Disneyland: The Ultimate Zone?
I rarely hear about a talk at any game conference that I really wish I could have been at. This is one of them. Scott Rogers gave what looked to be an incredible talk about how the design of Disneyland can inform level design in games. You can find the slides on Scott Rogers’ website and notes on the presentation at Cory Doctorow’s website. Great, great talk, and absolutely right.
I love that type of illustrated game design. A couple years ago I was at Universal Orlando looking at the theme park – and rambling a few times to my wife – from the same point of view. I’m such a nerd. Path control is certainly interesting. Those places are built to grow anticipation. Hence, it brings out the adventure.
Oh…tagged you for the Honest Crap Award over on the blog (http://makkaio.com). LOL. I’m sure I’m not the first.
Checked out the slides, looks like an interesting presentation.
The thing that I immediately liked him pointing out were what he calls “weenies” that attract the eye from afar and make the player want to move toward that object and check it out. I always love it when a game pulls that off well.
I think you could actually take some inspiration from that layout and apply it to quest design as well. I don’t have to return to the center of the park after each ride in order to go on to the next one. Each attraction is its own entity with a beginning and an end. I feel this is how quests should be designed as well. You start one, and it’s actually an “adventure” with multiple steps within part of a zone, with the final step giving you the biggest reward. You do all of these steps as you go along, without ever returning to “turn it in”, it just advances when you complete the requirements of the step you’re on. When you complete it, that’s it, you’re done with that area and you move on to another one within the zone. This allows the player to log on and play in small sessions if they want to but still feel like they completed something, whether it’s progressing the current adventure they are on or completing it.
This idea of actually having various condensed stories within a single zone would also take away much of the tedium that some people associate with leveling. Why should questing be a “grind”? The truth is it’s only a grind because of how boring most quests are. You can’t think about the grind as much if you are constantly seeing a story moving forward and unfolding before your eyes.
The only MMO to sort of do this was DDO, but every “adventure” ended up just being an instanced dungeon and that’s not really the way to go.
You might find the website http://www.themedattractions.com worth looking at. It’s been on my “worth reading” list for some time. Some interesting papers on there.
Oop. http://Www.themedattraction.com (singular)
Terrific article Ryan! Thanks for letting us know about it.
For a long time I’ve felt that designing cities in MMOs was akin to creating an accessible amusement park as opposed to creating a frustrating maze.
Interesting read – after *just* getting back from Disneyland a few days ago, I wish I had seen this before I had gone. I will agree Walt did incorporate some of the points he noted, but interestingly (being the kind of person I am) most times I just looked at the map, I’m at point A, need to get to B, fastest route GO! (And when you have 3 kids & a wife in tow, it doesn’t lead to a lot of freedom to adventure down some of those unmarked trails.)
Vald