What makes a Space Center flight great?

This post builds on “The Space Center: An Introduction”. Start there before digging in here.

I could write a book about the experiences and learnings from my time at the Space Center. For this essay, we’re going to focus on the role of storytelling as part of play and learning experiences in one of these bridge simulator experiences.

Space Center experiences are somewhat unique in the world of interactive entertainment. They sit somewhere between a movie, a table top RPG, and improv theater. Although bridge simulators in general have their own twists in how they play out and what the experience is like, I’m going to talk about the Utah Space Center tradition of storytelling and how story, at the end of the day, is the heart of a great flight.

The heart of a great flight is resonance

Cutting to the chase, resonance is the quality of storytelling that evokes an emotional response from the audience. When audience members witness something that sparks resonance within themselves, we can say that they are experiencing the purpose of the art involved. If that resonant experience matches the intentions of the storyteller, then we can say that the story was successful.

Great art generally is going to evoke resonance in its audience. This is why the Mona Lisa or a Stravinsky piece or the first 10 minutes of “Up” are considered classics. Some art is part of a broader conversation that primes the palette of the audience, and so the audience depends on some kind of context to exist before they will experience that resonance. This could be why modern or abstract art often is more difficult to appreciate, or why a child’s crayon drawing is more precious to a parent than a million dollar van Gogh might be.

This is not unlike the fundamental notes that causes champagne glasses or violin strings to vibrate. “Good vibes” in that case can be scientifically measured down to fractions of a herz.

Finding the “fundamental frequency” for a crew is going to be a tougher sell than reliably figuring out how to make champagne glasses “sing”. It’s one of the reasons that entertainment experiences incorporate these transformative, epic experiences that somehow resonate with broad, fundamental notes. It’s the “Hero’s journey” all over.

Resonance and the Hero’s Journey

Other art strikes at things that are more innate, and so general audiences will experience resonance without first having some kind of priming. This is actually the reason so much of popular culture converges on a few themes and ideas that resonate with people universally. The Hero’s Journey (first introduced by Joseph Campbell) is a great example of such a universal experience, and we find that Space Center flights have a lot in common with it:

1. You have a call to adventure (Mission briefing)
2. You cross a threshold into the unknown with the aid of a mentor (Boarding + the initial spiel from the chief engineer)
3. You face conflict and setbacks
   • Three-act structure would call these setbacks “pinch points” at the 25%, the 50%, and the 75% mark
   • These conflicts are typically triggered by limited beliefs
4. You descend into the underworld where you face potential destruction, including the destruction of those limited beliefs
5. You come out the other side transformed, armed with a new perspective from your victory
6. You return to the known world, bearing your newfound perspective and understanding

While most hero’s journey experiences in popular culture are witnessed by an audience, Space Center flights are experienced first-hand, as you experience it and play it as yourself. You don’t witness it (passively or actively), and you don’t do so through some proxy (a character on a page or screen, an athlete on a field, or a character sheet projected into the theater of the mind in a TTRPG). This is one of the key differences between a great flight and other forms of media.

Sporting events deserve an honorable mention here, as an interesting social experience that is deeply resonant. Fans witness their athlete’s accomplishments and cheer them on from the sidelines, creating a sense of community and shared experience. They wear facepaint, special clothing, chant and sing, and otherwise do all the fun ritual stuff you might find in an anthropology textbook.

The literature around the hero’s journey, Jungian archetypes, and magic circles may be helpful extensions to how we might achieve resonance in a great flight.

The tricky part is that one might consider books, movies, and perhaps some video games as fully automated. Doubtless these media can be deeply resonant, but they lack the dynamism of live experiences like flights, sports, or TTRPGs. Working to bridge this gap is the challenge facing the next generation of narrative-driven bridge simulator games.

Handcrafted vs Automated

Classic space center flights (say, from the 2000s) relied heavily on staff that trained for years to learn the craft of flight directing (in TTRPGs known as being a game master or GM). Flight directors were in a tight feedback loop with every action taken by a crew, so they could adapt and adjust to fit the crew perfectly.

Automation makes certain repetitive tasks easier to perform, however the further you move along the spectrum of automation, the less control you have over the experience. A fully automated flight wouldn’t necessarily be a great flight, as the attention to detail and personalization that comes from human interaction is lost.

The secret ingredient, again, is resonance here. Flight directors are able to identify that resonance, and can tune their storytelling to try to achieve that resonance. Automation is blind to and cannot experience resonance, which makes it very difficult to fully automate a resonant flight.

Options for resonance under automation

Automation runs on a spectrum, from zero automation with manual flight directing, to automation-assisted flight directing, to voice-acting-only flight directing (in this mode, the flight director is more of a participant than a game master), to fully-automated flight directing.

The first two modes are more or less the same for our purposes, since the control surfaces required are quite similar. It’s also very similar to what’s already being done using Thorium Classic. The second two modes (voice-acting-only and fully-automated flight directing) should theoretically have little more than a “start” button and, in the case of voice acting mode, a prompt for what to say.

Further essays on this topic will study the latter two modes in greater detail, and how automated systems might achieve resonance.

A note about sequencing and timing

Resonance is the heart of the matter, and thus the primary focus of this essay. However, great space center storytelling is a three-legged stool: Sequence, Timing, and Resonance.

Sequence is the order of experiences being relayed to you. I’d include editorial decisions for information given or withheld, when things are revealed, and when things are never explicitly laid out. In a detective story, the crime happens before the detective gets to examine the crime scene. If we see the crime before the detective, that changes the nature of the audience’s experience from “Whodunnit?” to “Are they going to get away with it?” So the sequence of events for the audience would be the discovery of a crime, and the incremental discovery of facts leading back to the crime itself. Along the way, we may get some exposition into the sordid lives of the various people who may or may not be innocent along the way - part of both resonance and timing…

Timing is the pacing of everything, so you have enough time to make sense of those experiences. Movies that jump from action to action to action with no rest can break the suspension of disbelief, just as much as “Waiting for Godot” takes a certain kind of person to appreciate. I remember watching the third installment in The Hobbit and found the illusion of the story broken after one of the battle sequences became tedious. Lots of action and incredible effects, but it became another “Oh, great, another ten minutes of combat action to wade through - isn’t there a story in here?” Getting the timing right is about building tension with periods of relief, over the course of the experience. During lulls in tension you have opportunities for certain sorts of exposition, things like the “This is Perikoi” speech or other things that may require more attention. Moments of high tension involve fewer verbal expositions, leaning more on lights and sounds, tactical reactions and such. There’s less planning and more impulse involved.

Sequence, then, is the “what” of a timeline step: what changes in the simulation as a result of running a given step? Timing is the “when” of a timeline step: what criteria will trigger the “what” to happen?

Resonance is always the target of all of this. It’s not something that exists in the software, since it’s an emotional experience. But, if there are ways that the software can gauge tension as it ebbs and flows in a story, then it’s possible to infer what type of action ought to come next (should we try to build more tension with some action, or should things ebb a bit and give more space?)

These points will be explored further in future posts.

Summing it all up

1. Resonance and catharsis are the emotional qualities that makes for a great flight.
2. Art in general is full of examples of how to achieve resonance, most notably through building tension and resolution with the right sequence and timing.
3. Automation lacks a sense of resonance, but it can be used to create tension and resolution. It may be possible to achieve resonance through automation by carefully crafting tension and resolution sequences.
4. The Hero’s Journey and “Magic Circles” may also serve as inspiration for creating resonance and structure in an automated flight experience.