How did a YouTube channel dedicated to the craft and history of theme parks become an amazing educational tool for game developers?
That’s a question I found myself asking after watching a new video from Defunctland, a YouTube channel created by the pseudonymous “Kevin Perjurer,” an anonymous individual who has crafted many intricate deep dives into the history of Disneyland, Universal Studios, and other theme park empires.
It’s not just because some videos—like one video diving into a Tomb Raider-themed ride at Paramount King’s Island—directly intersect with the world of video games. It’s because Kevin’s research and interviews on high-level designs from the parks reaches beyond what you’d see in game development textbooks. In the case of Disneyland, developers are often taught to examine the parks’ approach to level design like its use of “weenies” to attract audience attention and guide their movement throughout a three-dimensional space.
Disney is often eager to showcase what’s worked well in its various parks—but will rarely share any lessons from failures or misfired experiments. Defunctland’s latest video dives into the “broken promise” one of the company’s long-running initiatives: the effort to create “Living Characters.”
“Living Characters” aren’t strictly defined (a fact Kevin bemoans a few hours in), but you could describe them as an evolution of animatronics. They’re efforts to bring fictional characters to life in the real world in a manner that can organically interact with park guests and aren’t just a person in a costume or mask. They’re the non-playable characters (NPCs) of video games brought to the physical world.
Kevin describes these characters as a “broken promise” because Disney has regularly made (legally defensible) claims that these characters will populate its parks and resorts, but they often appear in a diminished or limited fashion. The reasons are multilayered, and include the challenges of operational logistics, the realities of R&D, and the company’s appeals to investors. The full video includes a breakdown of the time Imagineers terrified executives with a giant mechanical dinosaur and an an amazing swipe at Walt Disney for getting his just desserts by being reanimated as an animatronic.
While Kevin picks through the graveyard of these Living Characters to scrutinize Disney’s claims, game developers can loot the open coffins for a number of surprising lessons pulled from real-life NPC design (you aren’t allowed to say that’s ghoulish if you work on a game where players loot dead bodies).
Character choice matters
The living character initiative showed that a character’s personality—and audience familiarity with them—plays a major psychological role in how players interact with a game or feature.
One of the successful living characters that made it from R&D all the way to Disney’s parks is Turtle Talk With Crush, a theater-based experience where guests can chat with the laid-back turtle character from Finding Nemo. The attraction is effectively digital puppeteering, where a human actor chats with a theater full of families while a digital model of Crush tracks their movements, using a mix of canned animations and real-time tracking to create the illusion of an animated character physically interacting with the real world.
According to Defunctland, Turtle Talk With Crush evolved from two other prototypes: Stitch’s Picture Phone and Mickey’s Toon Elevator. The latter experience was Disney’s first attempt at letting guests talk to interactive animated characters, featuring its flagship mascot Mickey Mouse. The technology was repurposed for the Lilo & Stitch-themed attraction Stitch’s Picture Phone, which was tested with guests in Disneyworld’s “Innovations” experiment in Tomorrowland.
The choice to put Stitch and Crush in these experiences wasn’t purely about film promotion. Defunctland says that Imagineers faced concerns over what we now call “brand safety” for putting Mickey in such an exposed position—but more importantly, that guests might have a genuinely bad time if Mickey behaved in a way they didn’t expect.
Image via Disney
A throwaway comment or awkward social encounter wouldn’t fit their image of Disney’s magnanimous mouse, the upbeat perfect host whose behavior and voice has been documented through a century of animation. Because only three actors (including Walt Disney himself) played the beloved mouse, a park actor who couldn’t nail the slightest nuances of Mickey’s voice could unsettle guests.
Stitch, Crush, and other Park animatronic park characters speaking with guests don’t carry that baggage. More importantly, their personalities afford flexibility when interacting with guests of different backgrounds. “There’s no expectation Stitch would provide any level of attention or emotional concern,” Kevin noted in his video.
If a guest is rude to Stitch, it’s in-character for him to have a sassy retort or hiss and walk away. Crush has the vibe of a laid-back California stoner surfer and any sarcasm or diversions from errant guest behavior come off as playful and relaxed since he doesn’t seem to care about anything. These also soften the blow of technical glitches or awkward pauses in conversation, letting the mere marvel of speaking with a cartoon do the heavy lifting.
That freedom has limits. Defunctland noted how strange it is that so many park actors hit on guests, and too much riffing can feel like a bad comedian doing crowdwork, flattening what makes these characters special. But the mere existence of a “sweet spot” for character interactions and the popularity of features like Turtle Time With Crush shows is measurable data about how the right personality can make or break a player’s experience.
There’s a thin line between attraction and distraction
Why doesn’t Disney’s Star Wars-themed Galaxy’s Edge attraction feel like a fully-inhabited fantasy world? What if it’s because filling it with Living Characters could disrupt the flow of the park?
