AirDnD: personal storytelling at scale

My imagination was captivated by Disney’s announcement of a Star Wars hotel where everyone is in-character all the time and you have your own storyline. My first thought was how to scale this and as an Airbnb user and hotel hater, I wanted to see how it could work for them.
Why
There are lots of LARPs, ARGs, and treasure hunt games but because of their niche nature they only cater to hardcore enthusiast and they are not really accessible to the casual player. There are some parks or locations where users can experience some sort of casual storytelling but they do not exist beyond their boundaries (Medieval Times, Disney parks), but the story is not personal and it’s not really a story, just some people in a costume so it doesn’t really meet the definition of a game.
The primary goals are to create a storytelling opportunity to make the Airbnb stay more enjoyable, help with the discovery of a location, create interest for another Airbnb booking. In other terms create differentiation, increase engagement, and increase retention. So the KPIs can be tracked, ranked against cost and see if this is a net effect or not beyond the raw value of free PR.
Starting
The idea is to create several basic storylines to offer choice to the user, offer some customization to understand their intention and perhaps flavor the storyline a bit (like happy endings, for kids, etc), and then offer only a subset of these stories so they are localized (e.g. in Las Vegas you might not have the same starting stories you have in the English countryside). This to create a story from a small number of primitives give the impression of a vast story surface.
Think of these starting storylines as like supernatural, mystery, ghosts, UFOs, spy stories and so on. Vague enough so the player can put their meaning in it.
The hosts are part of this and they could offer this as a differentiator. Again the relationship between hosts and guests is a very important part of Airbnb’s DNA so this could facilitate it.
Gameplay
There is a class of games like Gone Home, What Remains of Edith Finch and several others. Essentially there is a storyline that is discovered through objects, mementos, and recordings dispersed into a spatial environment that is sometimes gated. This could be translated in receiving a letter when the guest checks in as part of their storyline (that gets selected during booking).
E.g. the host gives a letter found while cleaning the guest room where someone that lived in that room (or their ancestor) starts to tell an intriguing story. Or there is some sort of Mission Impossible location where the players receive a recording of their engagement.
From there the players can visit certain locations where a geocache can unlock audio recordings or pieces of information about the story, or collect a piece of information, a photo (a catalog of potential actions can be developed later). And here’s where it gets interesting: all these storylines can (and should) be as factual as possible, so the players learn about the backstory of someone that lived in the area they are visiting, to learn the background of a monument, or a landmark, to give meaning to their visit, enrich their knowledge and create a magic moment that gives meaning to their Airbnb visit.
Choices
There should be no failure states, at least in the initial version, but there should be at least one occasion where the player gets to make a choice, either through an action, where they sacrifice part of the story in order to advance another one. This could discover the fate of one of the two lovers of the protagonist of the story, and preferably the story is influenced by this choice.
Choices in games are important because they provide feedback about the state of the world and turn the experience interactive.
Sequels
If the experiment is successful then you can craft sequels so that the storyline continues and gives a larger scope for the story. For example, a spy story can give another mission and provide a sequel for a story, perhaps like an SMERSH-type of villain that keeps interfering with the player’s effort to discover, or the stereotypical discovery of a plot to invade Earth from another planet.
Taking this further it could have long term storylines, still played completely casually, but can create a fun diversion when booking multiple Airbnbs stays. It could be a campaign with a prize at the end. Because of the asynchronicity of the gameplay, it can’t be something that is shared with a big treasure hunt at the end but certainly, there can be a token for completion.
Thanks to Ian Thomas and Rachel for reviewing an early draft this post.
Thanks to Andrew Fray for the name suggestion.
