5
Warped Reality
PLAYING WITH TIME
Several years ago a friend of ours took his son, a Civil War buff, to Civil War Adventure Camp at Pamplin Historical Park near Petersburg, Virginia. The first thing they and their fellow reenactors did was to remove their clothing—except their socks and underwear, thankfully—and all other encumbrances of modern life (no cameras or cellphones, which would only remind the guests of the present time) and put on wool Civil War garb.
This was done in a barn structure that served as a place in which guests also discarded their normal, workaday lives in order to welcome the Civil War experience with its period attire and mindset. Having shed the present and embraced the past, all the reenactors then marched down the hill to camp where, once split into North and South units, they spent the evening learning how to do formations, practicing marching drills, signaling with flags (for day) and fire (for night), guarding the perimeter of the camp, and finally sleeping outdoors, with all meals served in the same tin cup. The next day—it was the middle of summer, so those wool uniforms were authentically hot and sweaty—consisted of skirmishes and maneuvering between the two sides. While they did get to shoot muskets and even a cannon, the only unrealistic detail was the wooden rifles they carried for safety reasons (well, they still did have their own socks and underwear). Our friend told us it was an amazingly well-orchestrated experience, a “total throwback in time” that was “not mediated in any modern way.” His then nine-year-old son, meanwhile, described it simply as “the best day of my life!”
Playing with Time
That was the best day of his then still-young life because the Civil War Adventure Camp warped reality for him, his father, and their fellow campers. It took them out of the present day, removing virtually all reminders of it, and shifted them back in time to a period that looms large in our nation’s history and has been seared into our consciousness. It was a great experience for all of the participants, no doubt, but one devoid of digital technology—or any observable post-nineteenth-century technology for that matter. For to have used any digital tools or modern machinery would have destroyed the effect, taking them out of the past and bringing them back to present-day Reality.
As opposed to Augmented and Alternate Reality, this realm isn’t about embracing digital technology or bringing virtual places into the real world. Rather, it takes an experience firmly grounded in Reality and shifts only one variable, moving the event from actual to autonomous time, as illustrated in Figure 5.1. The essence of this realm is simply playing with time in any way possible. So people leave actual time behind, departing Reality for another realm—a realm not only of Space and Matter but of No-Time, A journey into a wondrous cosmos whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead. Your next stop: Warped Reality.
So, yes, on the face of it, Warped is weird, a twilight zone of a realm. Do not give up on it, however, because done well you can create great customer value by taking a real-world experience and warping it—by serving Reality and adding a twist of time. Moreover, this realm has much to teach us about enacting autonomous events that applies to each of the other No-Time realms of Alternate Reality, Virtuality, and Augmented Virtuality.
Few things capture the imagination more than the notion of traveling through time. Warped Reality is not, however, about TV shows, books, or movies that play out solely in our mind. Rather, it is about happenings in the physical world of space and matter that play with our mind, and in particular its perception of time. This makes time—or, to be more precise, No-Time—a lead character in the drama. Experience producers can treat time not as a fixed dimension but as an independent variable. In doing so, the adventure and intrigue explode, stretching the horizon of possibility far beyond the conventional bounds of storytelling.
Getting into Flow
One need not travel in time to play with time. A key aspect pertaining not only to Warped Reality but to each of the No-Time realms, we believe, is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow. The Hungarian psychologist’s research led him to the conclusion that we as human beings are most happy in flow, an optimal experience that evenly balances our skills with the challenges we face at a high level. This can occur in myriad ways, from mountain climbing to ballet dancing, from surgery to schoolwork, from playing music to playing games. Surely you have encountered a flow experience yourself in some endeavor you faced with passion and per sis tence.
Encountering too high a challenge for your skill level, however, leads to worry or anxiety, and too high a skill level for the challenge leads to boredom or relaxation. Csikszentmihalyi found that a key component of such an optimal experience involves changes in the perception of time. “One of the most common descriptions of optimal experience,” he explains, “is that time no longer seems to pass the way it ordinarily does. The objective, external duration we measure with reference to outside events like night and day, or the orderly progression of clocks, is rendered irrelevant by the rhythms dictated by the activity…. During the flow experience the sense of time bears little relation to the passage of time as measured by the absolute convention of the clock.”1 He adds that “freedom from the tyranny of time does add to the exhilaration we feel during a state of complete involvement.”2
Freedom from the tyranny of time. Let that phrase sit on your head for awhile, as a friend of ours likes to say.
