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S01E18: Glossing up Galaxy's Edge, Part Two
49 Plays1 year ago
Galaxy's Edge is great and all, but... is it everything we hoped it would be? Join Bob and game designer Joe Mares as they take in Ghost Town Alive at Knott's Berry Farm, and then think about how Disney could incorporate some of those ideas to make Batuu the place we all want to be!
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Transcript
Star Wars Galaxy's Edge: Expectations vs Reality
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome back to the Star Wars Cleaning Crew, where we are talking about Star Wars Galaxy's Edge, the planet Batuu at Disneyland or Walt Disney World. You go there, it looks great. It feels like a Star Wars environment. The rides, both of the rides, I think are great. Fantastic. But when they were talking about this whole idea, it really felt like you were going to get the opportunity to come in and live your Star Wars story. You could become a character and interact with people and go on missions. And that part of it has fallen flat. So I've been thinking long and hard.
00:00:47
Speaker
What can Disney do to improve this? So for all of the Star Wars fans, we can have that experience that we've been looking
Meet Joe Maris, Game Designer
00:00:54
Speaker
for. So we started this conversation last week. I brought in my friend, Joe Maris. He is a game designer and he actually worked on what was essentially the prototype of this interact with people experience at Galaxy's edge. ah It was called Legends of Frontierland, and then they wound up taking what Legends of Frontierland turned out to be and making it into something called Ghost Town Alive at Knott's Berry Farm. Joe had never come back and revisited it, so I took Joe out there. We played Ghost Town Alive, and then we spent some time talking about it.
00:01:32
Speaker
So we're going to go back to the conversation with Joe. But before we do that, I want to share a little bit of the experience that we actually had playing the game because it's relevant to the rest of the conversation.
Interactive Role-Playing at Ghost Town Alive
00:01:42
Speaker
Remember, it's a Western town. What happened with Joe and I when we started playing the game was we got sworn in as citizens of Calico, the town where this all takes place. And at that time we were told we could then have the right to own property to operate a business. And we started thinking, Oh, that would be fun. How could we do that? Well, long story short, we wound up getting this idea because both of us are involved in corporate education. That's how we know each other.
00:02:09
Speaker
ah We got the idea that maybe we would buy the school house and turn it into like a for-profit school for adults and we would make money doing that. That would be our business. So we decided to approach the school teacher, Ms. Vicki, and here's how that whole thing started. because I ain't that much smarter than them. So it can be hard to bestow wisdom when in fact I have very little wisdom to bestow. yeah right So they end up teaching you? It is. it's like a It's like a cyclical relationship I guess. And we just get letters that one of our kids don't know math well and I know for a fact I'm his math teacher, which explains a lot. Would you be interested in teaching but teaching adults who are paying you to learn something?
00:02:58
Speaker
Yeah, I like getting paid, but I don't know if I'd be any smarter, but I like getting paid, so. Well, you know what? we're That's how we know each other is in that business of teaching grown-up stuff. And we're not that much smarter. And you're not that much smarter? No. Oh, OK. What kind of things you teach? um Like, you know, how to use different types of machines. Oh, that tactile thing. That type of thing. And also, like, how to how to lead each other and talk to each other and be nice. Oh, my gosh. I'm great at public speaking. Publix, there you go. I can teach Publix speaking and I also, I like touching things. I like tactile things, like machines and things. I can do that for sure.
Negotiations and Quests in Ghost Town
00:03:38
Speaker
yeah So from here, Ms. Vicki called in her school master, Mr. Noble. We had a conversation. We realized that it was actually the town that owned the school. So if we were going to buy the school building, we would have to buy it from the town, but he was the agent of the town and in charge of the school so we could negotiate a little bit. So we spent some time negotiating how much would the school be worth and we settled on a hundred dollars. So let's pick it up again from there.
00:04:08
Speaker
If can come over the 100. Yeah, you know, there is an essay office. OK, and I mean, I don't care how you get them right now. You know, if you feel like someone in town might know a way to get money, then that's up to you. That's your choreography. OK, and you know this. Okay. So you see what's happening here. The actors are just kind of winging this and they're coming up with ideas to support us in our story. They say, however, you can get a hundred dollars. Go try to find a hundred dollars. There's a bunch of ways around town in the context of the game that you can get that much money. So we said, okay, we're going to go for that. And then we asked, what do we need to do once we've got the hundred dollars? Yeah.
