Location-Based Interactive Storytelling the Walt Disney Imagineering Way

[Music] thank you all for coming my name is Jonathan akley and I work at Walt Disney imagineering research and development and I produce him in the creative director of various interactive Theme Park attractions but uh I'm a very very old game developer with games dating back to the 19 Lucas Arts adventure games including the curse of Monkey Island thank you all for coming let me introduce you my partner in this talk Chris pvis hi I'm Chris pervis uh I also am with weal dis new imagineering um I am very much like Jonathan in that I date back to the early 90s from the game industry originally uh and we both somehow ended up at Disney together um and have partnered on a lot of the attractions we're going to talk to you about today so what we're going to talk today is we're going to talk about how we are

are using the storytelling devices uh that have made Disney imagineering the most popular theme park uh company for the last 50 years and how we are taking the lessons learned from video games applying it to the development of those interactive Theme Park attractions uh and uh I apologize when you fill out your little surveys totally forget this part so we're going to talk about storytelling in themed environment how we can apply the Lessons Learned in video games to gaming in the real world so we're going to start off talking about Mickey's Ten Commandments and you'll learn about what that is uh we'll talk about some of our projects moving forward and talk about what lessons you can take from the video game industry and bring into the physical world and which ones are best Left Behind what the differences are and how to apply them so at imagineering we're all about storytelling through new technology that is really how Walt founded uh his theme park group he wanted to take the worlds

of his movies bring them into the real world and let our guests travel through those worlds and clearly that turned out to be a very popular idea but what we are doing is we are taking that same Disney storytelling just like Walt had it but we're turning on its head so now our guests are becoming the main characters in The Disney stories so I'd like to start off by some of the principles which ground storytelling out Walt Disney imagineering tell you about a famous imagineer named Marty scar Marty scar is a Disney Legend uh he was with the company and he ran the creative for Walt Disney imagineering for many many years he was also Walt's writer back in the 1950s and 60s ever since the Disneyland days and one day he was talking with Mickey Mouse and Mickey Mouse uh dictated to Marty some rules behind storytelling in a dimensional world so I'll quickly go over them uh obviously viously you can

probably read them fast and I can talk to them but talk a little bit about them give them some context because these absolutely apply I believe to the products that you guys make every day so know your audience don't bore them obviously you want to know who you're making your art for you're going to tailor it to things that interest them uh 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 don't say well this is for kids so I don't have to try as hard you try and make it as great as possible wear your guest shoes you know anybody who's worked in testing knows this is very important 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 and uh and really design for them organize the flow of good people and ideas this is just basic good storytelling you want to be clear you want them to know your intention and you want to show them

where they're going and why they are going there now create a weenie a weenie is Waltz word a weenie is a large visual object that draws your focus that really grounds and sets the stage for an area so at Disneyland the castle is the first weenie that you see when you enter the park it draws you you know you're there when you turn right towards uh tomorrow land what do you see you see the weenie down there it's uh Space Mountain so uh 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 don't just throw it up there think about it plan it out avoid overload if you fill everything with tremendous detail people are going to get tired you can't look at everything and focus on every detail be sparing choose important visuals this is a very important one tell one story at a time so again as I

said it imagineering it all begins with a story so everything in a land has to make sense uh you know you wouldn't have fantasy land and place NASCAR Days of Thunder racing simulator in it you'd be telling two different stories the two stories don't match the guests feel that and they know something's wrong so your storytelling needs to make sense avoid contradiction it's very similar to the last point now for every an of treatment provide a ton of fun this is sweat the details this means it's not just good enough to tell a clear story you want to give them as much value as possible and that really is baked into imagineering back from the original imagineers As Told by Walt Disney and keep it up now this may be something that's less important in a photonic world but in a physical world world as we're going to

be talking about this is really important in the real world you can't run at 9 m a second for 3 hours straight you can't jump down 15 ft uh and things break right in a video game you can put you know 50 pounds of dynamite against the wall blow it up and that wall is it still looks great uh Sun rain wind 5-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 so I'll talk about Agent P's world showcase adventure and uh this was my first attraction that I designed and produced at uh Walt Disney and it wasn't really designed to be an attraction I was working in research and development and had been working in a lot of mobile stuff and my boss came to me one day and said eh you know you used

