It’s interesting to note the similarities between theme park design and video game design—both involved worlds that appear “realistic”, but feature many of these tricks to make them more entertaining, more easily navigable, more conducive to discovery. In both cases, the worlds can feel “big”, but a are in reality much compressed from what their real-life dimensions would be, to keep people from getting bored/tired while moving about. Both involve intentional variety/uniqueness, features of interest at regular intervals, shortcut travel methods, landscape features to encourage travel to desired locations, etc.
In many ways, this kind of design thinking could be useful in designing real-world spaces as well.
I've been puzzled by how much more entertaining exploring cities, forests, or whatever is in games compared to the real life. I play games like GTA or Skyrim and, after being awestruck by their vast, beautiful open worlds, go outside to explore the real world in the same way and get bored much faster. Why is that? Real life has more detail and complexity, so real world exploration should be more interesting, right?
You probably have the answer there. Even if the real world holds a larger number of interesting things than a game, the distance between the things is so much larger than in games that I have to spend most of the time just navigating between them. In games, I can get from one interesting thing to the next in minutes or seconds.
Nintendo actually spent a considerable amount of time balancing exactly that metric for Zelda Breath of the Wild, according to a presentation they did in 2017. They replicated some Osaka landmarks in the engine to gauge how to space landmarks in the final game.
>go outside to explore the real world in the same way and get bored much faster. Why is that?
you don't have to exert any physical effort in a video game. once physical exercise comes into play, the brain calculates an "is this worth it" equation. i'm guessing most decide it's not.
This and video games generally let you move at an impossible speed. Sprinting, fast travel, riding a horse a full gallop forever, and so on, never encountering hindering traffic, red lights, or such.
As an avid runner and hiker, I have the opposite perspective. A view from a mountain or hill top or distant location in a forest that I had to work to get to is, to me, much more enjoyable than one that is easily accessible. When you happen upon another person, there's a shared acknowledgement of not just the view, but the effort you each put in to get there.
In a video game, you don't: get (actually) injured, get tired, get sweaty, get attacked by mosquitos, walk through poison ivy or have a nasty encounter with a thorn bush that leaves you hurting and/or itching for days, get sunburnt, spend 30+ minutes just commuting to the interesting thing/area only to realize you forgot something important and will now have a miserable time unless you want to burn an hour-plus round-trip going back for it, have to lose fifteen minutes finding some place that'll let your kid use the bathroom before they piss themselves and ruin the rest of the day (mainly a core-of-major-cities problem, sure, but those are also top-tier fun-having destinations), discover that the website lied and actually the thing you're here for is closed today, break expensive equipment if you make a mistake or are unlucky, soak your shoes and socks and have to take out significant time to solve that (very boring) problem or else just suffer the rest of the day, et c.
Game worlds are also usually far more compact and smaller than the real world, even the "big" ones. If it took a couple real-world days to walk to the top of the Throat of the World in Skyrim, while you're combo sweating-freezing in heavy clothes, legs are dead by halfway up, and most of the time nothing's happening and also much of the time you're in clouds obscuring the best views... it'd be a lot less fun. Instead, in the actual game, you can run the "7,000 steps" in what, 15 minutes if you ignore enemies?
It's telling that most of these games have rather high movement speed, and often also some form of teleportation, despite also having the advantages of being tailor-designed to be beautiful and fun and much smaller than real-world equivalents. Skyrim experienced at a realistic walking/hiking pace and without any form of time-skip fast travel would be a lot less fun. Ditto the recent Zelda games. Link basically runs everywhere, even when you're not "sprinting", and can perform incredible and quick feats of climbing to get over or on top of obstacles. Plus the whole paraglider thing. You climb a tall cliff in real life, now you gotta climb back down....
You can probably blame a city planner for that. Some cities are actually explorable in the way a video game or theme park is. However, a large problem with many modern cities is they aren't human scale which makes exploration arduous. Cities like Tokyo, Lisbon and Amsterdam are amazing places to just wander around and explore.
I also like exploring video games. I love hiking and the outdoors, too. To me, the difference in appreciation and experience is that one is art and one is reality. Art has been arranged by another person, typically for aesthetic effect, and so anywhere you look you’ll see something designed to elicit a reaction from the viewer. No such thought has been put into reality so despite the stunning amount of detail, it takes work and luck to find the beauty in it. One of the reasons we might say a particular moment in real life was “like a painting” or “like a movie”.
