Pap the
Disney Gamer's Highlights: The
Carousel of Gaming Progress
So there's a great, big,
beautiful tomorrow
Shining at the end of every day
There's a great, big, beautiful
tomorrow
Just a dream away!
Welcome
everybody to not just the first
Gamer Tuesday of 2013, but the
first Days of the Week article
of the new year! I love the new
year's celebration as it always
fills me up with hope and
optimism for a new chance to
start anew and pursue better
things off in the horizon. In
honor of this jolly holiday, I
will be talking about a specific
scene in Disney's Carousel of
Progress and see how it relates
to gaming's own progress.
For those not in
the know, The Carousel of
Progress is an
audio-animatronics attraction
which celebrates the progress
mankind has made over the
decades and how it has affected
the lives of the average
American family. It follows the
lives of the Progress family,
headlined by patriarch John
Progress as they see their lives
both become easier and more
complicated with the
advancements made in technology,
detailing historic events such
as the invention of electricity
and the airplane to the
audience. The show first debuted
at the 1964 New York World's
Fair as Walt Disney's Carousel
of Progress to great success.
Disneyland would later receive
the show as part of its high
tech attractions, where it ran
till 1973. It was then moved to
the Magic Kingdom in Orlando,
Florida where it continues to
delight park guests to this day
with its simple yet positive
outlook on, well, progress.

Walt Disney himself supervised
the creation of this attraction,
and featured the musical talents
of the Sherman brothers, best
known for their work on films
like Mary Poppins
Over the years,
the attraction has seen some
changes in order to present the
ever evolving lifestyles of the
decades. To get to where I will
be talking about, here is a
basic rundown of the
attraction's storyline and how
it operates. Guests enter a
theater which actually rotates
from scene to scene. Each scene
depicts the Progress Family in a
different era and holiday,
showcasing the world events that
lead to the lifestyles we now
live in. The very last scene in
the show takes place in a very
near future setting where the
Progress family are celebrating
Christmas.
This is where we
will be focusing on today. As
already explained, The Carousel
of Progress is a celebration of
mankind's ingenuity and desire
to make a better life through
its own inventions and
discoveries. All the previous
scenes reflect just how far we
have come since those early
days, and how sometimes tenacity
and perseverance can create
things that can change
everyone's lives significantly,
sometimes for the better and
sometimes for the worst. The
future scene represents just how
far we can go in terms of
technology in every aspect of
our lives, from personal comfort
to ultimate leisure.

As we stop in
the future scene, the
now-teenaged son James is
playing a video game with his
grandmother. Right away, we see
that this video game is not what
we have gotten ourselves used
to. It is a virtual reality
space shooting set that the
family got for Christmas. James
proudly declares himself to be
the resident flying ace. Then,
he switches the footage over to
the TV so that grandma can play
and show everybody how it is
done. Both don virtual reality
goggles that allow them to look
around their surroundings and
get a better feel of the digital
environment they are in.

I am sure that James and grandma
would suffer from headaches and
complain about how every game is
red and not quite virtual
It is very
curious that as we enter the
future scene the first thing we
see in terms of progress through
technology is a virtual reality
video game. Back in the early to
mid-90s, virtual reality was
seen as the next step in
gaming's evolution, and shows
like Star Trek: The Next
Generation fueled the dreams
of those that wish to literally
be transported to an abstract
world from the comfort of their
living room. Several video game
companies tried to cash in on
the possibilities by creating
their own take on what was then
somewhat impossible to attain.
One of the most well known, and
sadly disastrous, attempts at
this was Nintendo's Virtual Boy.
Billed as a 'handheld system,'
players would place their heads
inside the goggle-like system in
order to witness 3D gaming in a
'virtual reality' setting. As
promising as the idea sounded on
paper, the execution was left to
be desire. The games could only
display two colors, red and
black, and the game library was
quite small due to the lack of
third party support. Due to
this, the system was quickly
retired within a year, so there
was no great big beautiful
tomorrow for the system. That's
not to say that Nintendo let the
idea of 3D gaming die. In 2010,
Nintendo announced their next 3D
handheld, the Nintendo 3DS,
promising glasses free 3D.
Needless to say, the system has
been better received by the
gaming public, despite a rocky
first year.

