Disney Parks and Environmental Storytelling

April 25th, 2008 asgoodwin

In our last reading, Game Design as Narrative Architecture (First Person pp. 118-130), the author Henry Jenkins quotes Don Carson, a Show Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering. The section was about Spatial Stories and Environmental Storytelling. I was having trouble classifying the difference between the two types of storytelling, because I didn’t have too much experience with Half-Life or Halo, which are the two stories most often used as examples, but this made me think about what I know about the Disney Parks and how they treat both storytelling types.

Disney Parks have a lot of great examples of environmental storytelling. In a way, the park can be seen as a game where you are the main character - many of the designers talk about how it is designed to be like a giant movie that you can actually walk into. Take Disneyland (DLR) in California or the Magic Kingdom (MK) in Florida, for example. There are seven major areas - Main Street USA, Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, Toontown, and Liberty Square in MK and New Orleans Square in DLR.

In none of the “lands” are there progressive, linear story lines. Sometimes they show up in rides, but the land is all about “environmental storytelling.” The entire land conforms to the idea. There are details that you might not consciously notice but contribute. Walt Disney was very strict about having the worlds always stick to the story they were telling, and nothing should be out of place. There is a story about how he once saw a cast member in Tomorrowland clothes walking through Adventureland. He stopped the man and asked him what he thought he was doing? The man said he had to walk through Adventureland to get to his car. Promptly after that, Disney had a road built around the outside of Disneyland for cast members to use to get around, and when he built the Magic Kingdom, he built it over a first floor called the “utilidor” which cast members can use to get around the park out of sight.

There are bits of progression in the lands of Disneyland, but they aren’t obvious. For example, at the start of Main Street USA there are gas burning street lamps. By the end, they are electric. Other details add into the “story” of Main Street, the innovation of technology that came about from the turn of the century to the more ‘modern’ day. There are many challenges to this environmental storytelling you might not have in a game, where you can cut from one scene to another. In Adventureland, there is a statue of asian water buffalo which were chosen, because if they were seen from Frontierland on the other side of the building, they would look close enough to longhorn cattle to not stand out. Also, all of the music in Disneyland is on the same tempo, so that it can unobtrusively blend from the music of one land to another as you walk under a bridge from Frontierland to Fantasyland, or Main Street to Adventureland.

On the other hand, many of the rides are Spatial Storytelling. Like how games scroll along, the rides tell as story in what you see as you travel through the ride. Like a movie or a game like Mario or a Chinese painting on a scroll (as the author uses as an example), as we are taken through the space we see the story unfold past us in a more linear way.

It is neat to see these details that we so associate with games in an actual real life example.