Favorite File Sharing

We talk a lot about what YOU can do to improve the LARP experience at your game. But a lot of running a game is working with a team. How you interact with them can make or break the event - unless you have a small game and super metabolism, it is almost impossible to run a great game by yourself. And one major element to getting everyone on the same page is sharing content.

What's the best way to manage content between people? Well, my favorite so far is Dropbox. I'll tell you why. :)

So I started using Dropbox at work. It is a free service that allows you to download a folder onto your computer. Within the folder you can make additional folders and share them with other people. If you want to share each of those folders with different people, you can. Everyone has to download Dropbox onto their system for it to work, of course.

The documents (or whatever) inside can be edited by each person you invite, as long as they're not protected. Otherwise they would just view the documents. Each person can just open, edit, and save - and Dropbox will update it to each shared person's system, like you would have on a network. In fact, that might be just what it is, but I'm not computer savvy enough to know the specifics :) Documents you protect are still protected, and so on. And your material is also backed up online, at the Dropbox site; so if someone's drive crashes or people quit, the material is still there.

Now, the free service is only good up to a certain size, so this may not work for those sharing large amounts of images, videos, etc.

I've found so far that it combines the sharing capabilities of Google docs (Yahoo! doesn't allow shared editing, the person who uploads the file has to manage it) with the easy-to-organize system of Yahoo! groups. I haven't been impressed with the organization system of Google docs. It does allow sharing, and for small amounts of files where you want multiple contributors it's great (although I know it doesn't work for all emails, as my work email can't use it). But once you start getting into using it for a content library, or for things like your character sheet database, I've gotten frustrated and been unhappy with their options. Maybe I'm doing it wrong :)

I didn't have those issues with Dropbox, though. It was intuitive for a Windows user like me; it's just like another folder, so it's wonderful for keeping everything organized so I can stay sane. :) So far for me, Dropbox has all the things I want, and removes the negatives.

I haven't been using it for long, but I encourage people to give it a test drive and see what they think.

Or maybe you use something even better?

Pet Project: LARPcast!

So as a bit of a pet project, Mickey (frequent commenter) and I have decided to start a podcast. I wanted to start one a while back, but never got motivated after I had a guest appearance on the Mid Level Crisis.

Mickey contacted me and asked if I would be interested and I jumped on the chance. We share a lot of the same opinions about what's good and what's bad for LARPs on a game design level, so we figured we'd try and elaborate on some of those concepts.

Anyways, the podcast is called LARPcast. The first topic is about Trust Between Players and Staff at LARP. Enjoy!

http://www.larpcast.podbean.com/