The latest take on the alternate reality game

Created by Walt Disney Imagineering — the think tank and creative group that dreams up, designs, and builds attractions for Disney parks — The Optimist is the latest take on the alternate reality game. ARGs are a type of multi-platform experience that first received widespread attention back in 2001 with The Beast. That Microsoft-produced title, designed to promote Steven Spielberg’s A.I., mixed movie posters, websites, and real-world events as it led players through a murder-mystery plot that bled out of their computer screens and into the real world.

The Optimist is linked to the mysterious Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird project Tomorrowland, but according to Scott Trowbridge, vice president of creative at Imagineering Research & Development, building an ARG wasn’t an isolated experiment. It’s just one step forward in the company’s larger pursuit of interactive experiences that put the audience at the center of the action — ones that can stretch beyond the historically niche ARG audience and reach more people than ever before.

"What we’re spending a lot of time making sure we get awesome at are deeply immersive, participatory experiences," Trowbridge says. Disney has arguably had the "immersive" part of the equation down since the original Disneyland opened in 1955, with rides like the Jungle Cruise — and countless others since — becoming classics. As the park has evolved, the attractions have grown more ambitious, but logistics and technological concerns have largely limited Imagineering to creating fixed stories that audiences experience as they move through a ride. Now, Trowbridge says, that’s changing.

"More and more, technology is allowing us to do this. I think culture is kind of inviting us to do this, and frankly, I kind of believe there’s a changing form of narrative," he says. Expectations of what a story can be are shifting, allowing Imagineering to experiment with experiences where the guest has an active role in determining what happens next. Think of it as an open-world video game that you play in real life. "They can become much more immersive and engaging because the stories are much more personal," he says. "You’re participating in the story, not just being told a story."

"You’re participating in the story, not just being told a story."

It’s an evolution that doesn’t just impact the audience; it requires a dramatically different approach from creators as well. "You’re not authoring a specific fixed narrative," Trowbridge explains. "You’re authoring a story system, a story world, that has certain fixed points but that allows for various degrees of collaboration, various degrees of co-authorship." It requires that the creators behind the scenes — "puppetmasters" in ARG parlance — listen and observe, so the audience’s actions can help evolve the story. "Optimist was an example of that, where there were some spaces designed in the structure for that audience voice to be influential."