Armchair Imagineering: Let's Play Some Games!

Consider this a follow-up to last week's post about the singular Legends of Frontierland.

Legends was, for all intents and purposes, a LARP.* It was free to play and almost entirely freeform, with potentially infinite complexity once you got past the simple surface mechanic. It was group-oriented and loaded with continuity. The reward for playing was the game itself. And it garnered an adoring consistent player group.

The Adventureland Trading Company, operating at the same time, was almost entirely its opposite—pay-to-play, revolving around standalone prefabricated tasks comparable to scavenger hunts. There were no consistent characters to interact with; in fact you hardly had to interact with anyone in order to do it. The reward for completing each task was a nice little iconic souvenir. I didn't try this one, but according to those who did play, the souvenirs are great value for the cost, and you got the satisfaction of “winning” them, not merely buying them.

Each was well suited to its setting, of course—on the one hand, people coming together to community-build with few resources besides the various skills they brought with them, and on the other, individuals exploring in search of rare prizes. You might think of the two games as the ends of a spectrum...at least, it's hard to envision a game being more extreme in any particular and still being a viable theme park activity. So perhaps obviously, ever since the summer of 2014, I've occasionally wondered what games for Disneyland's remaining themed lands might potentially be like. Which lands are better suited to something in the Legends mold and which would be better served by something modeled more after Trading Company? What other permutations of basic game features would be possible? Is the Dilettante going to answer any of these questions, or is she stuck in rhetorical mode again?

Wait, what?

Main Street, USA

Now, for starters, Main Street needs consistent traffic flow. They couldn't do a game that requires dozens to hundreds of people to spend the whole day just milling around the area taking up space. So a Legends-level LARP** wouldn't do. On the other hand, Main Street is easily Frontierland's equal, or even superior, in terms of simply resembling a setting where people might live—in fact you can pick up on audio evidence of some of its residents, including their names and occupations! Any hypothetical Main Street game should absolutely incorporate these details that already exist.

Then, too, while Management probably wants to keep people moving along the street itself, they love to have guests spending lots of time in the shops! So it would be worthwhile to make the shops part of the game.

Here's a modest proposal: The Main Street Detective Agency. A private eye has set up an office in town, and he needs assistants to help him build dossiers on the townsfolk, just so that if anything goes awry in this idyllic slice of Americana, he can get a head start on sorting it out. Signup is done at the Main Street Police Station, which is not only thematically appropriate but already serves a similar function as the signup and meeting location for the guided tours.

So would it be free or pay-to-play? Both! You would start with the basic assignment, which would involve inspecting the much-celebrated Main Street Windows and using what you find to answer questions on a sheet of paper. Questions like “Who sells clothes for large men?” and “Where is the Bait Shop?” Upon completing it, you would get a cheap button (like the kind they just hand out for your birthday) and the option to move on to more challenging assignments, which would cost money. For these, you would have to do more digging—listening in on the Market House telephones for clues (they could add new recordings for game purposes) and even interviewing Cast Members playing the parts of townsfolk. For completing these, the prizes would be more substantial, such as well-made “detective badges” worn as pins. A top-level assignment might involve solving an actual town mystery in the form of a Linked List Clue Methodology.

New Orleans Square

Now, this one I can see being a mystery right from the start...a supernatural mystery! People are always trying to draw connections between the land's two big tentpole rides—even Imagineer Eddie Sotto got in on the act at one point, though his plans never came to full fruition***—and this game would give them a chance to be correct.

Speaking in the broadest possible strokes, I'm envisioning something like a “search for pirate treasure,” with clues scattered all over New Orleans Square and weaving together motifs from both Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion, as well as other locations in the area and even perhaps other parts of the park. It would be competitive, with the first player (or group) to solve the mystery on a given day winning the “treasure.” In order to prevent repeat players from memorizing the game and winning automatically, the clues and solution would change daily—obviously this would limit the shelf-life of the game, but I think that by having a “pool” of several dozen clues to draw from in different combinations, it could be stretched out over an entire summer.

This one would have to be pay-to-play, with each participant receiving a small souvenir, and the day's winner getting something more valuable to represent the treasure.

Critter Country

This one gives me trouble, I'll admit. The point of any of these games is that they should allow you to take on the role of a citizen or resident in the themed land where they take place, and I can't quite make that work for Critter Country. We, the guests, are humans, not critters. We can only ever be visitors here. Combine that with the limited space and piecemeal attraction theming and there's just not much to tie together into a game that uses the land as a unified entity.

But I will say that it would have to be both simple and probably free to play.

Fantasyland

Now Fantasyland, I feel, could support the most complex game of all—maybe not as freeform as Legends of Frontierland, but with potentially more elaborate “official” gameplay, thanks to the high attraction count, ties to animated movies, and the overall popularity of fairy tales and fantasy. In particular, I think a game where the players get to define themselves as spellcasters would be an instant hit. The basic idea of different schools or traditions of magic keyed to the major attractions is straightforward enough, and this might be the ideal scenario for a game that was on the whole cooperative instead of competitive. Fantasyland is where you get the most references to the Disney Villains; combining magical talents in order to defeat them soundly could be the game's season-long goal (with smaller goals available on a day-to-day basis for short-term players).

Naturally, being a game with continuity, this one would have to be free to play, for the same reasons as Legends. Nonetheless, it could bring in extra revenue, simply by having each magical discipline assigned its own distinctive emblems and selling associated merchandise that can be worn during play. They tried a bit of this with Legends, but it wasn't as inspiring as it could have been. I didn't see many people wearing the color-coded bandanas and whatnot.

Mickey's Toontown

This game, on the other hand, I think could be almost entirely freeform, without even the gimmick of a surface mechanic. Tell players they're now Toons, give them the option to buy a cheap inflatable toy mallet, and turn them loose in Toontown. Wouldn't that be fun? A legal nightmare, but fun!

Tomorrowland

Here we have a bit of a quandary.If it's difficult to pull Critter Country together in a way that makes it a unified setting for a roleplaying game, it's damn near impossible to do this with Tomorrowland, which is being pulled in four or five entirely different directions by disparate IP branding. Yet Disney clearly wants us to think of Tomorrowland as a singular place...otherwise they wouldn't have made a movie about it.

Even if we imagine Tomorrowland as a thematically consistent “city of the future,” I have a hard time thinking of the sort of game that would take place there. It's supposed to be semi-utopian, which disqualifies any premise based on significant conflict. It would be appropriate to have a game revolving around science and novel technology, but that might be a tall order for the average guest. Interplanetary exploration would likely be easier for guests to wrap their heads around, but would be harder to simulate.

So I'm a bit stumped.

So what do you think? Would you play any of them?

* Live-Action Role Play

** Bask in my talent for alliteration! Bask, I say!

*** Google “Jean Lafitte Mega-Theme” for details.