Thank you! We wanted to experiment with different mechanics that would help people genuinely think about good group facilitation.
The question of what citizens' assemblies should be able to vote on is fundamental dilemma, both in terms of game design and in real-life citizens' assemblies.
In actual citizens' assemblies, there have to be constraints on topic to allow the facilitators to plan and the participants to focus on the subject at hand. We don't want them to be so open that participants can talk about anything, because that would make it impossible to arrive at meaningful agreements in a reasonable length of time.
At the same time, we don't want the parameters to be so narrow that new solutions are overlooked or that the outcome is predetermined.
In the context of this game, it's reasonable to want more freedom for the participants to direct the agenda -- one day is definitely not long enough to fully deliberate on topics like the climate emergency!
Thank you for your all your kind words and support, eileen! 💚
It would be easy for a game about making policy to feel dry. We really wanted to add features that were fun and playful while reinforcing core themes of community and participatory democracy.
We knew that the idea of a Citizens' Assembly (and policy-making in general) could come across as intimidating to some people. So we wanted to make the characters as cute and inviting as we could.
Thanks so much! Adding music to the dance generator is a great idea. We didn't include it in the prototype because we didn't have time to make it sync to the BPM chosen by the player, but we will include it in a future version.