Flow experiences free us from the tyranny of time. They let us escape the routine, shed the mundane, and throw off the dictums of this hidebound world. They exhilarate our emotions, excite our senses, energize our bodies, and elate our minds. And whenever the challenges we face slightly exceed our skills, they instigate a virtuous circle as we stretch and grow and enhance those skills, which incites us to seek out greater challenges, which yields further enhancements to our skills, and so on. Short of the time travel we encounter only in books, TV shows, and movies, getting into flow may be the best way to embrace No-Time and thereby warp reality.
Shifting into the Past
The easiest way to warp our perception of time may be to shift us into another time period, usually the past (as we tend to know just a bit more about it than the future). The quintessential examples out there in the real world are historical reenactments such as the Civil War Adventure Camp discussed earlier and festivals such as the numerous Renaissance Faires the world over. Wikipedia lists 188 reenactment groups from around the globe, including those that recreate the 1815 Battle of Waterloo in Belgium, the 1627 Siege of Groenlo in The Netherlands, and reaching way back, the Spartan Society in the UK commemorating combat in that ancient Greek city-state.3
Similar in concept but different in focus are LARPs, or live action role-playing games, which are less about reenacting what actually happened than seeing how people would act (of their own volition) in certain circumstances. Although many LARPs feature real-life situations, this experience genre springs from fantasy literature (such as Lord of the Rings) and related tabletop games (such as Dungeons & Dragons), which means they shift into times seemingly past but never were.4 (LARPs influenced alternate reality games, which add in a heavy dose of digital technology to shift from Warped to Alternate Reality.)
Whereas LARPs and reenactments do not really appeal to the masses, anyone can enjoy living history museums like Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg. Each of these portray life in colonial times, the former the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts set in the year 1627 and the latter highlighting the period from 1699 to 1780 when Williamsburg was the capital of the Colony of Virginia. The workers—actors on their colonial stage—wear garb appropriate to the time, speak in the language current at the time, and work and act in ways that colonists worked and acted at the time (hence the term “living history”). In keeping with the theme, they do not even acknowledge modern inventions or events, all to help guests learn about colonial life.
Many cities and areas furnish naturally aged places with a patina of history suitable for transporting to the past. Regulations against motor transport on Mackinac Island in Lake Michigan convey visitors more than a century into the past. Or think of Venice. A visit to this City of Dreams transports you into a meticulously preserved past that puts you in the mood for historical erudition, personal reminiscences, and perhaps even romance.
Experiences can also evoke the past by using rules from earlier periods. For example, at Oakhurst Links in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, golfers must use nineteenth-century equipment and follow the rules in play at the club’s founding in 1884. That means hickory clubs and guttie balls, sand tees and sheep-grazed fairways.5 Or consider the Vintage Base Ball Association, which encourages players (or “ballists”) to wear old-time replica uniforms and to play the game the old-fashioned way, with such nineteenth-century rules as a ball caught on one bounce (called one “round”) being an out, and a hit being fair or foul based on where it first touches the ground. It also strictly maintains such customs as no gloves, no fences, and the utmost in sportsmanship (including helping out the umpires on calls and cheering the opponents).
Many people commemorate all these experiences via scrapbooking, a wonderful way to remember and cement our memories of the past—and a big business as well, with many companies helping consumers preserve their photographs and other memory-laden materials in increasingly sophisticated books. More and more people embrace digital scrapbooking—using computers to scan pictures, arrange layouts, and print pages—which would, of course, move the activity one realm over, from Warped to Alternate Reality (with the alternate view as one of shifting the real experience in time as well as in intensity). Everyone, however, imbues particular things with memories of past times. Whether they be everyday objects, such as a particular coffee cup your mother gave you, or special items of memorabilia, such as a ticket to the first concert you went with your soon-to-be spouse, these items become “time machines” that can instantly convey you into the past.
