Observations I Made at Cedar Point

A few weeks back, I got back from a trip back to my home state of Ohio. I was there nearly two weeks to hang out and spend time with my family, it was really nice. While I was there, I was really excited to go to Cedar Point.

Since I grew up in Ohio, most years my family would get season passes to the park, and we would go quite a lot in the summer and fall. The last time I went to Cedar Point was 2022, as that was the last summer that I was at home, so, I really wanted to go while I was out in Ohio again.

I actually ended up going twice. The first time I went it was disgustingly hot (you can practically see the heat in the picture I included). Though the second time was really nice. I didn’t get any pictures inside of the park since I left my phone in the car. However, I did try to occasionally slow down and look around, and really think about my surroundings.

There is a lot of very interesting features about the design of the park. One of the major things I noticed was that the way the paths work is very similar to how roads in a city work. There is a major ‘main street’ that is the main passage through the park, It starts as one main path that then splits into a big loop in the upper half. Along this path are the most major rides, much of the gift shops and places to get food are also along path. Coming off of this major path are other paths that are smaller at about half of the size. These paths are often offshoots that lead to a discrete section of the park, but they always loop back into the main path.

The third main type of path most often originates at one of the smaller paths, but some still come off of the ‘main street’. These are also about half the size of the previous path, though this less consistent. These paths lead to specific things, like the entrance to one ride, to a restaurant, or the the bathroom. These paths often loop back to a bigger path but not always.

One of the most important parts of designing a space, be it levels in a video game or an amusement park in real life, is signposting and landmarks. In a video game, these are important as they help guide the player to where they need to go, and make sure they don’t miss important things along the way. For an amusement park, doing a bad job at these two things means less sales from shops or less riders on a ride, so the stakes are fairly high. Thankfully, Cedar Point does an excellent job at this.

Starting with signposting, the park does a great job of this by just having a bunch of literal signs everywhere guiding you to rides, food, shops, and the like. Entrances to rides are very clearly marked and have interesting designs to draw you in. When exiting the ride, you often leave out of a gate or path you didn’t even think about before, but are returned to a major path near where you entered. Just about every place to eat has a big picture of food somewhere on the building or a very clear sitting area in addition to often saying what kind of food is served on the sign. The signposting of the park is just about as good as you would expect it to be for a company that has no doubt poured tons of money into researching the best ways to do it. But, at least in my opinion, the way the park utilizes landmarks and sightlines is better and more interesting.

Image taken using Google Street View (https://maps.google.com/), Street View images taken in 2011.

No matter where you stand in the park, and trust me I tried many different spots, you will always see at least two rides, and at least one of those rides are one of the parks famous roller coasters. These coasters act as the primary landmarks of the area. These rides help guide people around the park more than a sign does. It’s pretty easy to ignore some sign, it’s very hard to ignore the large coaster that you and everyone else is there to ride.

Now, obviously, some of this comes from the fact that these rides are very tall, and thus it would be hard to cover them up. But still, there is clearly so much thought that went into the structuring of paths so that the sightline always includes one of these rides, even near busy shops. The ways that the paths and shops are set up mean that you just have to walk in the general direction of a ride that you see and you will have very little obstruction in getting to that ride. If the paths were weird or there was too much stuff in the way, just walking towards it probably wouldn’t be enough, you would have to look at a map, ask an employee, or just wander around. While the park is set up to allow people to do this, if a whole bunch of people were doing that, it would be a problem. So, they avoid the problem though smart design, essentially just level design in real life.

Image taken using Google Street View (https://maps.google.com/), Street View images taken in 2011.

Since this was basically the first time I was really thinking about the design of the park, I often also found myself comparing the way the park is set up to how level design is done in games, especially multiplayer games and games that feature an open world or open areas. The fact that the paths almost always connect back together, and that there was very rarely a point that could only be reached one way is (from my understanding) really important in multiplayer games so that players can’t camp in one spot that only has one way in. And in open world games, you often want players to be able to reach points of interest from multiple directions or by using different methods to encourage exploration and player freedom.

How well the park utilized sightlines is similar to a whole bunch of games as sightlines are extremely important in level design, but I often found myself mentally comparing it to games with (in my opinion) excellent open worlds such as Far Cry 3, Elden Ring, and more.

I remember that even as a kid I was thinking about these things, but not really connecting all the dots. For instance, very often while I’m there I would think about how the open, non-terminating, paths mixed with the contrasting tight orderly queue lines would make a good setting for some kind of zombie survival game. Which actually was explored a bit in the 2009 movie Zombieland, but I definitely remember having that thought before I saw that movie.

Anyway, that’s about as much as I have to say for now, though there are many other design lessons to be learned from the park. Doing this really made me think a lot about how we design spaces in games and how often that overlaps with designing spaced in real life. Moving forward, I feel that I will definitely be way more mindful about spaces that I inhabit, and the work that went into designing them. At the very least, this taught me how interesting and useful it can be to sometimes just stop, look around, and really think about where I am and what’s going on around me.

Although, the fact that I had to make sure to mentally tell myself to do this, speaks a lot on how well the park is designed. Most people, me included for the longest time, just go around the park paying very little mind to how it was designed. And although it’s a bit upsetting for your work to go unappreciated, having someone, be it a player or a park guest, move easily through a space you created while not really thinking about it, means you did a great job at designing that space.

Thank you for reading.

- Gabe

2024 map from https://www.cedarpoint.com/park-map-and-directions
(Best resolution I could get)