to make adventure games why don't you make an adventure game uh with Kim Possible in Epcot because there was a perception at the time that there wasn't much for kids to do an Epcot so maybe we could do a test and so I went into it thinking all right I can translate some of what I did back at Luke Arts adventure games bring it to the physical world and maybe make wdi smart about how we might use uh cell phones mobile devices which were really just emerging at the time make us a little smarter maybe someday somebody will do do an attraction about it so uh eventually Kim posible became Agent P's world showcase adventure so forgive me if I get confused and use them interchangeably so the guest's role which is very important it all begins with the story is a secret agent Epcot World Showcase if you've never been there is designed like a world fair with a whole bunch of different Pavilions each Pavilion representing a different country so for our story as a secret agent secret agent would go from country to Country uh solving uh uh the uh you know foiling

the crimes of the evil villains from the Kim Possible TV show and because it was a Hightech story I could use mobile devices secret agents would use mobile devices so it was consistent story World Showcase modern day world secret agents electronic devices the interface and the story and the locations all work together holistically so this is the drawing of the UK Pavilion C it's a different culture of the world so our design goals uh we wanted to make our guest the main character without disturbing the park experience for non-participating guests so imagine if you were working on a massively multiplayer RPG maybe it was set in a fantasy world and uh Space men kept walking through it this would not be appropriate this wouldn't be good storytelling you wouldn't be telling one story at a time and also uh we have guests who would not

be participating in the experience they're just enjoying the environment of World Showcase which by the way is my favorite theme park great food great adult beverages you'd love it story and interface agentp is a classic nonlinear puzzle-based Adventure game Lucas Sierra it's just that but brought to the real world so many of the design principles that you know the people who predated me in that Ron Gilbert and Company just brought those forward they appli directly the secret agent story was great because again we didn't want to spoil the existing feel of world showcase by adding a whole bunch of Miss Pac-Man machines but spies hide their equipment and that made it possible for us to tell our story without impacting the story of the rest of the guests in World Showcase now I'm going to show you a little video here this is just an example of how agentp works agentp works the guests get a communicator or now a a

a mobile phone uh which I believe is field operative notification equipment or phone and it is a it's a uh treasure hunt and your the phone tells you the plot it tells you which where to go exactly where to go and when you reach a location there is a story point that can only be solved by you the guest and by pressing the communicator or the phone button it triggers the secret agent device and amazing things happen and you are the hero so so I'm about to show you a video this is part of Agent P's world showcase adventure in it you've discovered the Evil Lair of Dr hin doofen schz and it's has a secret underwater opening and so you need to trigger Perry the platus per the Platypus will come out in his boat he will set a depth charge which you will then trigger to blow open duen schurz's uh secret layer so here's that video

[Music] all right he's set the depth [Applause] charge now for a kid this is huge for a kid or a computer game professional 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 kids in this world don't have a lot of power so giving them control over a physical environment is very important and when I first opened the Kim Possible uh play test there was a little girl and she triggered one of the effects and you know we were watching from the background and the effect came on and she turned to a perfect stranger and jumped up and down and screamed I did it I did it I did it

and I swear I cried because I had made that little girl just that happy so is very rewarding I have found working in theme parks because when I worked in video games you know the best you would get was you know you'd hang out in Electronic Boutique and like fish for compliments you don't no one does that anymore nobody does that anymore or or you you'd force your parents to play and they'd say oh it's wonderful deer um but doing location-based entertainment you go out and you actually get to see real people playing with your the toy that you built for them it is so rewarding it is fantastic I'll show you another couple little videos I won't show them all the way through because they can be quite long-winded but in this next one you find Dr duen Schurz who believes that you are a uh an informant working with him and he's going to plot to uh give you a uh a rigged golf ball to win the evil scientists Open golf tournament it

makes sense if you're there me control sold I don't want anyone from I need you to replace all right I'm going to skip ahead cuz the audio quality is bad in this next one I'm not even going to describe why this is happening it's in the Germany [Music] Pavilion one great thing about working at Walt Disney imagineering is that there are people around who can do anything so you you brainstorm these