"I play games like GTA or Skyrim and, after being awestruck by their vast, beautiful open worlds, go outside to explore the real world in the same way and get bored much faster. Why is that?"
Because if you take an NPCs stuff in real life, it turns out vastly different for you than in the game.
" the distance between the things is so much larger than in games that I have to spend most of the time just navigating between them. In games, I can get from one interesting thing to the next in minutes or seconds."
This isn't quite true. Because there is more detail in real life, the distance between things is shorter than in games. The difference is that games only focus on what most people are interested in, so the distance between those things are smaller. The game is designed to be gratifying, and thus it needs to be near instant. Just like the algorithms feeding us Facebook content, it's designed for your engagement. There are plenty of interesting things in the real world if we are interested in the details.
videogames also attach rewards/values to objects around you, so exploring is valuable in an explicit, observable way. you'll gather up whatever rocks or mushrooms you find because they're useful for gameplay. or if you don't find any items, you might see that part of the map is now unlocked/marked-as-explored/game progress meter ticks up.
but the rewards for real world exploration aren't explicit. sure, maybe you found a cool mushroom that was fun to look at, but what's it worth? you probably cant go sell it for 2 gold pieces or eat it to gain 5% of your health back.
Possibly because all that novelty and interesting stuff in the real world is owned by someone. In an open world game I can go explore someone’s house or steal a limeware platter but if I do that in real life I’ll get arrested. Not fun.
> In many ways, this kind of design thinking could be useful in designing real-world spaces as well.
They already are used. The difference in urban design, which is what I assume you mean by real-world spaces, is that in theme parks and video games, the designers effectively have complete control over the entire system from top tp bottom and bittom to top. In urban design, that is not the case and one needs to deal with decades and centuries old organic, ad-hoc design and evolution of the urban system.
This is exactly the thought process that led Walt Disney to want to build a planned charter city in Florida, the “Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow” (EPCOT), inside of Disney World. The plan didn’t survive his death, but the extraordinary legal privileges required to build a charter city survived until very recently.
Once you start to notice it, it becomes impossible to ignore. For me, I always notice how silly-short travel distances are. It's only a few minutes' walk between "major cities" in Skyrim, and it's one of the reasons I don't find any game (outside of VR) "immersive".
Some games do a better job by means of a different cheat (though I'm not sure you can even call it that). For instance, making it clear you're only accessing a very small part of the city. PoE2, among others, does a great job of this with a "city map" that shows you moving through many districts before reaching the spot where the story actually takes place. Distances, meanwhile, can be demonstrated by other means. The old Fallouts, for instance, had the in-game date swiftly advance while travelling in the overworld.
There's actually a classic GDC Talk about this very subject!
They talk about using big visible markers (called weenies) for orientation and to help draw players. Having seemingly multiple paths that actually end up in the same destination. Tiny rewards for exploration. Good stuff
I was just thinking that it was an interesting pivot for Disney from movies/animations into theme parks. You can tell that they obviously put a lot of thought into "experience engineering", and I was kinda wondering what the connection was.
Obviously the IP provides a nice jumping-off point, and there are broadly similar themes around building a new reality etc. But it's not intuitively an obvious leap from moviemaking to theme park building.
The idea of theme parks as "real life video games" provides some continuity to that.
The real saving grace is that the website tells you where everything is in the warehouse, and nothing stops you from going in the "back" door, picking up what you want, paying and leaving.
I particularly love the fuel of lost souls, when you leave the bazaar of decoration, were they compress all the customers shoulder to shoulder, reminding them of the competition before they are allowed to storm the self service furniture pack storage area.
There's another trick used at Disneyland (I'm not sure about the other parks) is there's very few long lines of sight in the park. The walkways connecting the lands have curves with trees and theme elements blocking your line of sight on the inside of the curve.
The short sight lines help keep everything in view the same theme so you're not jolted out of the "Land" you're in. It also helps keep the park from looking full. A majority of the park's crowd is outside of your line of sight at any given time.
Notice how crowded Main Street or New Orleans Square feels during a show/parade vs five minutes after it's over. You'd think the crowd got bussed out of the park.
It's even cleverer when combined with the forced perspective so the short sight lines never really look short. The forced perspective of nearby buildings tricks you into thinking distant buildings are farther away than they are.
