Bottle Episodes

I find that bottle episodes or films are very useful sources of inspiration for running live-action games.  Almost all LARP organisers have to think about the limits to the amount of space that they have, and so bottle stories can teach us a lot about getting entertainment value out of a confined environment.

Sure, a storyteller could ask his players to imagine new locations, but the more that players have to pretend that their characters are in different places without leaving a room, the more a LARP defeats the point of being live-action.

In television, a bottle episode can be described as "the sad little stepchild whose allowance is docked in order to buy big brother a new pair of sneaks". The above quotation is from Scott Brazil, an executive producer on The Shield, pointing out that the practical purpose of a bottle episode is change how costs are distributed during a series - to save some budget for use in finale episodes or cliffhangers.  Most LARPs, on the other hand, have nothing even close to the production capabilities of television, and so - especially if you are planning a small game for a group of friends - researching bottle concepts is a great way to find ideas for reasonable, achievable but also fun stories that would work for a LARP.

I can think of a few good examples:

John Carpenter seems to have a good grasp of bottle concepts in his films; The Thing and Assault on Precinct 13 are both solid examples.  On that note, Ice - the X-Files' season 1 tribute to The Thing - is also an excellent bottle episode - perhaps one of the best in the recent history of television.

One episode of Community called Remedial Chaos Theory is also an interesting example.  It takes place entirely in one room, but shows the stories of seven different timelines originating from a single point - consequences that depended on which member of the study group left the room to collect the pizzas.

Being stuck together on a spaceship is a common way to create a bottle concept; it is frequently blended with horror (e.g. Alien, Event Horizon), but not exclusively so.  The Firefly episodes Our Mrs Reynolds and Objects in Space takes place almost entirely on board the Serenity.

The best bottle episodes for LARPs are usually ones that make full use of an ensemble cast, since they often help storytellers to figure out how to treat multiple players as protagonists in their own right.

I write all these thoughts down, because a bottle film that Shawn recently showed to me has given me an idea for my next LARP - something that we could perhaps do after Paul's angel game.  I'll say more about the idea in a separate post, or in a message to the Egham LARP group, but I'll also be looking for a co-storyteller if I can get interested players.  I tend to get very excited for an idea once I have figured out how it can work in the limited space of the Englefield Green social hall, without asking players to imagine much that is not actually in the rooms.