Shifting into the Future
By their very nature most museums also take us into the past, preserving artifacts, whether photographs, paintings, sculptures, tools, or other man-made relics, or objects of the natural world, such as fossils or the flora and fauna of quickly shrinking present-day habitats. It is of course easier to shift people backward into the known past, but some museums do focus on the future, at least on occasion, such as the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry’s Fast Forward exhibit on how the inventions of today shape our lives in the future. Even then—as with Walt Disney World’s out-of-date-as-soon-as-it-opened Tomorrowland—the exhibit is more about how yesterday’s inventions will make the future we experience tomorrow than it is on the unwritten future itself.
And since the actual future remains unwritten, some turn to fictional futures to engage and even enlighten. Star Trek: The Experience was an admission-feed experience at the Las Vegas Hilton centered on simulation rides that placed guests into an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which, naturally, transported present-day visitors into the future setting of the show. While the technology-i nfused rides reside squarely in the Virtuality realm, part of its ten-year mission (it closed in 2008) included a low-tech History of the Future Museum. Functionally a pre-show queue for the rides, this museum housed many Star Trek artifacts and provided a consolidated timeline that weaved together all the various TV shows and movies in one physical place. It enacted a Warped Reality shrine, almost, for Trekkies while simultaneously giving enough information to non-Trekkies that they knew enough to enjoy the ride. (Although for the non-Trekkies, it really was Warped Unreality.)
Companies hire consultants to help take them into the future, but it is generally a process fraught with peril. Doblin, a Chicago-based innovation strategy firm now part of Monitor Group, helps overcome these issues through what it calls “business concept illustration”—or “end-to-end prototyping of an entire business,” as the company’s cofounder and president, Larry Keeley, put it to us. Doblin’s Peter Laundy says such an illustration (either in the form of printed communications or an experience vignette) “depicts an attractive, entirely plausible future business that could be profitably pursued by a company that has a requisite appetite and commitment.”6 As opposed to scenario planning and other future-oriented exercises, Doblin’s approach envisions the business itself, rather than the business climate, and Keeley pointed out that businesses that go through this process “routinely transform themselves.”
The same can be said for Starizon Studio, a transformational consulting company that turns businesses into premier experience stagers (and includes Joe as a partner) at its experience design place in Keystone, Colorado. Founder Gary Adamson devised Starizon’s design process to enable the client first to experience what it would be like to live and work in a world where the strategy has been achieved and then to actually create that future world. Through a theme, declaration, and experience map that broadly lays out that future experience, the client (or “explorer”) team journeys not just to Keystone but to its own future, commits to making it happen, and then travels back in time (and to its own place of business) to realize that future. The explorer team acts as if that future will happen, as if it were real, and then makes it so.
Think of it as the future equivalent to reenactment: preenactment. We thought we coined that word on these very pages, but we Googled it and discovered 7,260 pages of prior mentions, including some to the Historical Preenactment Society (based on a comic book but now, so to speak, real).7 Think about it, though—how often and in how many ways do we prepare for the future? That is the essence of training, whether preparing to work on an assembly line, lead a mission in Afghanistan, or give a presentation in front of a huge audience. We preenact the future by acting as if we were in that future. But beyond shifting into the past, glimpsing the future, and preenacting what one day you hope to be, also look for value in just being timeless—taking actual time as a significant factor out of the equation altogether.
Being Timeless
The Vintage Base Ball Association notes that “modern spectators would still recognize [the] vintage version as base ball,”8 for as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin points out, baseball “is the most timeless of all sports.”9 A statement understood and embraced by all of its devout fans, baseball preserves this sense of timelessness to this day for a number of reasons, but foremost among them: there is no clock. Teams can never “run out the clock,” for baseball is not governed by time. If a game is tied at the end of regulation nine innings, it goes into extra innings, and theoretically at least, could go on forever—witness the most recent twenty-inning game on April 17, 2010, in which the New York Mets and St. Louis Cardinals remained scoreless through eighteen of those innings. The Mets finally won the hard-fought battle in the 20th after six hours and fifty-three minutes.