I took the backstage tour at WDW and they were proud to point out that they even balance the background music between lands to create a subtle transition and not jolt you from one theme to the next. Even the placement of walkway and landscaping elements is a gradient from one to the other.
How do they do it, like the imuse system of in mokey island 2, where different music layers get added and removed as you move aeound?
(See https://youtu.be/7N41TEcjcvM)
It's not quite to that level, but they carefully study the acoustics and position all speakers so the transition is gradual and not jarring. They might also choose songs that have elements of both lands to use in areas close to the transition point.
Semi-related: if you go on the Disneyland version of Pirates of the Caribbean, there is a short section of caves right between the first and second drop. The section only lasts maybe 10/15 seconds, but it's where you hear A Pirate's Life for Me for the first time in the entire ride as a kind of foreshadowing of what you will see later. Well, as soon as you go down the second drop, which is not that steep or long, the music is completely gone, and all you can hear is the atmospheric ambient music for the "main" cave section. I always found that incredibly fascinating, since you can turn around and see the previous area, but you cannot hear the music at all.
EDIT: there is actually something that is closer to iMuse, at least the way it was implemented in the Special Edition. Their parade routes are divided into multiple zones, and the soundtrack is equally divided in sections for each float. They use a positioning system to determine where each float is, and feed the correct section of the soundtrack to that speaker zone. It works incredibly well, and you don't notice it at all while you're there.
Each section is basically the same length, the whole thing is (mostly) in the same exact key, of course it's the same BPM across the board, and each section has an intro/outro that can act as transition points to mix into the next section. They can also, of course, loop ad libitum if the parade were to stop for a few minutes. Really cool stuff!
There's another reason that this is done. It's to separate the different copies of the characters. There are multiple of all of them in every park, but by keeping the sight lines contained like this there can be 9 Mickey's all over and you can never see two at the same time.
I took my kids to Disney last year for the first time. We went to go see Anna and Elsa. The line moved fairly quickly, and the group ahead of us went in through a closed door. Almost immediately the door opened again and we were pulled through. Rather than seeing the princesses, we were in a hallway of the house with ~8 doors, and immediately shuffled into one of them where the princesses now were. On the way through, I tongue-in-cheek asked the attendant what was behind the other doors. "Broom closets."
Can confirm, there’s only one Mickey, they time their exits and entrances and have a park coordinator (mostly women under the Mickey costume, by the way, because of costume size categories).
On a related note, if you're ever playing a sandbox game that lets you build and are wondering how to make your builds look better: this is rule number 1. In Minecraft, don't allow for seeing anything further than 20-25 blocks away (which also means very few straight paths). Block the view with anything and your base will magically start feeling much bigger, much more immersive, and become something you actively want to walk around.
Things are also designed so that in Disneyland you cannot see any structure outside of the park (although I think there might be some part where you can see some high-tension power lines). It was a mix of design and strong-arming the zoning commission of Anaheim.
That is a very impressive aspect. After reading about the sight lines at Disneyland however many years ago, I've started actively looking for them when I've visited. It's impressive what you can't see but know must be there (power lines, access tunnels, etc).
Insane attention to detail goes into every part of the park. I worked on a technology project for one of the attractions mentioned in the article, and a constant theme of the meetings and implementation was the guest experience and maintaining the feel of immersion. Lots of customization and fabrication went into anything that could be potentially visible to guests.
What's hilarious there is Japan is otherwise filled with vending machines on every street and street corner selling all manners of drinks and occasionally fancier things.
Vending machines at venues are great for convenience, but reduce opportune for upselling. Which is why I find it annoying when movie theaters don’t have them. 90% of the time, I just want a bottle of water. But they are determined to make me wait in a line in the hopes that I’ll buy some candy and popcorn, too.
I recently visited Disney Sea and found it very strange that food carts (10+ popcorn flavors each in different carts) never sold drinks. They were 1 item only. Popcorn or ice cream or nuts but only that 1 item. Drinks were only available at the very few vending machines or at full restaurants. I think they are missing a big upsell opportunity.
I was at Magic Mountain recently and got very annoyed that there was nowhere and nothing that sold just beverages.
Every option was a tens of minutes wait behind people ordering food.
I did eventually find a cart selling, also inexplicably, only pre-packaged frozen slush type treats. Serviceable enough for my thirst. Yet, still, for no discernible reason, the very short line took tens of minutes.