ideas and it's like oh can we do that it's like well let's ask the laser guy cuz you know we've got one of those and so you go talk to the laser guy and he's like oh sure yes I can create you a death R uh and uh and then and then you don't build it but you're just happy to know that you could if you want it so this next video uh again it makes complete Lucid sense when you're in the park but uh in Norway Dr duen Schurz is attempting to recover a uh stolen bike bicycle that was pilfered from his Viking neighbor as a child and it involves uh Viking reenactors and uh and uh well never mind it doesn't make any sense [Music] so we have just a great toolbox of

special effects animatronic robots lasers it's it's just a very fun toolbox and and with that I will turn over to Chris we'll talk about play yeah so before we open this attraction we mocked it up uh real close to full scale uh in a couple of The Pavilions and ran a test for a few weeks to see how it worked with the audience because we hadn't really tried anything like this before um just to make sure that we weren't being too confusing or making people march too far and actually um one of the things we learned that was kind of surprising was you know how how receptive people were to to walking long distances in the Florida sun in the summer uh for extended periods of time and and it was okay staying engaged with the game and keeping their satisfaction levels up that was that was we were surprised at how sticky the the experience was uh the other thing uh that was interesting was how well the

interactions with the human beings that we enrolled in the test where we actually had a interaction where one of the cast members we have a t- shop in England um and one of the quests the guests go in and they ask somebody in the tea shop um they give them the secret uh secret password danger is my C is my cup of tea right the the phrase and uh then there handed a special teabag that has a clue inside of it um and that was actually one of the highest rated parts of the experience where are we here now what we didn't know because there had been very few examples of location-based entertainment that lasted for you know more than 3 to 10 minutes uh and we proved out during this play test which was an exceedingly Long play test that caused people to March at least a mile probably over Mile in August in

Florida um and as Chris pointed out the uh the results of that play test were such that we actually turned it into a complete attraction uh but there were some other things that we worried about uh we worried about griefing in the park uh there was a lot of concern about that and it turns out it's just not an issue a our guests to the theme parks are actually usually very uh well behaved and I also believe that griefing is often caused by a feeling of anonymity online you don't have that in a theme park no it's really hard to be mean to the little girl who's waiting in line ahead of you when she's actually right there and we also uh worried about guests running into each other there's a lot of concern about that with spoil experience yeah so Kim Possible the effects as you saw are you know mostly mechanical Show Action Equipment type effects they they kind of do the same thing over and over and over and one of

the things that we were afraid of was that you know if you're sent to a location and there's somebody else there and you're sort of waiting around for your turn you'll see what's going to happen and it's going to be the same thing and that people would find that as you know dissatisfying like oh it's the same show that that guy just got I already know what's going to happen as it turns out that that that you know agency was more important than surprise the fact that they got to do it even though they had already seen what was just about to happen even was the finale uh guests didn't care they they they still wanted to do it themselves it was still just as satisfying for them and again that was something that we were uh not expecting and I it's always fun to talk about your brilliant game design ideas that totally failed so I'll tell you one of those right now uh I had a great idea which was going to solve this problem of people spoiling it before when two guests arrived at the same location I can detect that with our location DET detection system so if one pressed the button I was going to tell them oh your Communicator doesn't have enough

power get the other agents around you to all push your buttons simultaneously I thought ah I'm a genius they refused to do it refused to do it they queued up because I don't want to do it with somebody else I want to be the one who presses the button and makes it happen right so we didn't expect that so uh this attraction is effectively a large multip player game we've got up to a 700 to 900 people playing it simultaneously at any given time um so we had to write the quests such that they could be played back in any order uh to allow us to load balance the attraction um each so it's divided up into missions there's one Mission per Pavilion uh each one of the missions has a number of steps and those steps are actually uh somewhat nonlinear as well so we can really route people to any

