EPCOT, the billion-dollar dazzle opened by Disney last October, stands for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow. You may or may not agree with Walt's heirs that the communities we'll one day find ourselves in will include hunks of zero-gravity lettuce and diversions like trips back to the days of the dinosaurs, but there's strong empirical evidence that tomorrow's communities -like today's -will still have video arcades.
The Quarter-Gobbler of Tomorrow is located in CommuniCore East and CommuniCore West, two kidney-shaped pavillions located in EPCOT's "Future World section, right behind the Bucky Fuller globe that you see in all the ads. According to Disney press releases, CommuniCore is a place where "industry- sponsored exhibits ease bewilderment with emerging technologies. What they're trying to say is that the various "interactive"' exhibits in CommuniCore-of which the video arcade is only a small part-are supposed to prepare everyone for the Computerworld ahead. But hell, Kraftwerk was two years ago and the most striking aspect of the land of tommorrow's video vision is just how passe it is.
That's probably an unavoidable result of the other guiding principle of Future World's exhibits: Education. Thrills and motor reflex overload take a definite back seat to more cerebral pursuits-like guessing which state led the nation in wheat exports or blender production or somesuch. There's little evidence of the imagination that was Disney's calling card (although to be fair, CommuniCore is primarily designed by Sperry, not one of the most lighthearted of corporations). From a game player's point of view, the most intriguing thing about Disney's arcade games is that they're played on "touch screens. No more buttons to jab or joysticks to slam: game start, instructions, and all the (admittedly limited) actions are governed by touching specific places on the screen itself. I'm wary of this innovation coming to my neighborhood-would you like to play a touch screen game after a guy eating a steak bomb greased up the screen? Hopefully, the Disney people have some Glass Plus on hand.
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