Populous, formerly known as HOK Sport+Venue+Event, incorporates this sense of timelessness into the stadiums it builds for major and minor league teams by making a walk in or through its stadiums seem like a stroll into the very past that birthed and nurtured the game. Visit Camden Yards in Baltimore, opened in 1992, and if not for the clothing of the patrons, you could be in any era—perhaps half-expecting to see Jim Palmer on the mound, Brooks Robinson anchoring third base, and Boog Powell at first rather than at his BBQ place in front of the warehouse beyond right field.
Other sports do not share this same quality of timelessness (although some might point to cricket). Consider basketball and (American) football. The clock rules both of them—but in a way that also shifts the live experience from Reality to Warped Reality, albeit quite differently than with baseball. (The same is true for hockey and soccer, but we will limit our remarks to those sports with which we are more familiar.) In each case, both pro sports divide games into halves and then quarters, each ruled by their own set time limits (twelve minutes in basketball, fifteen in football). But it’s not twelve or fifteen minutes of actual time—it’s twelve or fifteen minutes of game time, which can be stopped and started independently of actual time. In basketball, a team has to shoot within twenty-four seconds of getting the ball, and the game clock stops whenever a foul is called or the ball goes out of bounds; in football, plays have to be run within forty seconds of the referee placing the ball on the ground, and the clock stops whenever a penalty is called, a pass is incomplete, or the player with the ball goes out of bounds (not to mention when the TV broadcaster wants to show some game-stopping commercials). Scoring does not stop the clock in basketball, but it does in football (although with extra points, no game time elapses). In both, sports coaches and players can call a timeout specifically to stop the clock and manage it to their advantage. Witness how the last few minutes of game time in close contests take much, much more actual time than the rest of the game.
Recall how in describing Warped Reality’s adjacent realm, Alternate Reality, we remarked on the inherent No-Time aspect of games. As our discussion of football and basketball exemplifies, almost all games (whether physical or virtual) can be started and stopped, reined in or extended, and frozen during a time out; mistakes can be replayed. They enact a degree of autonomy that most experiences simply do not.
Although casinos like to call gambling “gaming” to reduce certain disreputable connotations, gambling really does not have this same level of autonomy. (Do not try for a do-over at the roulette wheel.) But gambling can become so engrossing that you lose your sense of time and spend far more hours at the table than you expected or imagined, and of course is designed to be that way, with no clocks on the walls, no windows to let in signs of nature’s passing, and with the same cheery faces from dealers, drink servers, and other employees twenty-four hours a day. As Christopher Caldwell, senior editor at the Weekly Standard, put it in an editorial citing the work of MIT anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, problem gamblers in particular often “‘disappear’ into the games they are playing or ‘exit from time.’ “10 Casinos keep patrons from noticing the passage of time for good reason. Nonetheless, they provide an engaging, and obviously highly valued, experience for the masses.
Another such clockless (but not windowless) experience: theme parks. Like casinos and the best of experience offerings, theme park operators want you to forget about the outside world so you can enjoy totally the time you and your family spend in the places they have made. Many, such as Main Street USA at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, harken back to a bygone era (whether or not it ever actually existed), and old rides such as carousels, wooden roller coasters, and even “It’s a Small World” become old friends that harken back to our own bygone era when we were young. Santa Park in Rovaniemi, Finland (Lapland, as we have learned, is the real home to Santa Claus!) has as its theme “Everlasting Christmas,” so no matter what time of the year you visit, as you walk down into the underground place your surroundings—the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the activities—transport you to Santa’s home cavern on Christmas Day, captured “as a moment, a feeling, that lasts and is available for the entire Christmas season,” says the owner, Ilkka Lánkinen. The Santapreneur (he also reopens Santa Park in the summer and runs the Joulukka experience in Rovaniemi, Santa’s Summer House in Helsinki, and other such experiences) further told us that he “makes the experience more real” by “eliminating any sign or thought of the world above.”