location that we want based on the current distribution of players and the the current load in a particular land yeah we have a disadvantage over you photonic folk in that you can always put in another Shard we can't just make another theme park yeah so we have to be very careful and uh uh with our use of the shared space that is the theme right and and really the only thing that we found that was a big dissatisfier was that people didn't like to backtrack so if we had you going World Showcase is a fairly large area it's about a mile from all the way around it's it's a sort of the circular area around this Lake and this circumference of is about a mile so um what people really hated was when we made them feel like you know they're over here in Germany and then they've got to go over here to the Energy Pavilion and then back to Germany again that that kind of drove them nuts which you know in retrospect we should have

realized ahead of time it we don't do that now no we don't we took that out so the next game I'd like to talk about is a game that Chris and I launched about a year and a half ago called Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom and the overall conceit behind Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom is what if all those crazy trading card games came to life and actually worked so what if you had a whole bunch of spell cards and when confronted by a villain all you had to do was choose the spell you wanted to cast hold it out in front of you and it would actually cast the spell and so I pitched the idea to Chris and Chris said that's the stupidest thing I ever heard that's not technically feasible there's no way we'll do it and then he thought about it some more and said oh yeah we can do that you know programmers they do it all the time so it's in the Magic Kingdom so the theme of magic was perfect for it the guests search out Mystic portals scattered all over the entire theme park

once they open a Mystic portal they may be confronted by a friend who will tell them a bit of the story they may be confronted by a villain if it's a villain the villain will instantly attack because villains are mean and then you choose the correct card or cards that you feel you need to play toh defeat the villain this so yeah if if Agent P is a classic adventure game we wanted a fullon roleplaying game that lasted hours and hours and hours and hours and was replayable right the coming out of the agent Peak Impossible Project we had a few goals of things we'd like to do better one of which was to add some level of replayability because again Agent P is the same effects over and over and once you've done it you've seen them all uh we wanted to try and fix that the other thing we wanted to try and do was come up with a way of doing a game where we didn't have to give you a a handset that we needed to maintain an inventory of because that's actually really expensive operationally to do um hence the paper

cards which don't have any technology in them at all um but the main point to take away is even though we weren't using expensive handsets those cards are valuable because those cards we put a lot of effort in them they're actually valuable works of art that people trade for so even though it was less expensive to operate the guest got to walk away with something and then it haded a whole depth of trading within the experience which we learned uh was more important than maybe we had initially thought right so you know we wanted to make this you're going too fast man sorry man we wanted to make this accessible to people that just show up who've never been in the park before and have it be a fun experience but uh particularly in Walt Disney World there is a there's a a core group of uh annual passholders that are really kind of frequent repeat visitors and we wanted to give them something as well um which would you know not always

be the same thing over and over again again that replayability angle um how do we do that with an RPG without you know having an inventory or uh a series of stats or something that's really intricate and hard to read and difficult to communicate was something that we had to think about uh as one of our design considerations it's the whole know your audience thing when people are in a theme park they don't want to sit there and you know look at a stat screen not to mention that thematically the art directors would have killed us if we had tried to do that um so what we've come up with for this was uh each one of the spell cards represents an individual spell the Spells have uh you know n number of levels that they can increase in power with and we initially opened the thing with three different levels for each one um so as you use your spell cards they increase in power and the effect that is

displayed when you hold it up gets more potent it evolves as you play the game shall I shall I show them one of my favorites uh sure that's good because it's the next line okay great um so this is an example see it's funny because someone gets hit in the face with a bat um that's actually my favorite spell of all time um so we we have 70 different spells uh in the initial deck that we launched uh with a couple of editions for Holiday uh special editions that we've done over the last two years these are examples of the actual spell cards that get handed out um when you show up in the park you're given a deck of uh five of these that are randomly selected out of using basic um what uh tabletop playing card game uh Rarity model that we hired a consultant to explain to us

because we don't really know anything about that know your audience again uh we aren't experts in uh in trading cards so we went and we sought uh help from people who really knew the market and that turned out to be one of the wisest decisions we made right we ended up doing 95 minutes of a new unique animation uh that is the main content that the game plays back for you at when you see the vill appear and when you do battle with them so it's the equivalent of an interactive animated feature uh and uh this because every installation could support any story Point uh my game designer was able to write this uh attraction linearly which made him super happy uh because it's just a lot easier to write and also allowed some greater depth of Storytelling because a can lead to B which can lead to C which was something that just really wasn't pop possible in the adventure game structure of Agent P