00:04:50
Speaker
Okay, so we just need to come up with $100 before. And then who would we talk to at City Hall? to Well, you can get come here, collect my signature, or get a document from Town Hall, bring it to me, I'd sign it off. All right, we'll see if we can do it. Yeah, so you can talk to Abigail on there, she's usually in charge of a paperwork. Okay, when that's going very good. All right, all right, well, we'll see you back again. yeah All right, thank you so much. no Okay, so you pick up the vibe. Long story short, we wound up fulfilling the quests and we got the deed to the schoolhouse. It was a lot of fun. We had an absolute blast doing it, interacting with some amazing improv actors.
The Art of Improvisation in Guest Experiences
00:05:28
Speaker
Hope you pick that up that Ms. Vicky and Mr. Noble, those were actors hired by Knott's Berry Farm to play these characters and to interact with us and pretend like we were actually in this Western town.
00:05:40
Speaker
And wouldn't it be cool if you could have that same experience at Star Wars Galaxy's Edge working with Star Wars characters? Okay, pause on that for a second. Let's go back to the conversation with Joe and get a little bit more insight on his experience as a game designer and what he thought about where Ghost Town was and where Star Wars Galaxy's Edge could be. I've seen i've seen people really get into the ah the rails that we set. So they would really be really get into, because you could put people in jail in Legends of Frontier Land. And so they would get excited when their friend was in jail, or they'll snitch on him so he can be in jail. And they really got into that. But they didn't go out and do what we did today, which is we sort of like made our own path. We did. Like, I don't think they really wanted us to buy the school. yeah But they left it open enough so we could believe we could buy it. And I felt like you did a really good job of like creating a whole storyline where even though there's an actual storyline going on of like these two rivals, like buying the school and making it profitable um was its own thing. And they facilitated that to their to their credit. But I don't think the Disney version would have let you get that far. And and I think to their credit, like I could tell just because I've been around systems online. Yeah, I could tell that the Abigail was she the mayor? Yeah, or the the she was the judge. The judge Abigail. I could tell the judge didn't want us to reach the end of our story. Yeah, but she still kept she kept creating um ah Weenies for us to follow to finish our story But we but I could tell that she wasn't trying to really end it but she kept ah she kept the balls in the air Yeah, and I thought that was that was really Like they must have learned over the last few years like oh okay. Here's how you handle this situation. Yeah, but I Mean to that end of
00:07:41
Speaker
making us feel like we had all sorts of autonomy. Yeah. You know, it was it was kind of crazy, the the level of of storytelling we were creating for ourselves just off the fly. Yeah. um But I still feel like we probably were on much tighter rails than we even thought that we were. Well, for sure. Yeah. Because it felt like I think if I was a kid or I wasn't really, if I was just in the moment, yeah I think it it all would have felt way more real. But I was noticing that like, okay, this guy has this relationship, this asset has this property to it. So I could tell that they they were just fulfilling certain requirements.
00:08:20
Speaker
And which is good, because that's what you need. you need because Because these improvisers are doing the majority of the work. yeah they're they're They're really selling the relationship and they're making the ah context pay off. And if but if you start adding a ton of variables to what they're doing, they're just they're not going to be able to yeah do it. It's too much weight for them. So i think it's good that they keep it all very simple, their relationships. You know, it's interesting that you said when you were first working on Legends of Frontierland and you wanted them to have phones or some other technology to keep track of yeah the stories and the people, and they were like, no. ah And so it sounds like you basically just built that into the story, that like each character knew what they knew and could convey that to guests if they came up, and it really wouldn't matter what that guest had experienced or not. Yeah, yeah. It's um it's kind of funny because like, I mean today, or it's never a good example for me, but I actually have done a ton of improv. yeah And um the one of the head imagineers there, he he had a huge ah improv background. So like i we were very simpatico. And in improv, like instead of um
00:09:35
Speaker
Instead of like trying to know everything about every relationship and where it can all go, you just know what your character does and what he responds to. OK, so now I think we're starting to hit on some of the key ideas that Disney could use to make Galaxy's Edge more of that interactive live your Star Wars adventure that we all want.