Think back too to the Civil War Adventure Camp story that opened this chapter. Remember the barn? It was a particular experience design element that served as a liminal place between the Reality of real life and the Warped Reality of the Adventure Camp—a place constructed to be neither one nor the other, but rather a threshold between the two worlds. Even more importantly, it was a liminal time, one betwixt and between the present and the past, a timeless moment. We learned of this notion of liminality from Miami University Professor Sally Harrison-Pepper’s absolutely wonderful Drawing a Circle in the Square. A study of street performers, she describes how “Washington Square becomes a place of suspended time and space, an area chosen for escape or for freedom—perhaps a liminal realm in the mist of New York City.”11 Harrison-Pepper further cites cultural anthropologist Victor Turner defining liminality as “a state or process which is betwixt-and-between the normal, day-to-day cultural and social states or processes.” Turner elaborates: “It is a time of enchantment when anything might, even should, happen…. Liminality is full of potency and potentiality. It may also be full of experiment and play.”12
We saw this liminality also in Starizon Studio’s experience design place in Keystone, where taking explorer teams out of their normal, day-to-day working environment enabled them to think anew about what might, even should, happen in their business. Enacting such a liminal time, betwixt and between the client’s past and its future, is just as important, if not more so, than constructing the liminal place.
Liminality is an underutilized element of experience design that applies not just to Warped Reality but to all the realms of the Multiverse. So at least some senses of the term “timeless” need not require ages to accrue, as with baseball, but can be created through exceptional experience design. Even the quintessential experiences of Reality, such as family dinners, beach walks, or sunset scenes, come encoded with memories of moments from our own past, and in so doing may alter our personal sense of time.
Slowing Down, Speeding Up
That sense of stopping time itself, or at least slowing it down, can also be designed. I (Joe) have that sensation whenever I visit P. G. C. Hajenius in Amsterdam for cigars. The setting of the almost one-hundred-year-old location, the conversation with general manager Jan Kees De Nijs, who often stops his work time to join customers for a cigar, the curl of the smoke as I leisurely release it from my mouth to rise ever so slowly overhead—all contribute to such a break from the hustle and bustle of my daily to-dos that it becomes akin to stopping time. Anthropology Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen, echoing Csikszentmihalyi, says that in today’s fast-paced times we face a “tyranny of the moment”:
The unhindered and massive flow of information in our time is about to fill all the gaps, leading as a consequence to a situation where everything threatens to become a hysterical series of saturated moments, without a “before” and “after,” a “here” and “there” to separate them. Indeed, even “here and now” is threatened since the next moment comes so quickly that it becomes difficult to live in the present. We live with our gaze firmly fixed on a point about two seconds into the future.13
Eriksen’s solution is for people to deliberately and regularly seek out what he calls “slow time,” unhurried and thoughtful periods that resist the “stacking” of modern life, “the strange fact that more and more of everything is stacked on top of each other rather than being placed in linear sequences.”14
More and more people will seek such slow time in their daily lives, whether through a cup of coffee or tea made at home, at work, or at that most ubiquitous of third places betwixt and between the two, Starbucks; through a stroll outside; through a game of Solitaire on the computer; or myriad other ways we as humans look for respites and reprieves. Specifically to reduce stress in and slow down the lives of its patients (and their family members), Mid-Columbia Medical Center in The Dalles, Oregon, placed a labyrinth outside its Celilo Cancer Center. Not to be confused with a puzzling maze, walking the solitary path of a labyrinth with an attitude of contemplation naturally decreases our pace, decelerates our heart rate, and deliberates our thinking. It slows down time.
Companies can also speed up time, creating the perception that experience time is moving faster than actual time, as is often the case with flow experiences. It turns out that, according to a set of researchers headed by Aaron Sackett of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, “felt time distortion operates as a metacognitive cue that people implicitly attribute to their enjoyment of an experience,” which they helpfully translate for us laymen: “time flew, so the experience must have been fun”!15 Sackett elsewhere indicated to a reporter that to do this, you first must minimize “people’s access to accurate time cues”—that is, get rid of clocks and anything else that signals the tyranny of time. “Next, alter their subjective time perception…. For example, physiological arousal speeds time perception so a free coffee at the start of a long queue could work…. Finally, you need the surprise moment, when people are alerted to the true passage of time. That provokes in people the sensation of time having flown, followed by the gratifying inference that they must therefore have been enjoying themselves.”16 So you actually do want clocks around—but only after the experience so the surprisingly long amount of elapsed time convinces guests that the experience was even more engaging than they thought at first blush.