so show you one of my favorite installations what's fun about the Mystic portals is they don't look like Mystic portals so this is an artist rendering of uh a rock wall that becomes a Mystic portal and uh this is what the final installation looked like [Music] [Music] flowers wonderful me up are no good back at the castle you better see unfortunately the Sorcerer And good fairies have proven a bigger inconvenience than expected prepare the trap to be turned against them first you hear me S now you will face me and all

the power of my Fury so Maleficent has challenged the player here to a battle uh and that's them holding up their Prince Philip's magic sword card which triggers a spell effect which blows the dragon [Applause] [Music] up gracious he's got the crystal right there quickly so the interface is simply hold the card out in front of you uh on Agent P uh a cell phone even if it is a very simplified uh interface is a little hard for any kid under seven years old we had two-year-olds casting spells and defeating and having a fabulous time

um just because the interface was that easy it took a lot of of magic and Technology to make the interface that easy but this game is appropriate for much much younger kids I think the most important lesson that we learned doing this one is kind of captured on the slide in that in Agent P when people are waiting to play the game and they're sort of lined up they kind of stay separated from each other and stay back and let the each each player kind of go through the experience themselves with Sorcerers again we were afraid about what was going to happen when lines got big but as it turns out the longer the lines are for a portal the higher the guest satisfaction rating would go up and that was because people would start trading cards with each other they would just start turn into these impromptu card trading parties and people would talk about their you know tactics for what they were going to do next and where they were in the story and uh it

it it was really very surprising to us because it was so different from what happened with the with a impossible attraction yeah and so our our guests there's a a large uh selection of guests who come to Magic Kingdom now who self-identify themselves as Sorcerers uh 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 them in places inside the park and then put Clues on Facebook for where they've hidden them and create these sort of user generated games of hide-and gosek in the park uh without any of involvement from us um and talk a little bit about uh Stupid programmer tricks as I like to call them once we had this awesome game system uh Chris and I had an idea of of just how to make it wacky right so uh we ended up making this line

of t-shirts which uh if you purchase and wear because the game is based on a fairly powerful uh image recognition uh package we can tell if you're wearing this t-shirt that we sold you um and so uh we use that as a shortcut this this was a master sorcerer uh t-shirt which turns you into a master sorcerer which automatically boosts any spell you cast to the maximum power level which actually helps you if you're playing uh one of the more difficult levels of the game where it matters how strong your spells are in terms of whether or not you're going to be able to feat the villain which which brings up a good point uh about underestimating certain things so you know I didn't necessarily buy into the fact that our guests could only play a game for 3 to 10 minutes but I kind of thought you know maybe a half hour an hour at a time that's probably how long people will play the game and so the easy level

was designed for that for the person who you know is going to come to Walt Disney World they want to ride all the roller coasters and they want to spend maybe a half hour maybe an hour playing this and maybe there'll be some people who play the whole game all the way through you should make it clear that easy is really more like a walking tour than an actual game if you if you hold a spell up it you win you know instantly but the summer before we opened Chris and I were talking like well you know you know it's just numbers week at a medium and a hard level we do that really easy and so we uh it takes about four 4 and a half hours to complete the easy level going through all the things and it took maybe 8 to 10 hours to get through medium and if you didn't have the right cards on hard you could not win it's not possible yeah and so but I figured yeah big deal how many people are actually going to play hard everybody played hard to the point that we had to turn off off

and re-engineer hard because the fact that you couldn't complete it and really nobody could because this was early in the game's opening and you needed a full deck really to be able to complete hard um which is very difficult to get by randomly showing up every day and getting your five spells so the people would go into the attraction and never come out and they and they loved it and they loved it but with that not leave the lines was not designed for them don't go down when they don't come out the other side of the door so uh that became a problem yeah and so we actually just launched a new version of hard which uh uh we sort of pulled back hard now it's it's uh as hard as it ever was but slightly more fair a little more designed to to uh to well we solved it by by giving you an award for how well you did as opposed to how how how long you got beat how long you got beat up so that there's an incentive to keep playing and go back and do it the next time so my takeaway as a game designer