Enhancing Galaxy's Edge: Lessons from Ghost Town
00:09:58
Speaker
at ghost town alive we've got a bunch of actors they're very skilled very skilled at improv they are not memorizing an entire elaborate storyline there is a storyline that goes throughout the day about every hour some event happens and it's all kind of leading up to this hoedown at the end of the day so there is kind of a meta story as it were
00:10:21
Speaker
But when little things happen, like Joe and me going up and saying, Hey, we want to buy the school or things like that, it's something that they can roll with. It's not like they have to send a message out to everybody at the park that says, Hey, these guys are on this storyline. We've got to configure everything to that. No, they just acted in character. They sent us to talk to one other person, talk to miss Abigail. When we talked to her, we had to explain to her what we were doing, just like we would if she was a real person. You know, there were very simple props that we interacted with. At one point we had to steal a diamond and so we got the diamond. We found it. It was just a fake diamond. Uh, one of the tools that these actors use to communicate with each other when they need to. It's just little handwritten notes on yellow paper. It seems like yellow paper is kind of the code so that the other actors know, hey, if this is a message coming on yellow, it's a real message from one of the other actors and I should build on it and I should play with it.
00:11:19
Speaker
I think you could do an experience like this at Galaxy's Edge and engage the people who want to be engaged in it without overwhelming the people who don't want to participate in that because it's working over at Knott's Berry Farm. Here's what I would suggest that they do. I would suggest they create a whole bunch of new characters who are citizens of Batu. These should not be characters who have major roles in the Star Wars universe. They shouldn't be characters that we know. You'll still have those in Batu. You'll still have Rey and Chewbacca and the Mandalorian. They'll still work, walk around and they will still walk around because they're going to be besieged by kids wanting to meet them and get autographs and take pictures with them and so on.
00:12:05
Speaker
So we still go ahead and we let that happen. You can still go ahead with the Disney Play app that we talked about last week and let people independently just go through and scan things and stuff like that. But I think you could hire a bunch of actors and kind of set them up in the same way where they interact with people and maybe they say, Hey, you know, I could use a little bit of help with something. um I've got this particular piece of a motor. Could you take this over to Hondo's garage where the Millennium Falcon ride happens to be? And there you're going to find this other character and give it to them. And they're going to give you some money that I need you to bring back to me.
00:12:45
Speaker
You're talking very simple props, a piece of old machinery, just some plastic Star Wars credits that you go back and forth. You could give people that type of experience. You don't have to worry about micromanaging the whole thing. Let people interact. Let people come up in improv and just play within the rules of the world. and have a good time and therefore tell the story that they want to tell. Just be a little bit freer with it. Let people have a good time. Let the actors have a good time. Let things unfold organically and see where it all goes. I think doing something like this would really help improve the Galaxy's Edge experience.
Fan-Driven Experiences at Galaxy's Edge
00:13:27
Speaker
Now I will say this, I know that there have been some kind of fan-driven experiences. So like the entire Life Day celebration that happens now at Galaxy's Edge every November, that was completely generated and started by fans. ah There's a couple other experiences like my pal Dano at the Dano channel. He runs these Batu bounty hunts where he you know comes into the park and he sends people out. I do wonder if A bunch of us fans could actually make this happen. Could we just start dressing up kind of in costume and playing with us and seeing if it works or how fast would Disney kick us out? I don't know. Well, we'll see where that all evolves.
Listener Feedback and Closing Remarks
00:14:09
Speaker
Anyway, I hope that you've enjoyed this. Uh, we'd be interested in your thoughts. Drop me a note, drop me a line. Tell me if you think I'm right. If you think I'm crazy.
00:14:17
Speaker
if you've enjoyed this type of thing. Otherwise, we'll be back to our regular old Star Wars news reactions and all that next week. In the meantime, thank you for being with me. Hope your kitchen is clean. May the force be with you. Like, subscribe, tell your friends. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.
00:14:49
Speaker
Oh yeah!