I’M BACK

from America with a whole heap of development advice and ideas, and frogs. Mainly frogs.

Quick note before we go in deep – yes Severed Heads are playing live in Germany next year. Yes, we are extremely likely to perform just once in London, details to follow. Tickets for the VOD Festival sold in about 6 hours, I guess on nostalgia for black trousers and shouting. I thought for a little while that we were required to go back to 1979, but VOD have asked for more pleasant mid 80’s stuff. Nevertheless it won’t be the American set. London I think will be different again. More later.

My missus and I have been on a bear hunt in Florida and Las Vegas. Florida was mainly about the big theme parks, while Vegas is Vegas. I’m currently writing a very large debrief document – here’s an excerpt where I try to set up a scale for the experiences we encountered.

The designed space/rules/agency etc. is the experience.
Depth – the extent to which immersion is maintained and remains detailed as the participant navigates the experience. Diagon Alley is deep. Caesar’s Palace is shallow.
Scale – the range of object sizes in the experience, from the staging, down to texture. DA has a wide scale – there are streets of buildings each of which contains furnishing and objects.
Cohesion – the consistency of the palette: colour, sound, texture, branding… Omega Mart has low cohesion while Star Wars is high.
Story – the extent that the existing story is conveyed. The story may rely on external texts e.g. a Star Wars immersion has pre-known aspects – e.g. that Jedi are the ‘good guys’.
Agency – the extent to which the participants are able to comprehend and knowingly interact with the experience. Gambling in a casino is NOT agency because it doesn’t connect with the story.

Like any art form you have to have some art history to create upon. As a visit to the Louvre will aid the painter I had to queue for attractions to experience the theming, on-boarding, ride, off-boarding and of course the exit through the gift shop. Attractions made in the 1970’s have a different culture and audience to those of the 2020’s yet they are entwined. Movies become rides – rides into movies. There are traditions and innovations and audiences, sound design, dynamics of motion … so much to learn.

I was also hoping to catch up with friends in Florida but Hurricane Milton swept across the state, closing traffic for a few days. I think this meeting will never take place in the physical world 🙁

Back in the day the fairs were built to last 6 months – lots of plaster and wooden frames. It took a while to find out that much of the modern park is steel frames with coated fibreglass. 10 years?

One common theme in experience design is “Polynesia” which of course is not the same as Polynesian culture. I would prefer to call it Tiki, which is an American fad brought back by the sailors of World War 2. It dwardles on racism while nimbly stepping back into American folk culture. The device used to navigate Universal’s Volcano Bay is called a Tapu-Tapu – which just felt a little off. But I’m here to learn, not proclaim and Tiki culture brings many excellent outcomes.

We found a working Tiki bar in Las Vegas – The Golden Tiki is arguably the world leading venue at least in theming, from the animatronic birds filched from Disney (that tell dirty jokes) to the celebrity shrunken heads.

We were mainly in Vegas for Omega Mart by Meow Wolf. A psychedelic supermarket selling weird distortions of banal produce – where you can climb down the rabbit hole (e.g. walk through the shelving) to discover the toxic machinery that forms the food on sale. Meow Wolf are the young blood of immersion design, re-energising the entire artform – BUT they have some faults – no idea of a palette, every colour all at once, possibly due to it being an art collective – and they have only shallow or deep engagement with the story, with not much scale in between. They’re expanding rapidly city by city, there will be a stumble and learning soon.

But while in Vegas – it is Babylon. Gigantic structures from history, their only purpose to draw you in to gamble. The Eiffel tower – gamble. Pyramids, the Circus, Ancient Rome – gamble. A pretty poisonous bug. Their use of lighting to stop time is amazing to experience.
Enough for now.