was if you design a location-based game with the same longplay game mechanics that you would use in a photonic game people will play it like they will play a photonic game if if we designed a game that lasted 200 hours people would play it for 200 hours there's no difference between what you guys do and what people do in the Real Environment uh and uh because uh it's very social game people took it online I think this there are many different Facebook groups this one has over 1,600 now um story and interface Choice again tell one story the interface had to match the park which also had to match the stories that we were telling Merlin was a great main character he didn't he didn't ruin the storytelling because as a magic user he can travel through time he can travel from place to place he was a great character to Shepherd our sorcerers through the story and I'll just uh end with a uh a

few slides from the last uh game that we opened this opened at the beginning of the summer and it's a Pirates Adventure Treasures of the seven seas and this is just a great big pirate Adventure game it all takes place in Adventure Land and I'll just show you some of the uh moments within the uh experience again did I mention we have a laser guy uh this is a giant 13t high stone Idol that opens its mouth to reveal an evil pulsing glowing golden skull in one of the story points uh you trick an evil captain into uh hauling away some cursed treasure and later on he he calls you to a parlay and rises from the deep to tell you that he's really really unhappy with you uh and then uh designers realized that if you can have your your players shoot a cannon you've already won so

there you go so uh in conclusion uh the design principles the Mickey's Ten Commandments good game design practices just as you wouldn't a photonic game can result in meaningful experiences for our guests uh that will keep them coming back over and over and over again and creating a strong positively oriented Community among our players make the game experience better for everyone so uh with that I think we have some extra time in case there are any questions we can go to questions and answers thank you do you guys have any Pap on any thech you guys the question is do we have white papers on the tech um no

well it's it's magic yeah that that is the official company line it's all magic yes sir the question is the a Facebook site that we showed was that created by Disney no uh we didn't do any community building around it it all grew up organically uh from the people who come and trade the cards uh in the Parks uh and that Community expands out to people who just came and visited loved the game went back to Texas or Illinois and and they not trade the cards by mail and communicate through this Facebook page so no I'd say there's seven or eight web pages dedicated to the attraction there's the Facebook page there's a couple blogs there's the forums on

Vinylmation there's there's a there's a number of but again yeah no we didn't have any part in uh in setting any of that up so uh way in the back yeah yeah so so the question is theme park economics uh how do you justify building one of these things um I can't really talk about that um however we do have methods for judging the value of attractions but I really can't talk about it in this forum sorry yes sir pardon me how the question is how do you become

an imagineer uh and uh in my case probably random luck and persistence uh I became an imagineer uh I I came right out of college and it was the first place I sent my resume and they said thank you for your resume and so uh wow they said they actually got back to you with a thank you well yeah they with the little it was the '90s so they they don't do that anymore no it was it was it was they sent me a postcard with Micky on that said we got it and so uh something about me not having any marketable skills something like that and so then uh somehow I wound up in video games and after uh working in video games and then uh working in in toy robots when I worked at Lego eventually I just kept sending in a resume uh and then uh somebody saw it and said oh okay I I I have a use for you uh and then before I worked in theme

parks I spent maybe five or six years just doing corporate research and development as a sort of technical consultant within the greater Disney organization so it was just random luck that I eventually wound up in theme parks so I think everybody has their own strange story about any job they get right uh and uh mine was easy you hired me oh because or just know me yes no know him uh so uh you know there are imagineers who are Architects there imagineers who are Landscape Architects there are imagineers who are computer programmers they're are ride designers they're Engineers they're art directors they are concept uh designers there storyboard artists there are there are 1500 different disciplines actually um so you're not going to name them all that's what I I was going to try yeah good okay all right so we won't name them all so but we we kind of do a little of everything yeah yes sir I have a

