lessons from disney

​Location-Based Interactive Storytelling the Walt Disney Imagineering Way

This 2013 GDC Next lecture from Disney Imagineering's Jonathan Ackley and Chris Purvis focuses on how the lessons of theme park design can inform game design in the virtual world. Just as in video games, Imagineers deal with issues of artistic design, architectural storytelling, interactive narrative, massively multiplayer gameplay, adapting classic characters to the interactive world and community building. "

 
Disney theme parks are designed to take Disney movies into the real world and let guests travel through those worlds, which turned out to be a very popular idea.
 
DISNEY THEME PARK GAME DESIGN TIPS
 
Make participants the main character
 
e.g. Agent P, a story where the guest is a secret agent. It was a high-tech story, involving secret agents would use mobile devices. To be consistent the modern-day setting, secret agent roles, electronic devices, the story and the locations all work together holistically.
 
Guests are given a Mobile phone, their “field operative notification equipment” and they take part in a treasure hunt and the phone tells them the plot it tells them exactly where to go. And when they reach a location. There is a story point that can only be solved by the guest and by pressing the communicator or the phone button, it triggers the secret agent device and amazing things happen and so the guest is the hero. Now for a kid, this is huge, because we all would love to blow things up in the real world. But laws and physics don't allow it. But it's particularly important for kids because they don't normally have a lot of real-world power. So giving them control over a physical environment is very important. E.g. when a little girl triggered one of the effects she turned to a perfect stranger and jumped up and down and screamed. I did it. Did it I did it!
 
Know your audience.
 
You need to tailor experiences to things that interest your audience, to the technologies that they use and understand, the things that are going to intrigue them. little bits of magic that are going to make them wonder.  You don't talk down to them. You could create the most fabulous attraction but it requires you to walk a marathon that's not going to be very popular. You need to understand who your guests are.  Don't bore them.
 
Tell one story at a time
 
It all begins with a story, so everything in a land has to make sense and you need to avoid contradiction. You wouldn't place fantasy land and NASCAR Days of Thunder racing simulator next to each other. You'd be telling two different stories and guests will know something's wrong.
 
Sweat the Details
This doesn’t mean you need busy visuals, this means that for every ounce of treatment provide a ton of fun – which is more about usability.
Sun, rain, wind, five year olds, they have more power than you think. And so you have to focus on designing for maintainability and also putting resources to keeping things up and working well.   
 
Be mindful of safety
 
I had this idea with a golf club and the guests would come up and they hit a red golf ball and the golf ball would follow this our path and would always land in the hole. And I'm pitching this idea to the operations people and they’re like... So let me get this straight…You’re in a theme park. Thousands of people around. You're gonna give a five year old child a big metal club. ..Like, right yeah.
 
 
Every experience needs to be pick up and play
We have to be able to explain how to do this in like 30 seconds to anyone and they have to be able to get it. There’s no time or space for manuals because any longer and guets will immediately disconnect and stop playing.
 
Organize the flow
 
This is just basic good storytelling. You want to be clear. You want them to know your intention. You want to show them where they're going and why they're going there? At Disney we use what we call weenies. A weenie is a large visual object that draws your focus that really grounds and sets the stage for an area.
 
So Disneyland Castle is the first weenie that you see when you enter the park. It draws your eye so that you know you're there. When you turn right towards Tomorrowland. What do you see? You see the weenie down there. It's Space Mountain. So these things give people focus things to look at.
 
It's not a huge clutter, communicate with visual literacy. So this is just good artwork.
Think about it, plan it out. Avoid overload. Be sparing choose important visuals.
 
 
Manage space, time and numbers
Quests need to be modular, with non-linear components
e.g. Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom: A walking tour through The Magic Kingdom…Guests given spell cards and were encouraged to search out magic portals where they might meet an animated character (friend, or foe) who would tell them more of a bit of a story. Every installation could support any story point – which meant that the individual story could also unfold linearly, according to cause and effect.
 
