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?
