Several of my recent articles have discussed that to prosper in the future, community-based entertainment, including family entertainment centers, will need to use digital technology to fuse the real and virtual worlds by embracing the Multiverse and its eight-realm matrix of the real world, virtual world and time and offer 24/7 convergent entertainment experiences by extending the guest experience by both time and place from the real world into the virtual world.
In the FEC arena, Chuck E. Cheese’s deserves kudos for the first convergent experience of extending the gameroom redemption ticket experience into the virtual world. They recently did an e-mail blast as well as put a link on their website (http://www.chuckecheese.com/chuck-e-games/games/ticketblaster/ticket-blaster.php?utm_source=BH&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=123010&link=image) for an advertisement for their revamped birthday parties using their new ticket blasters that offered a chance to win redemption tickets by playing a virtual version of the ticket blaster. You play the virtual ticket blaster game, and while you wait for it to tally up your score and give you a certificate to redeem the tickets at your local Chuck E. Cheese’s, a commercial plays about their birthday parties showing the real world ticket blaster experience. Once a kid wins the tickets on the Internet, can you image the nagging her parents will get to take her to the store to collect a prize. Cleaver, very cleaver.
To learn more about the Multiverse, check out this presentation by Joe Pine (http://www.mobilemonday.nl/talks/joseph-pine-ii-multiverse/)
About Randy White
Randy White is CEO and co-founder of the White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group. The 31-year-old company, with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, has worked for over 600 clients in 37 countries throughout the world. Projects the company has designed and produced have won seventeen 1st place awards. Randy is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on feasibility, brand development, design and production of leisure experience destinations including entertainment, eatertainment, edutainment, agritainment/agritourism, play and leisure facilities.
Randy was featured on the Food Network's Unwrapped television show as an eatertainment expert, quoted as an entertainment/edutainment center expert in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times and Time magazine and received recognition for family-friendly designs by Pizza Today magazine. One of the company's projects was featured as an example of an edutainment project in the book The Experience Economy. Numerous national newspapers have interviewed him as an expert on shopping center and mall entertainment and retail-tainment.
Randy is a graduate of New York University. Prior to repositioning the company in 1989 to work exclusively in the leisure and learning industry, White Hutchinson was active in the retail/commercial real estate industry as a real estate consultancy specializing in workouts/turnarounds of commercial projects. In the late 1960s to early 1980s, Randy managed a diversified real estate development company that developed, owned and managed over 2.0 million square feet of shopping centers and mixed-use projects and 2,000 acres of residential subdivisions. Randy has held the designations of CSM (Certified Shopping Center Manager) and Certified Retail Property Executive (CRX) from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).
He has authored over 150 articles that have been published in over 40 leading entertainment/leisure and early childhood education industry magazines and journals and has been a featured speaker and keynoter at over 40 different conventions and trade groups.
Randy is the editor of his company's Leisure eNewsletter, has a blog and posts on Twitter and Linkedin.
