When will experiences replace movie theaters?
aaronsw.com
aaronsw.com
The reason there aren't more of them is that the described mechanics are so cost-heavy that it would be prohibitive to scale and operate on an ongoing basis. It's challenging enough to make a museum/theme-park ride that shuttles a dozen people through an 'experience' on a track without the line becoming prohibitively long. If you multiply the time taken to 'experience' the ride by having people go through at their own pace and only one or maybe two at a time, the costs would soar and the line would be absurd.
Haunted Houses skew more toward the described spy 'experience' than theme park rides, but even still the flow is carefully designed, there are no wrong choices, rarely obstacles and even with ticket prices and lines notoriously unpopular, almost none can afford to operate without the artificial scarcity of an impending holiday packing demand.
There are very good economic reasons why theme parks and haunted houses stick to experiences on rails and in groups.
It's eerie how now that computers are intertwined with our lives, the idea of an advancing virtual reality, able to give interesting experiences, is not something people fax poetic about anymore. The computer has already been assigned to some other category in most people's minds. Yet virtual reality will still advance and eventually give nearly any experience we might imagine.
This sort of service-intensive experience requires a large density of premium customers to justify going for that over a more mass-market entertainment approach. Indeed, theme parks themselves are moving more and more towards the theater model, because that scales so much better with much more capacity. Disney and Six Flags and Universal have upgraded many parks with huge theaters and shows. The best roller coasters and dark rides can run around 2,000 guests per hour; a theater show can hold 5,000 or more with minimal line-waiting.
Just like software, a capitalist can duplicate the movie experience for thousands of watchers at nearly no marginal cost. Compare that to a Broadway play which requires a hundred paid workers to stage a more personal performance. Broadway does exist thanks to New York's density of wealth, but that's the exception. Every town has a movie theater, because the pricing fits into everybody's everyday budget, and the physical hardware is easily constantly repurposed to a new movie.
You can build it. But it's dubiously economical (or incredibly expensive) unless you start stripping away at the immersion to streamline it.
This is why the answer to the OP's question is "never." "Experiences" were very popular before movie theaters even existed.
I think the "replace" part of the question is silly. Movie theaters never replaced live stage productions, in fact given population growth and increased leisure time there are probably more of those going on today than there were in Shakespeare's day. Likewise we actually have more hobbyists, archaeologists, and students making Stone Age arrowheads today than we had actual hunters making Stone Age arrowheads to hunt with during the Stone Age. Replacement is a myth in my opinion. But even if replacement were a logical model for this sort of thing, if anything it would be movie theaters which already replaced "experiences," back in the 1890s or something.
That, combined with 'you should follow me on Twitter here', has me tempted to filter out everything this guy writes. (I won't, but I'm tempted.) The 'you should follow me on Twitter here' meme started when somebody A/B-tested 'follow me on Twitter' phrases. Tons of people who read that post adopted the phrase which that one person found most effective.
Problem is, A/B-testing is extraordinarily context-sensitive, and quality is much more important than quantity on Twitter. It's not a video game where the person with the most followers wins. If anything, it's a video game where the person with the smartest, least annoying followers wins. So "you should follow me on Twitter here" is cargo-culting in the service of a goal which is questionable at best.
I basically think that meme is stupid beyond words, and I very much disagree with this blog post, but despite all this, I'm not trash-filtering this domain (I use a custom HN viewer app I wrote which trash-filters a lot of domains, e.g., TechCrunch, anything Zed Shaw). Reason is, the Aaron behind aaronsw.com also wrote a terrific Twitter conversation viewer. So, I might disagree with the guy, but I love the tool he wrote, and I use it all the time, which is really the most sincere, practical form possible of respecting somebody's idea.
rant rant rant ramble ramble ramble
For instance, some people set up an indoor mini golf course with blacklights in a storefront at the mall near my town. My 9 year old and I went there maybe three times -- it was a cool idea but we weren't going to do it every weekend. They didn't quite last a year.
Similarly, a ski area that's a three hour drive from here set up a "ropes course" where you can put on a harness and climb up into thre trees. We had to pay for gas and a hotel stay plus the ticket and then my kid had a panic attack in the treetops and had to be talked down. Cool experience, but not something I can do every week.
The experiences which work out the best are the ones that we create for ourselves with a low budget -- like the frozen pond we discovered in a nearby state forest that we've been skating on or the radio transmitter club that a local amateur radio club is organizing this weekend.
