Manifesto! is a sugar-coloured game designed to frustrate. We made it while the political fallout of the 2015 election was playing out all over the media. It grew out of some conversations with Furtherfield, about what a street game inspired by the Magna Carta might look like, for a strand they were curating at Frequency Festival in Lincoln.
Players have just three minutes to come up with a manifesto that they’re willing to stand behind if it’s put on the internet forever (assuming tumblr will last until the end of time). They have a limited word set, and fill in the blanks of five sonorous sentences. The game ends with a ritual reading of the sentences, manifestos chanted allowed by the people who made them.
Local Lincoln signwriter Mervin Dove made the boards for us, to give the game a strong street presence.
We’ve since run the game at Beta Public, with a voting mechanic – two groups compete head to head, and passers-by become the electorate, deciding who to vote for. In this version of the game, players don’t just have to come up with something they’re all happy to stand behind – they also need it to be something they think their audience will like…
