08/24/2026
The Game Consent App beta 1 is now available, free.
It is a real-time, anonymous participant feedback tool for activity
facilitators — Game Masters at tabletop RPGs, teachers, therapists, workshop and support-group leaders, and anyone else responsible for reading a room.
https://techtalkhawke.com/news/game-consent-app-status-update-beta-1-now-available
If you facilitate groups, the following has already occurred in sessions you have run: someone was uncomfortable, and was too embarrassed to say anything about it. Most of the time, you will simply never find out what went wrong.
People quit the group without explanation, and over the years a facilitator or an organization can acquire a reputation without ever having the opportunity to address the cause.
The reason is almost never that the participant was unwilling to communicate.
It is that communicating meant doing so in front of the peer group, and very few people are willing to "look bad" in front of their peers by admitting discomfort publicly.
So: every participant gets a private green / yellow / red traffic light on their own device. They tap it, as often as they need to, as discreetly as they wish. The facilitator is notified of the group's overall state in real time,
and is never shown who changed the status. The Basic Edition CANNOT tell the facilitator who — that information is never transmitted in a form the facilitator's device is able to resolve.
There is no server, no account, and no Internet access at all. The devices communicate directly over Bluetooth, so nothing about who felt what ever leaves the room. Free and open source (AGPL-3.0), no advertising, no data harvesting, no telemetry. On Android the build ships without the INTERNET permission entirely, so the operating system itself will confirm it cannot reach the network.
I've been running RPGs since 1977 and facilitating them in educational, correctional, and therapeutic settings for decades, as a Washington State registered Recreational Therapist, through RPG Research and RPG Therapeutics LLC. Consent is hour-one, day-one material in our professional training programs. This app is the instrument that makes that day-one lesson actually executable at the table.
Current status, plainly: Android is beta 1, tested on real hardware with real groups. Linux (.deb/.rpm) and Windows (.msi, setup .exe, portable .zip) are early alpha and have only ever run on my own development machines — those are the builds I most need other people to try. macOS is still fighting me. Web comes later. iOS may never happen, thanks to Apple's fees for distributing even free software.
I would particularly value feedback from facilitators, educators, clinicians, and recreational therapists who can run it with an actual group.
At long last, the open source beta 1 of the Game Consent App, created by "The Grandfather of Therapeutic Gaming", Hawke Robinson, is now freely available to the public for early testing on Android, Windows, & Linux, and soon MacOS and Web. iOS might never happen due to Apple, we'll see.
