“Without guidance, people fall, but with many counselors there is deliverance.”
— Proverbs 11:14 HCSB
Counsel is the hall where you listen. Audience is the hall where you are heard.
Once a quarter, makers bring a pitch deck into a live room. We work the pages together — the story, the ask, the thing a stranger still cannot see — and then someone stands up and performs it. Not for a score. For a welcoming audience, which is the rarest tool in this craft.
This is a rehearsal, not the raise. The point is to leave with a deck that has been answered.
How the hour goes
Workshop, then the hearing
The first movement is a workshop. Decks on the table. Feedback from people who have shipped, funded, or failed in public and will say so.
The second movement is the hearing. You perform the pitch in front of the room. Questions follow. The room is on your side, which is not the same as a room that will not tell you the truth.
Quarterly, on Zoom. The list hears the date before the door opens. Seats are few on purpose — a pitch does not survive a crowd.
Where a finished ask can go
Wedgwood keeps the patron hour
We already do this work under another banner. Wedgwood Circle gathers patrons across the arts, and the interactive hour there is where a deck can be heard by people in a position to help.
That room keeps its own name. Hall of Audience is the makers’ rehearsal that feeds it. A deck that has been stood up here may be invited there. One is not the other, and you do not have to be a patron to be heard in this hall.
Who should bring a deck
Makers in and near the game industry who have a project far enough along to explain, and not so finished that the telling is frozen. A studio ask. A solo game. A first page you are still ashamed of. Bring the true one.
You do not need a title. You need a name we can find, and something you are willing to say out loud.
If you are ready to stand up at the next hearing, leave word. If you only want to sit in the audience and learn the shape of an ask, sign the roll. Both are useful. The list is the key.