’t quite go according to plan or that don’t work as well as they could. In the following paragraphs I outline a few of those problems along with some suggestions to improve future runs of the game. I’ve put them here rather than in a private email because I think having a discussion about these things can help source better ideas (and if you’ve got a better idea please comment below), as well as inform other game development.
Costume hire
My husband chose to hire his costume and had a bit of a mixed experience. He identified some pictures of last year’s costumes that were similar to what he wanted, gave a desired colour scheme and sent in his measurements. When we arrived what he got was one of the exact costumes from 2016. It had a tunic and a coat with a big fur collar on it and was in a cool looking fabric. Generally it looked pretty good quality.
However, once he tried it on it became clear that whoever had allocated him this costume had not even glanced at his measurements. It was many sizes too big. One of the team quickly took it in a few inches on Friday during the day, which was a great thing to be able to do, but it was still much too big. There wasn’t much more that could be done about it at that point, so we didn’t make a big deal about it. After talking with others it was clear that a lot of the hire costumes suffered from this problem at CoT 2. I’m not sure if this was a one-off issue that just happened with this run of CoT, or if this is a common problem with the costume rental, but I would personally be wary of hiring a costume until there is some indication that this issue has been addressed.
I think if you’re going to offer services like costume hire, setting expectations is important. By asking for exact measurements and colour and style preferences, Dziobak created an expectation that costumes would be pretty heavily customised. That’s not what they actually offered. What they are offering might be fine, but it would be better not to create a false expectation by asking for details you don’t need and aren’t going to use.
Access to the political game
I believe CoT is the only overtly political larp that Dziobak have done. Their other games, like College of Wizardry and Fairweather Manor, are more about individual stories within a loose framework of events. The Convention of Thorns however is explicitly about a large group making collective decisions that not all the characters, and not all the players, will necessarily agree with. In College of Wizardry you can largely choose whether or not you do well in classes, and you can go off into the woods to defeat your own personally organised villain. But in Convention of Thorns you can’t cut a deal with the Lasombra to get them to join the Camarilla unless the vast majority of Lasombra players know about it and agree. While the structure of the game provided lots of things to cut deals for, it was a bit lacking in ways for players to be meaningfully involved in those deals.
The main downside of the game structure was how heavily the organisers relied on the canon founder characters to drive the votes and announce the results. When a clan was asked to announce its decision, the founder was the character that was asked by default. When the traditions were finalised they were provided to the founder characters first who then distributed it to the rest of the game. This meant that the founder characters quickly became bottlenecks in the game. If someone wanted to make a deal with a clan, the logical step was to go to the clan’s founder first. So if you didn’t already have a close relationship with your founder it was difficult to get invited to those meetings and be involved in the political game. The founder players compounded this by having meetings amongst themselves to make deals directly, effectively cutting the vast majority of players out of the political game entirely.
The structure also failed to have an established method for appointing justicars, or indeed much mention of appointing justicars at all. In fact, it seemed to take a lot of people by surprise. When justicars were announced the organisers asked the founders to name the justicar for their clan. Some founders simply named themselves or a close ally without discussion with the rest of their clan. This removed the only avenue those clans had of appointing another leadership character who might be more inclusive. And because of the consent based rules, if someone didn’t want to give up the power the organisers had handed them, no other player could force them to do so.
To be clear, I don’t think any of the founder players were bad people trying to stomp on everyone else’s fun. I think they were playing characters as they were presented to them and as the game encouraged them to play those characters.
In talking about these issues with some of the organisers afterwards they suggested that they didn’t get enough time to properly brief the founder players for this run. But I think this issue could be more easily resolved by a few simple changes to the structure of the game.
1. Ask the clans at their first clan meeting to appoint a spokesperson who the monks will ask for the decisions of the clans. And encourage the founder players to give this role to another player.
2. Alternatively, remove the necessity to ask one person to speak for the whole clan by having the monks go to the clan rooms to get the decision from the whole clan and then have the monks announce the decisions in the ballroom themselves.
3. Make the choice of justicar a greater focus for the phase 2 decision, either giving it its own time for a decision, or making it clearer that the clans should choose a justicar when they agree to join the camarilla.
4. Have a default way of deciding justicar (e.g. majority vote in the clan meeting). Clans should be allowed to make the decision in another way if most people agree, but a default would prevent one character just taking it on themselves to make the decision without the rest of the clan.
5. Make sure the timing and default process for deciding justicar is mentioned in the design document so people know it’s a thing that will happen and can make deals about it.
6. Allow the clans to use the justicar decision process to remove or change their justicar and/or spokesperson.
The other improvement I’d encourage the organisers to consider is making the council sashes brighter (or patterned) and more distinctive. Each council was denoted by a different coloured ribbon sash. But the colours were quite muted and very difficult to make out in the dramatically lit (i.e. dimly lit) play areas. So it was pretty much impossible to find anyone else on your council to try to machinate with them.
