Half-Life

Also known as Fast Forward

A scene is played within one minute and is then repeated in the given time frames of 30, 15, 7, 3 seconds and finally 1 second.

This shortening forces the players to reduce themselves more and more to the essentials of the scene. As a rule, even a weak starting scene turns into a guaranteed laugh thanks to the slapstick effect of the compressions.

Tips and notes

• It helps to ask the audience for a suggestion based on a dramatic situation.
• The starting scene should contain as much action as possible: changes of location, dialogue, drama and so on. *It is important to always keep the key anchor points of the original scene in the shorter follow-up rounds. The game lives from the repetition of exactly these defining beats. And of course the audience enjoys watching the players struggle, race against the clock and end up completely out of breath.

Variant: The starting scene can have any length, and the first compression then cuts it down to one minute.

Origin of the term

The half-life is the period of time after which a quantity decreasing over time reaches half of its initial value.
In physics, for example, the term is used for radioactivity. After the half-life has passed, the radioactivity of a substance has dropped by half. The half-life of the radioactive carbon isotope C14 is roughly 5,700 years, meaning that after 5,700 years only half of the C14 isotope remains in a piece of wood compared to the amount it contained while it was still growing. This way, the age of formerly living tissue can also be calculated.