Life After Dave & Busters

Life After Dave & Busters

Dave & Busters has one singular, clear goal – that the guests walk out of the door with a smile on their face and a hole in their wallet. Through a slick combination of “games of skill” and “games of chance,” D&B creates a calculated distillation of a carnival.

But a carnival has many sides. At its core, its namesake Carnival was a yearly departure from the social divisions of daily life– a time to “let it all go.” If that’s so, is there a depth to the big Price-Is-Right wheel and the push-the-coins-off-the-edge game that we’re missing?

In this talk, we’ll draw blurry, tenuous lines between D&B, media theory, and trends in curated experiences– most likely asking more questions than we answer. We’ll try to imagine a world in which we take the lessons from Dave & Busters and ask if (and yes, this is a big if) it’s possible to apply them to more meaningful experiences.

Speakers