Park People
parkworld-online.com
core story, the author (in a non-interactive experience) and the user (in an interactive experience).
Does interactivity spoil an attraction designer’s ability to tell a story? This is a complex question. First, what do you mean by “story?” If, as Raul Fernandez suggests, “story” is simply an organising structure, then no, because you can organise a story to deal with guest input. In Turtle Talk with Crush, the story is based around a quid-pro- quo that Crush states early in the show, “I’ll tell you what it’s like to be a turtle if you tell me what it’s like to be a human.” The story can careen all over the place based upon specific input from the audience but the overarching story remains in place, held there by that premise and the structure we developed that the actors follow.
The problem is, if you look at the larger history of entertainment, you find it divides into two grand traditions – storytelling and game playing, and they come from how we learn. We can learn by doing, but that is dangerous. If I am a child in a primitive culture and I grab my dad’s spear and head out into the forest to find supper, if I have no training I’m as likely to become supper for some other creature as to find a creature to become supper for me. So humans developed two abstracted forms of learning where the costs of failure were less severe: Learning by example and learning by (abstracted) experience. The former is the heart of storytelling, the latter the heart of game playing. Each has its own strengths.
Storytelling’s strengths are that it shows you how to do things you’d be unlikely to be able to learn on your own. Learning by experience is often more powerfully remembered if for no other reason than it is almost always more multi-sensory. I can tell my young son dozens of stories about the horrors that will happen if he touches the hot stove, all he has to do is touch it once and he will remember that lesson forever. And there are certain things you simply can’t learn without practice. I’ll never be able to play the violin successfully, no matter how many times I’m shown, without practicing it myself.
This gets to the heart of the issue. As a designer am I wanting to show/tell you something? Or am I wanting to create an environment where you discover something on your own? The reality is that most of us live our lives negotiating the middle, I learn theory from things that are shown me (stories), from friends and co- workers, and then I practice (interactively) to get better at them. And this is the real new frontier that lots of game designers, especially, are exploring. It’s what I see college students working on everywhere – How do I combine story and game?
What’s your view on interactive dark rides? Like with any other ride, when they are done well I like them. When they are done poorly I don’t. I do think that as a class they are under-represented in parks.
NOVEMBER 2014
Do you consider Toy Story Mania a dark ride or a game?
Both. Clearly I’m on a ride conveyance. Clearly I’m playing games. Does it have to be “either/or?”
How did Turtle Talk come about, and were you worried about copycat projects emerging, as they now have? Turtle Talk came from the Stitch Phone booth that Disney R&D put into Innoventions at Disneyland. It was so instantly successful that we began to search for ways to grow it so that more people could share in the fun. I originally pitched the Turtle Talk concept as a pre-show for an attraction for the Tokyo DisneySea park. That attraction never got built, though several years later we ended putting Turtle Talk #3 into the exact same spot it had originally been conceived for, as an independent show. We knew that if we were successful others would attempt to copy it. But that is the nature of invention, isn’t it, that we all develop new things based upon older things. (To quote Newton’s line: “If I have seen farther than others it is only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”) At its most fundamental Turtle Talk is an interactive puppet show and those go all the way back to Greek and Roman times.
Tell us more about your work with the Disney Cruise Line
My teams did three bodies of work for the cruise ships. We developed a “dinner theatre” version of Turtle Talk for the Animator’s Palette restaurant – an interesting challenge since we had to make the show work in a much longer format and in a much more distracting “theatre.” We developed a number of games for the kid’s clubs on the ships. We developed several ship-wide
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Technology has nothing to do with it. Interactive experiences can be high, low or no tech. The basic
definition is simple. It is any piece of entertainment where user input alters the flow of the show
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Turtle Talk with Crush, creating by Joe’s team, has been an influential interactive attraction 33
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