Tim Lucier ☀️🎹💪🏻

Watched this documentary about the origins of the Jungle Cruise ride, which was essentially supposed to be a LARP documentary about the waterways of the world. It worked in the 50s until Walt Disney heard a mother saying she’d skip the ride since she’d been on it before, which made Walt freak out and turn to the man originally responsible for the humorist resonance in Disney films, Marc David. He took one ride on Jungle Cruise and when asked what the problem was, replied “it’s not funny. There’s no humour.” He then completely revamped the ride with view to instil a sense of humorist resonance, but (as an animator) found that in fact it became more realistic, and more animated as a result. (Elephants playing, squirting water from their trunks, etc). Since that extremely early revelation in the 50s, it’s endured 70+ years. If you made it this far, well done. During Baldur’s Gate 3’s campaign, we noticed that while the quality of information was good, engagement was dropping (many reasons: audience fatigue, distance to launch, between updates, etc). We realised that even without changing the quality or type of information, engagement was far higher when we thought less about engagement and more about how much it made us laugh. As a result, we started to focus on how funny the delivery of information was as much as we did the quality of the messaging itself. Once we started doing that, engagement began to skyrocket and people started to enjoy the ‘ride’ that was the campaign. If there’s one thing I learned during Baldur’s Gate 3’s campaign it’s that to achieve a true sense of resonance, you need to make people smile. That is the absolute priority. If you know how to do that, you’re half way there. Humour is the engine of endurance.