I'm finally watching the Jenny Nicholson video about the star wars hotel (RIP) and it's fascinating trying to pick apart, like, which parts of the bad experience she had with it were bad design, which were in-the-moment failures, which were things they could have iterated on if the entire project wasn't a doomed low interest rate phenomenon... It feels like the designers of the thing were both extremely naive to the realities of how guests were going to actually interact with it (especially, eg, kids) but also I wonder if they even talked to anyone who had domain expertise with what they wanted to do?
Like did they talk to anyone who'd run a LARP before, or better yet to someone who ran a Sleep no More style interactive theater show? It feels like their points of reference in designing the experience were video games, which is alarming.
What it kind of smells like to me: They could commit neither to a very laid-back and incidental experience where guests kind of just hang out and story happens around them, nor to a demanding experience where guests are expected to affirmatively participate a lot, and so they ended up with sort of a terrible in-betweener that tries to 'transparently' and 'automatically' sort guests into 'story paths' in a very undesigned-seeming way. With a sprinkling of high-on-their-own-supply 'our tech will solve for this' (it did not).
Ah, there we go. A clip from this is used in Jenny's video briefly, but here's the full thing - a keynote from indiecade's 'playable theater' event featuring a couple of the Disney designers responsible for this thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl3Y1YCMnVw
Having watched both Jenny's video and this indiecade talk, the sense I get is that the designers of galactic starcruiser were given an impossible brief but they approached it with the wrong tools and generally very rudimentary narrative design. It's like they were told to build an F-35, tried to do it with canvas and balsa wood, and were told halfway through that the budget had been cut and they had to deliver the half-finished thing. Of course it couldn't fly!
Obviously the impetus to do this was a cash grab; obviously it was a way to take all the 'immersive' and 'interactive' elements of the star wars land and make it exclusive to guests who paid an extra $2000 (per person) for a two-night stay at a hotel that wasn't even in walking distance from the park.
But the narrative design is honestly so bad? It really feels like just a series of compromises looking for a vision that wasn't there.
LARP, immersive theater, ARGs and escape rooms aren't distinct things just because of genre convention; they have different material circumstances and audiences that keep them sort of in their lane. The Star Wars hotel feels a bit like it's not sure if it's a LARP, if it's immersive theater, or if it's a (very rudimentary) ARG. So guests don't have a clear place to stand along the witness/agent boundary, and indeed the game doesn't even seem clear on that either.
For example: in Starcruiser, players interact with the NPCs through either a phone app (bad idea to begin with) or in-person with a character performer. Here's the thing: only the app interactions matter to which storyline they get 'sorted' into. The idea is that guests can always do what feels right in the moment (ie, hang out with a character performer, involve themselves in a public scene) but it doesn't affect outcomes beyond unlocking things based on which scenes they've seen.
This is, of course, inconsistent (again, are you a witness or an agent? Are you role-playing as a person in this universe or are you a theme park guest just having fun? What's the level of investment the game is trying to meet?) but also ass-backwards because it's human nature to put more emotional weight on an in-person interaction, not less.
Having watched the talk and also seen some of Jenny's footage of talking to a character performer, it feels very much like the actors themselves feel like they're constrained by this design. They're not allowed to actually pick up vibes or engage the guest at the level of "this person seems to want this/is directing the story this way", because in-person interactions aren't supposed to do that! So they're obliged to be noncommittal.
Like, I can see how they reasoned their way towards this system but it ultimately makes no sense.
Same with the overall narrative structure. Starcruiser is built as a sort of merging narrative that has lots of organic entry points but then funnels players towards a handful of story paths, which then all merge into the same shared ending. This is a natural and obvious way to design something like this when you know you have exactly one big lightsaber fight set piece and you want everyone to be at it.
But it just seems like a really bad misapplication of standard narrative tools to a very nonstandard problem... The whole thing is still built like a branching narrative, complete with conversation trees (in those app interactions that matter so much), even though it's really not. Again, I can see how you arrive there, but it's... almost like a first draft idea.
Why isn't the climax, for example, an event that happens simultaneously across multiple areas on the 'ship', with different scenes feeding into each other and interacting at a distance, in a way that emulates the montage of a movie finale? Well because that might have cost money. Same reason there's exactly one animatronic walkaround alien suit, exactly one droid, exactly one of basically everything. The whole thing is built from a barely-enough perspective. There's exactly one lightsaber fight, so the entire thing has to be set up around dealing with it.
Which is kind of the tragic thing about it, right, Disney built an insanely expensive 'immersive' resort experience that from a distance seemed like at least it could have been a no-expenses-spared fascinating boondoggle... but it's actually such a minimum viable product-ass thing that it's not even a particularly interesting failure.
That's a line near the end of Ms. Nichelson's epic four-hour movie that I believe sums it all up. Somebody with sufficient MBA brainworms at Disney realized they could take all the "free" stuff they promised for Star Wars Land and upsell it as a premium hotel experience for $2000/night. They were cashing in on decades of goodwill, that intangible currency that can make or break your business. Because while Disney has always been known for being pricey, it used to be, you know, worth it. But if you're asking people to spend $5000 for a two-day experience, you can't expect them to do that again next year, and the year after that. The price was way too high for repeat business. And that's the crux of it all. Because I strongly suspect, and I have no concrete evidence for this, that Disney couldn't lower the price any further because the $2000/night price tag was already under cost. And as Jenny points out in the video, you can't do cost-cutting measures anywhere. You can't easily add more rooms, increase the throughput, or reduce the number of actors. Disney fucked themselves on this stupid boondoggle of a luxury hotel.