If we are going
to talk about a literal virtual
reality as depicted by the
Carousel of Progress, Sony has
experimented with the technology
in the last couple of years. One
of their most recent attempts at
virtual reality is the Sony
TMZ-H2, a 3D headset that takes
cues from the mistakes and
failures of past attempts and
re-invents them for a new
generation. The headset has been
featured at several trade shows,
but it is clear that thanks to
the price and the still
experimental nature of virtual
reality, the headset won't
become mainstream yet. So it
might be a while till we
experience virtual reality on
Christmas as we see in the
attraction.
In addition to
the game being a virtual reality
title, there is also the matter
of how the characters interact
with the game. Both James and
grandma are wearing gloves in
their hands in order to navigate
through the game. In this brief
scene, The Carousel of Progress
is suggesting a future in which
gaming will no longer rely on
traditional controllers in order
to interact with the games,
using hand free devices to
achieve the illusion of control.
What is curious is that we are
actually beginning to see gaming
try and experiment with this
train of thought.

The Power Glove: It's so bad...
Perhaps the most
infamous of this attempts
happened in the 80s, just as
gaming was beginning to
experience the massive growth it
is still living through today.
The peripheral was named the
Power Glove. Players would wear
the glove and after inputting a
game specific code on the
keypad, they would be able to
control the game using their
hand motions. Much like the
Virtual Boy, the concept sounded
fantastic on paper, but the
final execution lead players
frustrated due to poor
calibration and mediocre use of
technology. It has then become a
sort of an ironic icon of gaming
as it presents the hopeful
idealism of what gaming could
do, but without the know how to
actually make it a successful
reality. In Carousel of
Progress, the gloves the
characters wear are slight
variations of the notorious
peripheral.
As far as hands
free gaming goes, there have
been various attempts with
various degrees of success.
While not quite hands free,
Nintendo's Wii system, released
in 2006, did try to bring
players into a whole new level
of immersion. Using what is
known today as the Wii Remote
control, players would wave a
wand that translated the motions
into actions within the game. So
for example, if the player is
playing a sword game and he did
a slashing motion, the game
would recognize it and turn it
into an action within the game
world. It was seen as the next
step in placing players in a
virtual reality setting through
their own motions and control
input. The success of motion
gaming was so grand, especially
after the industry had seen it
as a fluke, that it prompted all
gaming companies to try and
create their own take on the
concept.
Nintendo would
go back and re-invent the
controller and dubbing it the
Wii Remote Plus, a controller
that actually allows players to
have one on one motion in real
time, meaning that the game
would react to the player's
motion in real time, no lag or
delay in response. Sony would
pretty much replicate the same
concept as the Wii with the Sony
Move wand, a controller that
uses a camera in order to
recognize the movements of the
player.

From top to bottom: Sony's Move,
Nintendo's Wii Remote and
Microsoft's Kinect
But easily the
most drastically different of
all was Microsoft's Kinect
motion camera. Much like the
future scene in Carousel of
Progress depicts hands free
gaming, the Kinect promised a
new era in motion gaming where
the player could use his whole
body to interact with the game.
The early concepts were more
than promising, showing how the
camera could even scan real
world objects and turn them into
objects within the virtual
world. The trailer even promised
that the game could detect where
a player was standing and
properly react to it. The final
product, however, was not as
advertised, with some ideas
taken off the final product and
others stripped to their bare
minimum. Regardless, the Kinect
camera has received some solid
games since its debut in 2010,
such as the acclaimed Kinect
Disneyland Adventures (which I
have talked about several times
here on Gamer Tuesday), the
Dance Central series and more.
Still, many saw it as just a
brief diversion cashing in on a
new concept rather than a
genuine step in the right
direction.