Booking game space
The castle is huge. We were playing across four floors and many rooms and play areas. Simply finding the people you wanted to talk to in a timely way was often an issue. While sometimes this was fun, other times it was frustrating.
The suggested way to deal with this was for players to agree on a time and location to meet and post it on the relevant facebook group. This had two problems. First, most players did not carry their phones with them during game and certainly weren’t checking them regularly during play. So even if you’d organised it enough in advance that most people had seen it, you couldn’t update the details once game had started.
Secondly, and the reason you might want to update details, other groups of players can’t see your facebook group post and might book the same area. This happened to me twice and in both cases the organised events simply didn’t happen because another group of players had decided to take over that space and I had no way to reschedule it to a different time or place.
In College of Wizardry this issue is addressed by having a whiteboard in the organisers’ room where players can display the time and location of events. This way everyone can easily find out what’s going on where and when and can show up to whatever they think is interesting, or avoid whatever they wish to avoid. And you can update it if something happens and it needs to be changed.
Apparently there was a whiteboard in the organisers’ room that we could have used for this purpose. But since no-one was told about it (in fact when asked organisers referred us to facebook), it wasn’t used. For future games I’d suggest Dziobak stick with the whiteboard technique and make sure they tell players about it in the briefings.
Nordic style
Overall it was a fantastic experience. I learned a lot and came home brimming with ideas for my own games in Australia.
I think the Canberra/Pheno style isn’t that different from the Nordic tradition in a lot of ways, but there are a few differences that got me thinking about the way we run games.
Immersion
Nordic games have a strong emphasis on immersion. They operate largely on the principle of “what you see is what you get.” So setting, props and costumes are very important. It also means that game organisers, GMs, storytellers, etc. need a seamless way to enter the game and direct it without breaking the immersion or removing player agency.
In our larps it is perfectly fine for the game organisers to just stand around in normal clothes, maybe with a badge or a hat to denote them as organisers or GMs rather than players. Players are expected to pretend they aren’t there. Any time you interact with a GM you break character. GMs can pause a scene to provide additional information, ask and answer questions, or to describe something would not otherwise be apparent.
Convention of Thorns had none of this. Game organisers were fully costumed NPCs with an in game reason to be there, to be providing the directions and to answer questions. In this case they were the ghoul servants of the vampire lord of the Abbey.
Terminology
Terminology was also different. Convention of Thorns used “in-game” and “off-game” rather than “in character” and “out of character”. A small nuance, but I think I like it. It was easier to say than “out of character” and was never reduced to a potentially confusing acronym the way “out of character” is reduced to OOC.
During day play the term “freeform” seemed to be used to denote roleplay without costumes, props or sets, heavy on the imagination. Which I suppose is often what we do in many Pheno “freeforms.” But I thought the terminology difference was interesting.
Workshops
I wasn’t completely sure about the usefulness of pre-game workshops when I started, but I am now convinced. They helped set expectations. They let us practice using the safety mechanics and other rules, rather than simply explaining them. And they helped get us in the right frame of mind to play and get the most out of the game we could.
That said, it’s probably important to keep the amount of time you spend on workshops in proportion to the length of your play session. We did about 3–5 hours of workshops for about 3 days of play. I’m not sure if something like a workshop would be feasible for a 3 hour Pheno slot. But it is definitely something to consider, especially for slightly longer games.
Consent
The biggest difference is the explicit consent based rules. While many of the rules-light Pheno and Canberra games implicitly rely on negotiation for a lot of outcomes, generally players expect to have some kind of mechanic to determine who gets what they want for at least the more critical aspects of the game.
Giving victims full control over how a power works might seem un-intuitive to us, but I found it encouraged people to use the game mechanics in a way that would be fun for others. It also encouraged people to look for opportunities to have powers used on them in a way they would find fun.
Some people call this style “playing to lose,” but I didn’t hear that term used myself at Convention of Thorns. I have a few problems with calling it “play to lose” in an Australian context, because I don’t think it effectively communicates what this style is about. Instead we called it “yes means yes” or looking for enthusiastic consent. It means making sure the people you are playing with are having a good time. That might mean playing their oppressor if that’s what they want, or it might mean selling their hit if that’s the type of fun they’re after. For this to work, everyone needs to be open and honest about their boundaries and what sort of fun they’re looking for.
There has been a bit of argument locally about whether it can work for character-vs-character conflict in political larps like this one. Some people feel that if your larp has one prize that multiple people must play to win, it won’t work. To a certain extent I think that’s true. But I think it’s possible to define in a game what is up for negotiation and what is a structure of the game. For example, in Convention of Thorns, while combat and powers were consent-based, the basic voting mechanics weren’t up for negotiation. By playing the game, you implicitly agree to accept the outcome of the vote. I’m not sure how far you can go with that in game design, but it’s something I’m keen to think about and explore further.
In other words: watch this space…
Pictures kindly supplied by photographer Przemysław Jendroska.