To encourage replayability (variation over time), accessibility (even 2 year olds could do it) and avoid technical costs they included 70 different paper trading cards in the game which guests could scan using on-site cell phone interfaces to trigger effects.  Guests could choose spells to cast by holding a card out in front of them e.g. giving them the power to hit the animated villain in head with a bat.  Each card has 3 different levels of strength to choose form. 
-New arrivals automatically assigned to easy level and given a random deck of five (some basic/common, others more rare), with the option to upgrade and walk the route again.   Guests could also collect and take cards home with them. 
-Queues formed around the portals, potentially frustrating, but b/c that also gave crowds a chance to trade cards, swap tactics, it turned out that the longer the queue, the higher the satisfaction rating.
-“There's a large selection of guests who come to Magic Kingdom now who self-identify themselves as sorcerers. And because the overall story is to protect and enhance the kingdom, they go out and commit what they call random acts of kindness, where they take their extra cards and they find small, adorable children and they just give the cards away.  They also do things like hide their cards in places inside the park and post clues on Facebook (creating) user generated games of hide and go seek in the park without any involvement from us.”
-We ended up making this line of T shirts, which via image recognition technology signal a master sorcerer, which automatically boosts any spell cast to the maximum power level…helpful for advanced, repeat players.
-We added a medium and a hard level. It takes about four, four and a half hours to complete the easy level, going through all the things and it took maybe eight to 10 hours to get through medium. I assumed that very few people would want to play all the way through….it turned out so many people went that far that we had to stop the game and re-engineer it to make it harder. In the end we made it harder, but also more winnable to help clear the crowds.
-This game has inspired over 1600 facebook groups now.
-Our fans developed their own systems for making it more convenient to carry the cards. A lot of people just have images of them on their phone. People have made apps that have them sorted and this is more magical than a real card.  People enjoy collecting and also preserving their good cards at home.  A virtual version saves them having to damage their cards, or bring in photocopied knock-offs.
 
The appeal of the hunt
Even if the combat is not particularly challenging on easy level, players can still enjoy finding their way to all these locations marked on the map of the entire park.
The importance of story
The story is engaging too. The overarching story of Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom is that Hades the evil god of the undead wants to make the Magic Kingdom his summer home, and to this end, he has sent pain and panic to steal Merlin's Ultimate Weapon the crystal of the Magic Kingdom because once that is out of Merlin's hands, Hades can invade. There's a scuffle over the crystal, the crystal is shattered and spread out across the entire theme park. So you have to prevent Hades from getting The Magic Kingdom’s crystal whilst Hades recruits other Disney villains to try and get the shark for him.  It’s a nine-chapter saga. So, if you're an advanced player, you still experience all new stories.
 
Phone are pointers
The cell phone is a remote control for controlling the park, it causes people to look up and focus at areas of the park that they otherwise wouldn't have visited. When we ran the play test, a lot of annual pass holders played it and they wrote us letters: “I loved it because I've been to that park maybe a couple hundred times, but I never went to this part of the park.” So we actually use the mobile phone experiences to direct people away from the one and a half by two inch screen and back out into these wonderful worlds that the Imagineers have created over the years.
 
Timing is important
You have to know how long things take how long it takes people to get from A to B on average, how long they stand in a place, and you have to think about how and where to move them along. You have to know that you're not going to be in the parade route.
 
Every experience needs to be pick up and play
We have to be able to explain how to do this in like 30 seconds to anyone and they have to be able to get it. There’s no time or space for manuals because any longer and guets will immediately disconnect and stop playing.
 
Test – it may surprise you
 
Before we open each attraction, we mock it up close to full scale and test it for a few weeks.
 
-The play test proved the (unexpected) appeal of extended engagement outside if the seasons is right. 
-It also showed that theme parks are generally safe from griefing behaviours. You don’t have online anonymity in a theme park.
-Also, even if people encountered spoilers from other players, they still wanted to do it themselves, and were just as satisfied.
-Players refused to push buttons simultaneously when in the same vicinity – instead they wanted to queue up and take it in turns to be the only one pressing the button
-People don’t like to backtrack – they prefer to maintain a forward flow through space
-Good game design is as important in a theme park, as a console video game.  If we designed a fun game that lasted 200 hours, people will play it for 200 hours.  This has implications.
-People love interacting with cast members.  For example, we have a tea shop in England. And in one of the quests the guests go in and give somebody in the tea shop a secret pass phrase: “Danger is my cup of tea” after which the guest is handed a special tea bag that has a clue inside of it. That was one of the highest rated parts of the experience.
 
 
Ackley, Jonathan, and Chris Purvis. 2013. Location-Based Interactive Storytelling the Walt Disney Imagineering Way. In GDC Vault, edited by GDC. U.S.: YouTube.