I had a pretty lousy time despite it being one of my favorite places on earth. It was hours of waiting and being thirsty for a grand total of four rides only to see all the queues shut down an hour before close.
It's the unix philosophy applied to food service: do one thing, and one thing well. (Whether they have lived up to the second part of that is in the eye of the beholder).
I was always impressed by their "two line" system where there's a visible short line outside of the ride and then once you've spent 30-40 min in that line, you turn the corner and are shown the real line which is another 40-60 min wait. For really popular rides, there's sometimes 3 line tiers.
I was just at Disney and noticed this too. Their rides are also designed to quickly load and unload people, so their lines are always moving relatively quickly. The lines also don't always follow a simple switchback path, so it's easy to lose track of where you are in the line. This all makes waiting a little less discouraging.
Universal Florida does this really "well" with their Hagrids ride. There's an outside part, then you wander around in a room, and only then discover the real line -- the three days you'll spend wandering around in tunnels with no sight lines to help you figure out how far along you are.
I would dispute the title. "How the design of Disney parks affects our perspective" should really be "How the design of Disney parks affects our perception of space"
There is no such thing as 'our' perspective any more than there is an 'our' laws of physics. Perspective is immutable. The perspective of now will be the same for everyone in one million years time.
> In summary, a 22 year old Mbuti man named Kenge accompanied Turnbull on a drive to the mountains. Kenge had supposedly never left the Ituri forest before. On seeing some buffalo in the distance, he mistook them for insects. As the car approached and their apparent size increased, Kenge became confused as to how they transformed into buffalo. He made the same mistake with a boat at some distance on a lake, thinking it was a small piece of wood.
> Turnbull’s explanation was that, having spent his life in the forest, Kenge had not been exposed to large vistas and so had never acquired the ability to adjust his percpetion of size for distant objects. This explanation seems to be accepted without question; I’ve read it in a psychology textbook and, I think, in one of Oliver Sacks’ books.
This excellent anecdotes refers to the perception of space. As a proud possessor of monocular vision, I think a lot about spatial perception. Also a huge fan of Oliver Sacks and also A. R. Luria (neurology) and Rudolf Arnheim (perceptual psychologist and artist).
However, perspective is a different issue. Specifically, it is a mathematical model for projecting 3D space onto a 2D plane.
This seems like a quible, but as someone who teaches perspective, I have a lot of trouble with people coming to my class with a misunderstanding of what it is. 3 point perspective is not the only spatial system out there, but it is the one that has had most impact upon European art, and it is also the most exact. It has not changed a bit since it was invented by Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham 1,000 years ago, and it is likely not to have changed even when we all have devolved into radioactive lizard rats in 1,000,000 years time.
I reread your response three times and I still don’t understand the difference. In the real world, we have an intuitive understanding of how big something should be and if we see two objects that look the same size, but if we know that they aren’t, we infer that one object is more distant than the other.
Isn’t that what the 3 point perspective in art trying to simulate?
While most people would map the art to their real world experience or in the article the Disney buildings, the guy who has lived in the forest I assume wouldn’t have been fooled.
Yes I’m self aware enough to know that my opinions come from one semester in art class
over 25 years ago.
> In the real world, we have an intuitive understanding of how big something should be and if we see two objects that look the same size, but if we know that they aren’t, we infer that one object is more distant than the other.
I see your point.
As a painter, physiology and perception play as significant role in my treatment of space as perspective. My original quibble was that these terms are being confused with each other.
We infer space from many cues. When I paint a pastoral landscape (e.g. trees on a hill) I create depth by employing a whole lot of spatial devices. Most significantly by considering the depth planes (foreground, middle ground etc) and their relative differences. These differences can be of average lightness, local contrast (i.e. dynamic range), edge sharpness (distant objects tend to be more fuzzy), hue (distant objects tend to be more blue) etc etc.
None of these have anything to do with perspective. However, the moment I paint a building, it is 90% an issue of perspective. Perspective is a device for projecting cubes onto a picture plane. The 3 points of 3 point perspective relate to the three visible sides of the cube. It is a mechanical process entirely within the domain of physics. This is why Ibn al-Haytham's treatise on optics simultaneously addressed perspective.
> Yes I’m self aware enough to know that my opinions come from one semester in art class over 25 years ago.
