Research Post: Crowd Control in Amusement Parks and Games

The purpose of this research post is to look into the mechanics behind how Amusement Parks control the flow of people and how this correlates to the flow of the user in game design.

http://faculty.smcm.edu/acjamieson/f12/ThemeParkManagement.pdf

"...For example Larson (1987) argues that for fast food customers, satisfaction in a single-queue system may be higher than in a multi-queue system, even though customers wait longer in a single-queue system"

Analysis - This is interesting, this analysis suggests that even though a multi-queue system is faster, customers are actually more satisfied when in single-line queues, even if it takes longer. This is relatable to games because a lot of people complain about general mechanics of games like Call of Duty, but in essence it doesn't work if these things are changes.

"Poor management of theme park capacity may result in considerable undesirable customer waiting or underutilization of the available capacity"

Analysis - If the park is managed badly, it doesn't meet it's potential. This is a thing that happens a lot with games. For it's design, if managed badly the execution will be bad, even if the game was a solid concept, as for gameplay this helps balance the game, there is a max potential which the player desires and the gameplay and reward is set around this potential and trying to get the most of it.

"Customers also have varying degrees of tolerance for waiting for thrill rides during different hours of the day-adding further to the complexity of park management"

Analysis - People are very affected by small aspects, time is a large aspect. With games such as DayZ that runs similarly to the time of day in real life. This means real time actually affects gameplay, similarly with Animal Crossing, which abuses certain hours of the day where their target audience will be free from work to complete tasks in game that are only available around that time.