Fellow video essayists like Jenny Nicholson argued in her popular 2024 video about Disney’s now-shuttered Starcruiser hotel that it felt like Disney had made big, expensive promises then cut corners by putting the most premium role-playing experiences in an expensive hotel, one of many cost-reductions measures across Disneyland and Disneyworld. Kevin echoed this argument in his Defunctland essay.
“When you spend years promoting a land as a living, breathing place where you can immerse yourself in a Star Wars story, and build an environment that appears to be designed for Living Characters and interactions, and you accomplish this for one day when the media is there to review it, regular guests get a little upset,” Kevin noted, also laying out how the division between different division’s marketing and operations budgets shape when and where characters appear.
But in the video’s closing moments, he spotlighted design nuances that may show Disney should have never made those promises to begin with: Living Characters are crowd-drawing attractions unto themselves, and their realism may be so mind-boggling it undermines any role-playing potential.
In 1963 when Disney unveiled the Enchanted Tiki Room attraction, it promoted the restaurant full of animatronic talking birds with a single animatronic barker sitting outside the building that caught guest’s attention. Guests paid attention all right. They gathered around the parrot, blocking access to the attraction.
The animatronic was quickly shuffled away.
Image via Disney
In 2017 Disney tested “J4KE The Droid,” a Star Wars droid autonomously wandering through Disneyland’s Tomorrowland area of the park. Guests would block J4KE’s path to take photos with their kids. Kids walked up and kicked and grabbed J4KE.
In the last couple years, with the rollout of the new “BD-X” droids (distant cousins of BD-1, the companion droid from Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars Jedi series), park attendants have had to constantly follow the little duck-like machines as they waddle through the park, again warding off errant children and managing the crowds that stop to watch them.
These moments spotlight a fascinating tension in game design. In live-action or digital role-playing experience aliens and droids wandering a town are meant to feel organic, even boring. They simulate the everyday life of a fictional world and players treat them as such. In a park, they are amazing creations that draw the eye away from events.
It’s easy to avoid the complexity at the heart of this dynamic. If you asked ChatGPT for a key lesson, it would likely say “designers need to consider player traffic when designing levels.”
Kevin’s observation is that humans are flawed creatures and these flaws make Living Characters in public spaces untenable. “Even if Mickey Mouse could be a fully autonomous bipedal animatronic with character-specific language learning model and perfect speech synthesis, that Mickey could not shake your hand when you enter the park and walk with you to get an ice cream because the costumed Mickey [actor] can’t do that. He would be mobbed.”
But developers would benefit if they can zoom out to the biggest picture possible. My takeaway: context can drastically alter the very nature of a game experience, and the subtle differences can sometimes be difficult to perceive or describe. A small group encounter with a Living Character is immersive. A crowd encounter is a show. The instance when one moment becomes another is blurry, and it can be easy to not see when the context has shifted.
Human psychology, however well documented, is remarkably fickle. But it can still be harnessed to make your game sing when artificiality struggles to keep up.
The human touch matters
I’ve written before about my experiences at Galaxy’s Edge and how actors playing the characters of Kylo Ren and Vi Moradi offered different flavors of how to delight and deter guests in the park. Defunctland drove home how, despite the passion from Disney (the man and the company) for autonomous interactions, human choices are what delight players and park guests.
Again, watch my interaction with Kylo Ren for a sample of this dynamic at play.
As an interaction between a would-be Supreme Leader and undercover Resistance operative, it’s boring. As a personalized moment for a guest at the park, it felt amazing.
Defunctland highlighted what was almost the opposite reaction of this from video of the guest experience in the Starcruiser hotel. The hotel rooms contained what may have been one of the most advanced Living Characters ever created: a maitre’de droid named D3-09. D3 was an advanced interactive chatbot who interacts with guests as part of their adventure.
“Most guests reported growing bored with D3-09 quickly, while finding the interactions with the human performers rewarding and engaging,” Kevin explained. Children apparently found the droid more engaging, but children also “think costumed characters are real.” He laid out how most concepts for designing artificial intelligence operate on the idea that the human interacting with the machine will be operating in good faith. But they may not even need to be operating in bad faith to undo the magic. It can evaporate if they’re confused or inattentive.
Human interaction—direct or indirect—is much more sticky. In an in-person encounter, an actor can look at the people around them and intuit what behavior will provoke a certain response. In game design, developers customize different interactions with some sense of what the player will feel on other side. Even in procedural content or emergent multiplayer experiences, the strongest emotions emerge when one human looks at another over some distance and thinks “I want this person to feel this way.”
“Achieving the illusion of life does not necessarily require fully-autonomous free-roaming self-directed character agents,” Kevin said in his four-hour video essay’s final moments. “You can create something that feels immersive and alive without expecting guests to shift their behavior in a major way.”
