In the queue

Any service involves queueing, whether it is a doctor’s office or public transit. The queue is the area where you wait for service. Sometimes you are literally in a line and other times you are more of a herd, and sometimes you’re lucky enough to arrive at the point of service to find no one waiting (instabus!) but queueing is a fact of life. Waiting to ride an amusement ride typically involves a queue, and this becomes sort of the folklore or fiction of the activity. For instance, when Disney Parks and Resorts released location-aware devices that would provide audio description for people with blindness and low vision, a late-night comic joked that the device would say “you are in a long line”.

The queue also provides opportunities to shape the guest’s understanding of the attraction and thereby affect their subsequent behaviour. For instance, waiting for a carnival ride gives the guest a chance to observe the nature of the ride, the dynamic forces, the apparent enjoyment factor and behaviour norms. So powerful is the queue experience that even curmudgeons are often surprised at finding themselves won over within the first 100 steps at a Disney park, and the Disney consultation to U.S. “Secure Borders, Open Doors” program of Homeland Security noted the opportunity to shape perceptions of international visitors to the U.S. within the first 100 steps off the plane. What occurs within the first 100 steps at a Disney Park? Guests queue for bag check, then ticket check, then are rewarded with a grand perspective down the main promenade. This conditions guests to behave in patient, orderly, compliant manner in order to receive enjoyable sensory experiences.

In what we call “dark rides”, or attractions that are situated inside enclosed buildings away from the view of queued guests, the queue does not provide an opportunity to preview the ride, so many attractions use thorough warning signs with language like “this ride vehicle will suddenly accelerate, stop, turn, climb and drop” or play video “spiels” on monitors during the queue. Guests are often with companions, however, and not paying full or durable attention to signs and video messages. When wait times are long, ironically, the effect of static warning information may even be reduced, as guests are trying to numb themselves from the monotony of standing in line by tuning out their environment and finding amusement within themselves or their group.

To counteract this and take advantage of unavoidable queue time, there has been growth in the use (and retrofit installation) of interactive queues in recent years, some more effectively than others, to engage the guest and put them into a frame of mind that suits the nature of the attraction that follows. The queue of the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey evokes the mystical, while the queue of the Simpsons ride prepares guests for the playful and even demented show that is to follow and the nature of the theme enables a themed safety briefing that makes the warnings memorable by making them fairly explicit and funny. Humour is also hinted at through the animated portions of the queue to the new Star Tours. As someone who is not very familiar with Star Wars, I benefited from some context in the queue area to gain some understanding about what kind of narrative would be involved. The baggage scanner set piece particularly amused me, but I was still surprised at the humour in the ride itself.

Some interactive queues are unintentionally funny. The highly successful and popular attraction “Soarin'” at Epcot routinely has long standby times (and is a good use of the Fastpass system) but on a recent short visit, the Fastpass times available were not possible for us, so standby it would be. We were pleased to see the playful video game installations on large wall monitors that were controlled by the collective body motions of the “players” in the queue: bouncing virtual beach balls, smashing blobs, and in one funny game, steering birds through a canyon maze. The queue herds in front of each of these large screens were given the opportunity to “train” a virtual racing bird by learning the control actions: lean bodies to the left to steer the bird left, lean to the right to steer right. Each screen displayed a bird of a different colour and the birds would race to the finish line on the strength of the teamwork and coordination of the guests in the queue herd facing each respective screen. Just as the game said “ready, set, race!” the queue moved forward. We were now in front of the next display screen on which a different bird was racing. Surely our body motions would control this bird in the same way, but no one leaned left or right. As the virtual bird in front of me smashed into and bounced off the canyon walls, I scanned the rest of the queue and was amused to see that the entire queue had stopped playing the game and were all passively watching virtual bird carnage. Each queue herd had a vested interest in the bird on the screen we had just left behind and no interest in the “strange” bird in front of us. While it was funny and a bit instructive of human nature, the interactive queue didn’t quite prepare the mood for the “Soarin'” attraction or fully occupy the wait time, but did improve on past standby wait in its non-interactive former queue.

The “Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” at Magic Kingdom features a highly interactive queue that incorporates multiple play stations that keep the guests moving along the queue, require minimal explanation to the point where the sign “Pull” (a rope) is more playful than necessary. Wheels afford turning and produce a response that confirms the action was correct. The image shows a bead-on-wire installation familiar from any dentist’s office waiting room that accompanies guests down the queue to the switchback turn and back the other side as the guests approached the ride. Other elements in the queue include “honey” covered touch screens that revealed Pooh’s friends when the “honey” was wiped aside. The 30-minute queue passed quickly both for children and adults (even this one without a child companion).

Queues are inherent in the medium of entertaining through amusement devices. Including the queue in the scope of design not only occupies the guests in a more entertaining way, but allows the attraction designer to provide more back-story and context, situate any symbolism and hint at highlights, and cue guest perceptions and condition expectations for later reference. Expect to see interactive queues proliferating particularly in theme parks. The question will be, how can we implement these concepts in “iron parks”–amusement parks that focus on thrill rides with minimal theming, and in queues of carnival rides? Stay tuned, and please remain in your seat until the ride comes to a complete stop!