The Walt Disney Company is a master at another perception-changing way of freeing us from the tyranny of time: rethinking what is and is not part of the experience. This was pointed out to us in a conversation with University of Virginia Darden student Tyler Carbone. Places like the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in so many states create “an utterly miserable experience” because waiting is presented as part and parcel of the experience and takes so very long. Tyler contrasts waiting at the DMV, where “it takes a long time and feels like it takes a long time,” with waiting for an attraction at Walt Disney World, where “it takes a long time but feels like a short time.” Disney uses a number of elements to make it so: stating a wait time always longer than the actual wait, snaking lines so you can people watch, and turning the queuing into a pre-show for the live experience that engages all by itself. And, of course, there are no clocks to remind you how long it’s taking to get on to the ride!
Hyperlinking Time
Experiences of course can be broken up into more segments than show and pre-show. What if you could randomly access interstices of real-world experiences normally played out in rote sequence? What if you could instantly jump around from, to, and within physical places equivalent to hyperlinking from, to, and within virtual places on the Web? The technology of teleportation only exists in science fiction (think of Star Trek transporters beaming Federation officers through space), but short of that, think of transportation vehicles—planes (particularly “perseat” services like Dayjets), trains (particularly other-worldly subways), and automobiles (particularly random-access taxis) that cause you to interrupt your experience of one place and effectively move it to another place, where it continues apace. By once again changing guests’ perceptions of what is and is not part of the experience, they can perceive it as taking a breather in time—not unlike an intermission within a play—before the experience starts up again, although here in a different place. Just as theatergoers easily pick up the dramatic action once intermission ends, so people pick up the narrative of the experience after being transported (if not yet teleported) in such a way. It’s like Alternate Reality’s example of GoCar Tours or even a DVR, which belongs in Virtuality—but you as the experience stager accomplish the feat without the use of digital technology.
For example, Mark Brady Kitchens of Simsbury, Connecticut, offers a “Shopping Cruise” where the eponymous designer himself picks you up at your home in a stretch limousine. He begins by taking you to breakfast at a local diner to discuss your needs, and then you’re off exploring various kitchen stores, finding exactly the right cabinets, appliances, countertops, and so on. In between each segment of the Shopping Cruise experience, guests embark and disembark the limousine that provides interstitial respite from the dramatic tension of examining all the possibilities and making exactly the right choices.
Applying Warped Reality
Warped Reality experiences remain distinct from but connected to the real-world experiences on which they are based by virtue of the real places of Space and the physical substances of Matter. So many businesses, big and small, creating value within this realm should impress on you that enacting events stands as an equal to forming places and constructing substances in the staging of experiences. And as we trust we have amply shown, Warped Reality itself remains set apart from the others because it does not create customer value on the digital frontier. In fact, no digital technology is involved at all in purely warped experiences. It does, however, hold great potential for forming powerful experiences attuned to customer needs—even if, as with scrapbooking and much of gaming, those experiences generally become infused with digital technology and thereby shift over to other realms. Or especially if the experiences birthed in Warped Reality shift to another realm of virtual places and/or digital substances.
Although Warped Reality has value in and of itself, perhaps its greatest value lies in teaching us what shifting from the actual events of Time to the autonomous events of No-Time is all about. For the essence of this realm is simply playing with time. This then should more fully inform your work exploring the other realms on the digital frontier with which it shares this variable (Alternate Reality, Virtuality, and Augmented Virtuality). To begin the learning process, understand these principles of warping:
∞ To shift from Reality to Warped Reality you must manipulate time in some way that makes it autonomous—or at least so that we as guests perceive it to be autonomous —from actual time as we experience it moment by moment in the real world. How can you make your experience independent of actual time, warping your guests’ sense of time in some way?
∞ A wonderful way to do so: get into flow. Embrace Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of optimal experience by evenly balancing, at increasingly higher levels, the challenges you present with the skills of your guests. This requires that you customize the experience to individual customers, or make the experience itself customizable to them, as well as adaptive over time as individuals improve their skills.