question about game balance for the sorcerer game um how did you solve the problem of making it deep or challenging enough that a hardcore gamer in this room didn't have fun with it but little 5-year-old Susie plays her card and she loses like that can't be a good experience for a 5-year-old so I I guess what did you do to sort of solve that so the default uh when you go and you sign up is that you're automattic put on the easiest difficulty level which as I said earlier is really more like a walking tour um you know any any spell cast will defeat any villain on a single cast you have to actually complete the entire game and go back and say okay I want to do this again and they'll ask you well would you like to try playing on medium um and they explain to you that you know you can lose now uh so generally the really young kids don't have the ability

to do that because as Jonathan pointed out you know the fastest that we can get through the game is about 4 hours if we're doing the the whole thing on easy just because there's so much walking around and the you know it's 27 different encounters I think before you finish the whole thing something like that no actually no it's 36 so um so most most of the really casual players aren't going to come back and you know sign up for another four plus hour block of time out of their day at a theme park well the the kids will but the parents will re yeah they the parents will say no we're going to go do pirates now because I didn't pay for all this to play video games so very very speci very spe specifically uh about there is a there is a gaml style in location based entertaining that you actually you find a little bit in uh games but not much and you can't discount it with which is the treasure hunt in the real world game mechanic so

say you're a heavy duty grognard and you want super hard we can start you off on easy level because you're not familiar with the park so even if the combat is not particularly challenging on easy level you still have to find your way to all these locations marked on the map of the entire park secondarily we actually have some really wonderful storytelling the overall the overarching story is that uh Hades the evil God of the undead wants to make the Magic Kingdom his summer home and to this end he is send pain and panic uh to steal Merlin's Ultimate Weapon the crystal of the Magic Kingdom uh because once that is out of Merlin's hands Hades can invade uh 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 crystal of the Magic Kingdom and Hades being passive aggressive uh just recruits other Disney villains to try and get the shards for him so you go

through a huge nine chapter Saga so if you're an advanced player even though the combat is not difficult there's the uh just treasure hunt mechanic which is fun and the fact that you haven't seen any of this before so you get all the storytelling and what's going to happen next and what characters am I going to run into so you entertain them on easy mode when they go back on hard mode all bets are off and we're going to hurt them real bad so that's how we handle the uh the load load level load balancing perfect thank you sure in the middle how did you guys handle we don't care actually uh you can go right ahead and do that uh our fans have 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 uh people have made apps that have them sorted where they can bring them up and hold and this works great this actually works better

than a real card because it's more magical um I got to catch myself there uh but what we also found uh actually I think our consultant was telling us that you know you can if you show up at a magic the Gathering uh tournament with a bunch of photocopied cards you're kind of embarrassed right nobody wants to be seen with the you know knockoff versions of these things and so um people really really enjoy the collecting aspect of it even and and what they'll do is they'll collect the cards put them in myar lock them away and then use the image on their phone once they've got it because you know that way they don't have to dog ear their their mama od's uh Voodoo blast or whatever yeah yeah I mean our our our our business model which again I can't talk about isn't based on selling the cards so uh you if they want to print out cards and have them all uh and

and then they can keep their good cards at home and and not you know expose them to to damage we're all for it mentioned mobile phone being a great way to carry around your CS have you started looking at ways to incorporate smartphones since everybody at the pars when I go now spends their time in Q staring at a screen instead of looking at all the wonderful free show that you guys do for all of your attractions your next itation of sorcerers or you know the treasure H will that incorporate smartphon so the question is should have we thought about incorporating phones ourselves take that sure um you know imagineering is all about looking at new technologies and finding new ways to tell stories so the answer is yes we've been looking at that because obviously it's very powerful if you look at the design of agent p/ Kim Possible world showcase adventure you will see that it is designed not around

the cell phone the cell phone really is just what I call a remote control for controlling the park so what the cell phone does is it causes you to look up and focus at areas of the park that you otherwise wouldn't have visited there when we ran the play test a lot of annual passholders played it and they wrote us letters and they said I love this experience because I'm an annual passholder I've been to that Park maybe a couple hundred times I never went there ever never went to this part of the park so we actually use the mobile phone experiences to direct them away from the 1 and 1/2x 2 in screen and back out into these wonderful worlds that the imagineers have created over the years um but we don't have anything to announce specifically about Smartphones at this time uh the gentleman in the checked shirt you guys consider aha so the question was have we