Going back to
the future scene in Carousel of
Progress, grandpa begins to talk
about how amazing progress is,
mentioning how in his day none
of the things the family enjoys
today didn't exist. He briefly
mentions two things: laserdiscs
and high definition TV. This is
where unfortunately we see that
the show is slightly dated, and
realize that this was a future
envisioned by the people of the
90s (as cynical as that may
seem). The laserdisc was a
digital video format that was
seen as the successor to the
VHS. Many companies, especially
Disney, tried to capitalize on
this by releasing several high
profile films on the format. Not
only that, gaming even used
laserdiscs in various
experimental phases. In the
early days of the arcade scene,
long before the video game
suffered a crash that almost
destroyed it, there was one game
that caught the attention of
many players: Dragon's Lair.

Dragon's Lair is
an action/fantasy game in which
players take on the role of Dirk
the Daring, a knight out to
rescue Princess Daphne from the
clutches of an evil dragon that
resides within a castle. The
game came as a huge revolution
as it was one of the first
titles to utilize laserdiscs as
well as the first to be
presented as an animated
feature. It was created by none
other than Don Bluth, who has an
extensive history at Disney as
an animator on features such as
Pete's Dragon. The basic
gameplay concept is that you
press buttons in a timed manner.
If done correctly, you would see
the other part of the movie, if
not you would see the death
animation and the game over
screen. Several laser disc games
were released after the success
of Dragon's Lair, including a
direct sequel also produced by
Don Bluth.
Laserdisc as a
home medium lasted for a couple
of years, but never really took
off like VHS did. That was
because laserdiscs were often
large and bulky, and required
special players to work. In
comparison to VHS it was
superior, yet VHS was easier to
afford and find in stores. You
could buy blank tapes and record
video footage over them. The
laserdisc would then be defeated
by the DVD as the disc based
media as it was not only the
size of a compact disc, it could
store the same amount of data
and present high definition
video and other features. The
DVD surpassed the VHS, and now
the DVD co-exists with Blu Ray.
Now, the belief is that there
will come a time in which there
will not be a need for a
physical format and stuff will
be distributed digitally via the
internet, from music and movies
to applications and, of course,
games. People will just need the
device that can play said items.

Then there's the
concept of high definition TV.
Grandpa Progress was correct in
that notion. Since the mid-90s,
it was advertised that all
television media would be
transmitted in high definition
by the mid-to-late 00s through
the release of high definition
TV sets and the TV broadcasts
being done in high definition.
How has this benefited gaming?
In 2005, Microsoft released the
Xbox 360, being the first gaming
console to be a high definition
machine. Sony then followed this
through in 2006 by implementing
their own Blu Ray technology,
giving movies a whole new
dimension of visual fidelity.
Interestingly, the attraction
itself would update the
television set with a high
definition set to better reflect
this new era.
Another
invention the future scene of
Carousel of Progress proudly
displays are voice activated
devices. In the attraction, they
show how devices can be
controlled with just a voice
command, often leading to
several turkeys being burned to
a crisp by mistake. We may not
be there yet in terms of how a
whole house can be programmed to
react to one's voice, but we
certainly have seen devices with
voice command features. The
latest iPhone device comes with
an app named Siri, in which the
user can talk to the device and
it will offer search results and
even spirited answers.
And that is the
progress of gaming as presented
by the Carousel of Progress. It
is a very small element in a
grand show, and there is a lot
more to gaming than what I
presented. Many of the ideas
presented would evolve into what
we know today and others
scrapped altogether. But as
Carousel of Progress shows, as
long as there is a need to
progress, we can always expect
brand new ideas that enhance not
just our daily lives but gaming
as well. You can bet I will be
there when the next best thing
happens, cause after all...

There's a great, big, beautiful
tomorrow
Shining at the end of every day
There's a great, big, beautiful
tomorrow
Just a dream away!