∞ Perhaps the easiest way, however, is to shift guests into the past. Through design, costuming, speech, and acting—as well as removal of all reminders of the present day—transport them to a specific historical period.
∞ Even better, make guests not just observers but full-fledge participants who reenact the past. When they become not just immersed and engaged but involved and active, the experience creates much more value within them.
∞ Provide ways for people to remember and cement their own past, whether as an offering unto itself (as with scrapbooking) or as memorabilia for any experience.
∞ Of potentially greater value than focusing on the past, even if a bit tougher, is to shift guests into the future.
∞ Moreover, get them to preenact their own personal or corporate future, which makes the warped experience not just fun and informative but potentially transformative as well. This is a key area where mixing in a dollop or more of digital technology to shift it from Warped to Alternate Reality holds the potential for even greater value.
∞ Find other ways to transport us through time, whether musically, via period artifacts, or any other way you can devise that adds value to your economic offerings.
∞ You can also evoke the past by using rules from earlier periods. Is there some vintage version of your current experience that people would enjoy? (You could at least theoretically do so for an imagined or fictional future as well, such as when Star Trek’s three-dimensional chess was sold as a real game.) Recognize that you must encourage, cajole, and even force participants to accept the premise as well as the rules of the time being experienced lest they spoil it for themselves and everyone else.
∞ Be timeless. If you already have an experience with the patina of authenticity that comes with age, then be sure to take advantage of that to embrace your timelessness. But you can also design timelessness into your experience if you throw off the tyranny of time, not just by getting rid of clocks but by eliminating the need for clocks in the first place: make your experience so engrossing that your guests’ perception of actual time falls away. Here, too, you must take care to remove all signs of the present time, sheltering guests from the distractions of the outside world lest they take guests out of the experience.17
∞ In whatever way you play with time, look to design a liminal place between the Reality your guests are coming from and the Warped Reality of where you are taking them. This place—whether a distinct structure or just an entryway—should be a threshold between the two worlds, serving as a liminal time as well, one betwixt and between the present and the past, a timeless moment.
∞ Create experience time separate from actual time, using clocks that can be stopped and started independently of how many seconds tick away in real life.
∞ There may be many ways to separate experience and actual time, but by far the easiest is to make your experience into some sort of a game (a subject we will return to in Chapter 13, “From Design to Deployment”). You can start and stop games, rein them in or extend them, freeze them with a time out, replay mistakes or prohibited moves—with more ways of gaming time out there to be discovered.
∞ Stop time itself, or at least slow it down. Provide a respite from the daily grind, whether with coffee in a third place or via other methods elsewhere. It always helps here to start with an experiential good—think of not just coffee and cigars but wine, cuisine, or anything else that excites the senses.
∞ Conversely (a frequent adverb when it comes to playing with time), speed up time, creating the perception that experience time is moving faster than actual time.
∞ Finally, change guests’ perceptions of what is and is not part of the experience. Whether through pseudo-teleportation devices such as transportation vehicles, segmenting the experience into pre-show and show (and there’s also post-show), dividing the experience into many different interstices, or providing some sort of out-of-the-ordinary access, shift the nature of the experience from the linear to the nonlinear, from the synchronous, time-sequenced, lasting, and static spooling of events to the asynchronous, unsequenced, transient, and dynamic access of any single event, or of the hyperlinking of multiple events together.
As you can see, there are even more ways of warping reality than there are of augmenting or providing an alternate view of it. Warped Reality is a realm of possibility, not an afterthought to its digital cousins. Just as Time is a fundamental dimension of the Universe, so No-Time is a fundamental variable of the Multiverse. The right opportunity for you amid the infinite possibility of cosmos incogniti, therefore, may very well lie right here, right now. (Or in keeping with its fundamental variable, right here, right not-now.)
More likely, however, you will end up in one or more of the other realms, and if so, still explore the principles of warping for the ideas they could spark in creating value for your customers. When designing an experience—any experience—while you form its place and construct its substance, attend to the enacting of its events as well. For more than any other variable, No-Time stands for freedom. If you free yourself from the tyranny of time, you will free your mind to go beyond the boundaries of imagination and possibility.