Thomas B.
American larpers should play more one-shot games! In 2007, I contributed a few segments called Little differences to Gamer:The Podcasting, a cool larp podcast. The idea was to add a european perspective to this US-centric podcast via voice messages. In the “Feedback Show #2” episode , I urged Americans to play fewer campaigns and more one-shot games because of all the problems inherent to campaigns.
Fast forward 2012 Finland, where Sarah Lynne Bowman gave a talk on Social Conflict and Bleed in Role-playing Communities during the Solmukohta conference. I could only agree with many of the conclusions from her research, and am glad to have finally found that mp3 on an old backup drive.
So now even if you weren’t at Solmukohta and cannot find the archive for that episode, you get to hear why you should play one-shots! (6Mb mp3 file)
That’s a good idea of manifesto. You should translate it into french sometimes.
Well, it’s less of a problem in France and Western Switzerland: the vast majority of larpers play one-shots. Locally the most recent attempt at a US-style Vampire larp campaign failed for all the reasons I outlined, and I feel even in France they’re not as popular as they were in the 90s.
Actually Lizzie organized a panel on her blog that covers pretty much what I said in writing, so I’ll just link there when people ask me for a written version 🙂
http://elizabethrstark.com/2012/02/26/one-shot-larps-v-campaigns/