Just a chatty thread, for inspiration and fun: Tell me about a game you played that taught you a new technique, something you're still using. And, of course, describe the technique :)
I read Clyde Rhoer's "Silence keeps me a victim", an allegorical game about child abuse. The game takes place in a dreamlike world, full of strange imagery. To me, the game seemed very wedded to a Forge-ish design paradigm (lots of moving dice and numbers about), but it had some amazing things going on, one of which I stole: In certain scenes, the GM controls the (single!) character's actions, while the player describes how the environment reacts.
This is a simple and effective technique for dream scenes - you know that feeling where you do something in a dream, and you're not sure why? It works best, I think, when the player just describes what they "see" - their immediate visual response - rather than thinking about what might fit the "plot". I've stolen it for use in The Society of Dreamers, which at this point only exists in Norwegian ("Drømmernes Selskab").
Oh! What a great technique. I may steal that for Season of Dreams.
At Knutepunkt, as a warm-up for a jeep-larp, Frederik Berg Østergaard lead the audience in a group game called Fluga. The real game was going to be a "this is your life" retrospective on a larp luminary, but before this the audience played out a documentary on the life cycle of the common housefly. Fluga = fly. So we started buzzing and moving about, becoming a great mass of the fly hoarde. There were three different actions we could take (sticking to the wall, cleaning our legs, mating with another fly). We roamed about, and someone narrated the voiceover, talking about the flies living their lives, begetting more flies, then dying. We lived it up and then collapsed in heaps all over the room.
This was a ridiculously simple exercise, but this, along with a brief karaoke moment in the same game, and a public dinner-theater noir adventure in Oslo where they got much of the audience to be living dead, capturing the private detective and so on, really put a bug in my ear about having a large group take action at the same time. It's not suited to really nuanced play--but it's enlivening, and is a wonderful counterpoint to lots of small group play that is being observed by a larger group.
When we played The Butterforger at Nerdly, there were many moments where this kind of dynamic broke out, since the players were audience in character. I'm looking forward to using this more in design an dplay.
Here is a bunch of techniques I can map to specific games:
Dogs: Family relations are pure story juice
1001 Nights & Dread (Jenga): Good questions engage players
1001 Nights & Dread (Jenga): Use all five senses when painting a story moment
Geiger Counter: Drawing is a great brain storm technique
And here is a bunch of techniques from all kinds of play experiences that I can't really map to specific games:
Body language is important, both in character (status play) and out of character (active listening)
Symbolic props are powerful
Author stance is awesome
Open ended scenes generate lots of options (a scene can end before everything is explained - and the meaning of a scene can be defined/redefined by later scenes)
Strong scene pacing can cut away the weak play and get to the point ("3 hours later")
Player information != character information (giving players more information than their characters can create dramatic tension)
Thinking out loud - giving voice to the characters thoughts adds another dimension to the story
I took part in a group audition for a production of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore where the director put us all in a closed room and said "You've all been infected and are going to die, sooner or later. So die. The audition ends when the last person drops."
And then he watched, and it was pretty interesting. Think about the social dynamic in this situation - you want to "die well" as an actor, you want to be noteworthy but not chew the scenery, you want to not die first and lay there dead for what might be hours, you don't want to die last, for God's sake. From a very simple, single parameter, a lot of complexity emerged.
For me it has to be the freeform No Sign of Alex, where two groups of players play in different times. One group in the sixties and the other in the eighties. The two groups were playing the same characters opposite of each other, just 20 years apart.
At certain point in the game, one of the characters, who sort of still lived in the past, mentally, was holding some sort of monologue, swapped characters with her other identical role and sat down in the other group. Seamlessly. No explanation. It all made sense.
This really opened up my mind about character ownership, using the physical space to tell stories, and what happens with others when someone else is playing your part. The beauty of it was how it was integrated in the story.
Jumping in to play out a flash-back or flash-forward for another character in the Upgrade gave me a similar experience. In some recent games people have kept single characters in the game. It seems like a big change to me. That aspect is so important and freeing.