> There is no such thing as 'our' perspective any more than there is an 'our' laws of physics. Perspective is immutable. The perspective of now will be the same for everyone in one million years time.
As well as "perspective" as in linear perspective, the word can also mean something like a way of considering or understanding something [1]. I suspect the article's title may be a play on these complementary meanings.
This would likely be 'one's perspective' not 'perspective' per se. However, generously, even the later can be understood as referring to the 'science of point of view'.
Yes, another example of this is "sailors eye" or the ability to determine bearing and distance qucikly either in relation to or with an absence of landmarks.
It's possible to use Google Street View (or at least, panorama photographs that have been shared with Google) in some locations of the Disney parks and for some reason none of the faces have been blurred. However everyone looks thoroughly miserable in these photos. I wonder if it's because of the amount of walking involved, or if its because they've realised they essentially got scammed out of thousands of dollars for a multi-week holiday in hell?
Or maybe it's a candid snapshot and no one goes around with expressions of elation all over their face all the time.
And "thousands of dollars for a multi-week holiday in hell"? That's a lot of exaggeration in little space, the kind of hyperbole the Imagineers at Disney would create.
While, it will probably be a few thousand dollars depending on accomodation, travel, and the like, that's true of a lot of travel.
Multi-week? C'mon, Disney itself offers multi-day packages. Hell, on their site, you can only select up to 5 days worth of tickets. So on the outside, it's a week. And if you don't want to visit certain parks, you can probably do it in 2 to 4 days. Last time I went, we split time between Disneyworld and Universal and only stayed about a week.
As to hell, there is one thing I really appreciate about Disney and it's their absolute commitment to the bit and the buy-in they get from their employees. The dedication to the guest "experience" is nothing short of amazing. I also find it very honest in its way. They make no bones about this being performance first. The person serving pretzels, their job isn't serving pretzels, their job is to play the part of someone who lives to serve pretzels. It's fake, but it's honest about it. I don't think less of movies simply because they contain fantastic elements. We both know what I signed up for when I buy a ticket to see Transformers. Similarly, when you buy a ticket to Disneyworld, you both know what you're signing up for.
The longer I live, the more I wonder if traveling is something people actually enjoy. (And this is much worse, since its this faux-traveling)
There is quite a bit of pain from simply moving your body long distances. The reward must make up for this.
Beautiful views are the least rewarding part, those moments are fleeting, and there are plenty of more beautiful things you can see on your phone without leaving your bed. This is basically the goal of Disney, throw in some short physical hedonism from rides, and that is the experience. Only thing I'm missing is that having your own children smile will cause some intense pleasure thanks to biology.
However, call me a Platonist, but the best part of traveling is the knowledge. I remember physically feeling awful during my travels in Europe. The transportation was long, the food was so small portions I felt ill (until I learned you could get tuna sandwiches everywhere[Weight lifter walking 12+ hrs/day]), and outside the Sistine chapel, I had seen these views before. However looking back on it, and my favorite moments was learning about the history and learning about the area. Being physically able to walk from Aurelian walls to the colosseum and the forum was enlightening. A history book couldn't teach me this.
Traveling physically hurts, but it doesn't mean it wont be looked back fondly.
For what it's worth, I don't think your experience is universal. Fair enough, walking around all day does create some bodily discomfort, but personally I walk around in my home city a lot. So I'm pretty used to that and the discomfort is generally minor.
But in particular, you seem to not have a particularly good time with the food while travelling, which for me is often the best part of traveling while there, and the most memorable after the fact. In some ways, I travel to eat, and maybe that's a common alternative to your experience, to be fair, I think I'd like traveling far less if the food was generally bad.
I'm not fond of traveling either. For me to go somewhere, there has to be a friend (or friends) or family there to visit. I dislike going somewhere just to go, and have found that typically, it's not worth the experience. I travel to see people, not places or food.
I think that makes a lot of sense, both of my parents hate traveling. The point of my post was just to suggest that the parent's opinion wasn't universal, that some of us really do actually like traveling. There are obviously aspects of it that aren't great in the moment, cramming into a plane, jet lag. But generally those aspects are worth the rest of the experience.
I'm curious why you consider going to Disney faux-traveling. It's an opinion I hear often (and I once held) but everybody seems to get there for different reasons.
In many ways, this kind of design thinking could be useful in designing real-world spaces as well.