The Legends Panel held during this year’s IAAPA Expo featured a trio of writers with attractions experience. Attendees heard from Bob Weis, former president of Walt Disney Imagineering; Margaret Kerrison, author of “Reimagined Worlds: Narrative Place-Making for People, Play and Purpose” and member of the team who created Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge for Disney parks; and Joe Pine, author of “The Experience Economy” and co-founder of Strategic Horizons.
The panel, moderated and organized by Bob Roberts of BRC Imagination Arts, covered several topics in the 90-minute session, including authenticity in attractions, the role of technology, what has (and hasn’t changed) in the business and their future works, including Weis’ novel “Ghost Dog,” which spins off his favorite attraction, the Haunted Mansion.
It was a blend of war stories and inspirational tales. Here are three topics about which the threesome shared thoughts and observations.
On what theme parks can learn from video games
KERRISON: “I grew up in the ’80s. I played a ton of Nintendo, and I tell the story how as a kid, as a 7-year-old or 8-year-old, playing Oregon Trail and feeling like I have such power and agency to help guide my team to death or survival. As a kid, that’s very empowering. So to think about immersive experiences that give that sense of power and agency and personalization and customization and giving it my perspective and my point of view of where I want to go, what I want to do, the things that the people that I want to meet and talk to … it just opens up a world of possibilities that gaming has given us for decades. So how we create, like, physical worlds – both digital and physical worlds – that can help to capture a lot of that excitement we feel when we explore these worlds and get lost in it. And how do we feel that sense of urgency?”
WEIS: “I think games are our closest brethren. They’re closer to us in the immersive-experience world, I think, than movies or animation or books or anything else because they endeavor to put people into the world, let them play roles in that world that they can act out themselves. And yet this is a very authentic world that they’re putting them in, but the guest brings themselves to it, as opposed to a directorial didactic project where a director tells the story to you. In the game, you are in that story and you are responsive and the world responds to you.”
PINE: “When you play games you have agency, and that is not always the case in the themed-experience industry. … Because you have agency, it makes it more easily transformative as well and that’s something else that we can learn about, how it enables people to transform.”
On working with specific intellectual properties and finding the audience
KERRISON: “So you have someone at the very end of the spectrum, just wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and then you have someone who’s wearing a Star Wars T-shirt. And then another one, maybe dressed as a Mandelorean. And then you have one who was full on cosplaying a Star Wars character. Every morning when we walked to our desks or cubicles, we were reminded of different types of people would come to this land and to be reminded that we are going to serve all of these people, and it will be an equally enjoyable experience for all of them.”
WEIS: “You’ve got to be able to find a pretty wide swath of audience, age group, interest and so you can’t start out by saying, ‘I’m going to serve the people who know the whole canon,’ or you know, are going to be looking for every detail. It goes the same with Disney. You can’t assume that everybody’s a Disney fanatic, looking for every little hidden Mickey. There are people who were quite happy to let their other family members enjoy that experience and they want to read the New York Times, right?
PINE: “I saw the Smithsonian’s ‘America’ exhibits a long time ago. I saw it when it opened in Tokyo. You came down this big ramp. … There’s a big American flag, big video, Ray Charles singing ‘God Bless America.’ And I was next to this guy from Japan coming down and he said, ‘This makes me proud to be an American, and I’m not even American.’
Finally, simple advice
PINE: “The advice that I would give is to really understand what business you are in and what the possibilities are for creating greater value in your business. And bottom line, what I want you to think about, the raison d’etre of your existence, of whatever business you’re in, is to foster human flourishing.”
KERRISON: “My advice is never underestimate anyone. I think a lot of people in this room have felt underestimated before in their lives, and I think it’s something that we default to when we see someone who’s not like us. So I want to say be as kind and generous and thoughtful and intentional of all of your connections and all the time that you give to someone else, because they are people, too, just like you.”
WEIS: “You have a friend, a family member, a next-door neighbor, an employee, a colleague, a collaborator, someone out there with some crazy dream they want to pursue. Tell them to chase after it.”