Live To Write Another Day by Dean Orion (free ebooks for android .txt) 📕

a lot of fun. If your brain is wired to think in terms of stories that can be told on multiple levels, like mine is, then you probably have the interactive gene as well as the writer gene—and a potential future telling these exciting new kinds of stories.

 Theme Park Experiences

In recent years I have spent a great deal of time working for Walt Disney Imagineering, creating interactive experiences for Disney’s theme parks and cruise ships. One of the most interesting things about WDI is that it actually started as WED, Walter Elias Disney Enterprises and, as the story goes, was the passion project in the back of Walt’s shop, the shop in this case being Walt Disney Studios and the passion project, Disneyland.

Walt’s vision of building the “happiest place on earth” obviously turned out pretty well, but it’s the creative spirit of Imagineering that I think is his real legacy, his dedication to give artists of all different stripes, from illustrators to ride engineers to rock sculptors, the freedom to dream big and believe there’s no limit to what they’re capable of, which is why I have always felt right at home there.

The nice thing about working for any part of the Walt Disney Company is that you never have to look too far to find great storytelling. When you’re talking about theme parks, however, you’re talking about storytelling of a slightly different nature. This is thematic storytelling through the creative use of a wide variety of different disciplines: architecture, engineering, and advanced technologies, as well as set design, signage, sound, music, live performances, and all different kinds of interactions with walk-around characters and park operators, or as Disney prefers to call them, “cast members.”

Every ride experience also tells its own unique story—a story that has been thoughtfully conceived throughout the development process and informs every aspect of the finished product. My favorite example of this is Expedition Everest, a phenomenal rollercoaster at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida. The ride features a monstrous Himalayan peak that can be seen from almost anywhere in the park, and casts the legendary yeti of Asian folklore as the star of the show. Everything about the experience, from the museum-type artifacts and discarded mountain gear in the queue, to the railroad-themed ride cars, to the appearance of the abominable snow beast himself, is meticulously structured and designed to tell a satisfying story.

Ride queues in particular present interesting opportunities for storytelling. One of the many projects that I’ve done for WDI, Soarin’—Living Landscapes, an interactive experience located at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center (also in Orlando), presented just such an opportunity.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of waiting in a long line to enjoy a ride at a theme park, I’m sure you would appreciate the work that we did with this one, because at the height of summer this particular wait could be as long as two hours. So the challenge here was to turn part of the queue, which sits in a 150-foot hallway, into an entertainment venue, thereby turning the time spent by the waiting crowd into something fun and memorable.

After a fairly extensive technology exploration, we decided the most effective approach would be to use “computer vision,” which is the same technology now used in the Microsoft Kinect video-game console. Using cameras to sense the body movements of our guests, we would then be able to create a series of short, three- to five-minute, graphical video-game-type experiences (projected onto movie-theater-sized screens) that they could engage in using only their bodies as an interface. The difference between our project and what Kinect would do some three years later is that we would use five cameras, each of which would capture up to fifty people, while the Kinect would use only one camera and would be able to look at only one person at a time. Our goal was to create a mass audience gaming system in which up to two hundred fifty people could participate at once!

As the creative director, writer, and producer of the project, I led a team of engineers, artists, and interactive designers through a series of brainstorming sessions. Over a number of months I would continually write and rewrite draft outlines detailing the proposed guest interaction of the five experiences that we would eventually produce and install at Epcot. Our most ambitious effort, called Balloon Odyssey, is perhaps the best example of how we were able to tell an interactive story using this very unique venue.

When the game begins, a hot air balloon sits atop a beautiful vista next to a shining castle, adorned with sparkling jewels. All is well in paradise. The kingdom is peaceful and serene. But then suddenly, ominous music rises, as a “bandit balloon” enters the frame, steals the jewels by sucking them up with a giant vacuum, and makes off with the loot (Act One). Following this, the “hero balloon” is launched, sailing after the bandit in hot pursuit. It’s now up to the fifty guests standing in front of each screen to steer their hero balloon through a series of obstacles (by controlling it with their collective body movements) in order to recover the stolen treasure (Act Two). Mythological creatures, craggy rock formations, and fierce weather threaten the hero balloon every step of the way, until the guests eventually bring it in for a safe landing back at the castle, after which each team receives a final score based on how many jewels they were able to recover (Act Three).

I’ll be the first to admit that Balloon Odyssey is a pretty unusual narrative driven in a most unusual way, but like all the games in the Living Landscapes installation, it’s a remarkably satisfying experience, one that I’m proud to say has run every single day, 365 days a year, since it was installed on July 4, 2007.

 Transmedia Storytelling

Before the proliferation of the Internet in the mid-1990s, entertainment properties pretty much stayed in their own neat little boxes. The only consistent crossover