Are We Having Fun Yet?

Amusement parks, crowd control, and load-balancing

Pay for play

The news that Disneyland Paris is now selling Fast Passes — a skip-the-line ticket — for about $10 per person per ride has theme park watchers debating whether this is the destiny of all Disney parks and, if so, what it means for the future of theme parks.

You may not care about this, but the creation, maintenance, and operation of immersive built environments is an old art form with enormous cultural significance and few practitioners. The curious pleasures of an immersive built environment go back at least as far as the Sun King’s palace at Versailles and the winding path of built environments from elite follies to mass entertainment runs in parallel to the changing currents in populism, commodification, and participation.

The urge to immerse yourself in a virtual world is as old as the first tale told before the first fire. Today it finds itself expressed in a myriad of ways, from LARPs (live-action role-plays) to escape rooms and virtual-reality worlds to multiplayer games, but the Disney theme parks (and their most ambitious competitors, including Holland’s Efteling Park and the global Universal Studios parks) are literally the most concrete expression of this deep human desire.