considered multiplayer we did not touch on uh this source of the Magic Kingdom actually can be played in a multiplayer fashion um the system it's it's fairly simplistic but if you have a family with a couple of you know kids and he says the system he means the Magic The Magic right the magical system uh is tuned so that you know if you have a a a couple of kids or even three or four people they can all hold up spells and it will detect all of them cast them all and that way um you can have you know two kids play with their parents without having to split up and go in different directions because if they did that the game would physically separate them there's no way to pair two groups together in the in the in the attraction so um as far as competitive multiplayer goes um so it's something that we think about

uh with with the competition we like we like the guests pairing up together uniting to defeat the villain um we're not so much about you know Brenton and me getting in a huge sorcerer battle in the middle of the Magic Kingdom and you know duking it out because I think I think the game would have to match the story that the park is telling yes so if if there was a parked or a theme themed environment which uh which led to that and a technology that made sense from a story point of view we absolutely would consider it we just you know you you design for location-based entertainment the location you're putting it makes a big difference to the story that you're telling and uh but every park has its own requirements it has stories that are correct it has it must function as a living organism you would not believe

how complicated it is to run a theme park it's mindboggling uh so uh the answer is I think we absolutely would look at something multiplayer we just haven't found the right application for that yet yeah yes sir in the front um I know you probably this a little bit before but when it comes to game design story design and location design and then contrasting that between what you're doing in themus what done in video games what similari have you found between those what differences trading cards things like that are there any other surprises you found that didn't expect when it came to either the way you design things or the

way things kind of naturally progress okay so the question is the differences uh what are some differences that we've found between designing for regular video games and for locations and what things did we find that we did not expect it's a very good question um one of the you know we talked a little bit about the theme park as a shared resource you can't double the right capacity of Pirates of the Caribbean by building another Pirates of the Caribbean right next to it um so you have to be very efficient in your game play you have to uh timing is very 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 you have to move them along you have to know that you're not going to be in the parade route these are not things that you worry about um in video games now that's the 5 minute signal um you also don't have to worry about

maintenance um and and we have an army of people who are out there every night and every morning on all the attractions testing and fixing things because mechanical things in games do not break generally um from where uh in an aggressive environment like Tokyo or Hong Kong or Orlando things break all the time um I think the one thing to note that's a difference is the the level of complexity we can't we don't want to dumb the experiences down but we do have to maintain a certain level of intuitiveness I think that goes beyond 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 right we can't spend five minutes telling guest exactly how to play the game or hand them a manual or or anything like that

um or they'll just immediately disconnect and and stop playing so you really have to try and and make the experiences really is intuitive and and quick to pick up for for anyone as possible right and safety is also something you don't generally have to worry about in a video game particularly in video games where so many people you know get shot um when I had you know I had to oh gosh I had these genius ideas for Kim Possible just you know just brilliant I had this idea with a a golf club and and the guests would come up and they hit a rigged golf ball and the golf ball would follow a bizarre 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 theme park thousands of people around you're going to give a 5-year-old child a big metal [Music] club like right yeah uh so that's another thing that people don't uh don't generally uh have to deal

with with regular video games um probably time for one more question sorry uh yeah yeah have you about actually letting the player alter the course of the story uh we uh we have not implemented that in any of the attractions that we done but there are definitely groups uh within Disney and R&D in Disney uh who are looking at things like uh like that but but we currently haven't rolled anything out I think we still have time for one more question yes in the back so the question was why Orlando and not Anaheim uh because every property has its own need needs in its own agendas uh as I mentioned when we uh put

Kim Possible in World Showcase uh there was a perception that there was not enough for kids to do in World Showcase uh and so there was a need and we fill it it would be great to just think I could come up with any idea I want and put it in any park but those Parks uh are living organisms and they have needs and uh and sometimes those needs come before an imagin desire to just put something cool in the theme park and uh we'll probably hang out afterwards if anybody has any more questions but I think we are out of time and I want to thank everybody for coming thank very much for so much [Applause]