Well, I've been to the St. Louis City Museum he talks about many times and I can't imagine getting tired of it. (Enjoy sticking your arms out and getting rolled upside down in an antique gigantic wine barrel? Or sliding down frighteningly steep slides intended for transporting shoes? Or crawling upside down in a thunderdome style metal rig on the roof of the building? Or watching a several hundred gallon barrel fill with water until it tips over? Or climbing in metal chutes outside a hundred feet in the air to arrive at a plane suspended in midair by cables? I do!) However, there are few (if any) other places like that.
i really can't do sleep no more justice in a comment. "immersive", again, is probably the best word for it. it was quite successful and ran for several months beyond the final show last summer.
obviously it's a business, but i think it would be more apt to compare it to a play house, which still thrive where they can.
Taking the given example, when watching a movie, I can believe Matt Damon is a spy. I can't make myself believe I'm a spy. Whenever I'm in such situation my brain screams at me how ridiculous the premise is.
Experiences where I don't have to believe something ridiculous - playing paintball, for example - are enjoyable, but they don't replace movies, not by a long shot.
There was a time I was on mailing lists and chat rooms where I know some of the people were connected with intelligence services and national police agencies, not just which ones.
At this point your life gets weird... People call your wife when you're not home with caller ID blocked and try to trick your wife into installing malware on your computer, etc.
It might be a little exciting at first, but the trouble you can get into in that life just isn't worth it.
Nobody wants to pretend they're a spy. Everyone wants to pretend they're James Bond.
Baer also points out that a CIA case officer's job is unique in government, in that their explicit job is to convince someone else to break the law. Not US law, of course, but still: their job is to convince someone else to commit treason.
Most people also don't go to be told a challenging story, they want something simple, quick and easy like popcorn.
I don't really know how to find the source, but I once read that netflix customers will put movies they feel they should watch (like important pieces of cinema) into their queue, but when they arrive the customer let them sit around longer before watching them than a generic mindless entertainment flick.
When the Great Netflix Psychotic Break happened, about a million customers came to the same conclusion.
http://www.smuggs.com/winter/amenities/canopy-tour.php
Another ski area just built a huge indoor waterpark.
There are tons of these types of adventurous opportunities out there. Movies are for the lazy.
People are lazy and broke. And fixing 'broke' doesn't usually fix 'lazy.'
The problem isn't so much providing them (although other posters address the issue of cost), it's whether the customer does, in fact, want to do his part. Go to a movie theater, look around, and ask what percentage of attendees would, in fact, want to spend the next 2 hours going thru an approximation of what they're going to sit there, mouth agape, staring at. Most wouldn't, even if they could - which most couldn't.
The opportunities for experiences are there. Skydiving. Romance. Wilderness adventure. World travel. Competition. Artistic expression. Whatever. Spend as much or as little as you like, in both time and money. I've seen all kinds of "experiences" appear and flourish in a few decades. Lots of people participate in them, as the height of our culture allows and facilitates unprecedented indulgence in luxury "experiences". Oh, they may not be as objectively exciting, but subjectively they can be fantastic (first time I did paintball - about the same price & duration & space as a high-end movie - it sure wasn't a James Bond film, but instead of "that was neat, now what" I drove around the city loop twice screaming in residual endorphin rush).
The key is audience participation. Anyone can jet off to exotic locations for wild times for just a few days' salary, and for even just the price & time of a movie go leap out of an airplane or take a romantic walk. Most, however, would rather push a button and say "here we are now, entertain us."
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_ALL_Hacker_Spaces http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/labs/ (seems to be missing some places) meetup.com
You don't have to be a spy or somebody else to have some adventure. That idea is limited, just combine it with some other needs and there you have it.
And what do we get when people show up? People seem to enjoy looking at the bizarre interactive stuff -- it gives them permission to be freer -- but most people, it seems, want formulaic experiences. They like dancing at sound camps, intoxication, and riding around on art cars in costumes. Which is just a typical Friday night clubbing, only more so.
But rather than criticize them for being unadventurous, let's look at what makes these experiences work. Music was invented a few hundred thousand years ago and there aren't many more direct routes to people's pleasure centers. It's also evergreen; a sound camp can swap DJs every few hours and have a different experience in the same environment.
Complicated art or interactive installations do their thing, but if you have a five ton sculpture that whirls boulders around, well, that's what it does. Rarely can they be as protean as a music hall or a movie house, or your personal computer.
The best you can do is some sort of hardware/software combination, like the Cubatron series, which has had various incarnations as a sort of 3d screen saver build out of LEDs. Syzygryd is an interactive, collaborative music sequencer in the shape of a giant sculpture that lights up and shoots fire.
Perhaps the best urban interactive experiences will be like that -- there might be some expensive hardware built component, but they need to plug into some inexhaustible source of new ideas too.
To put in perspective, he listed 2 experiences that might have thousands of visitors a week. Eyeballing last week's box office results, it looks like ~$150M across major movies. That means 15 MILLION people went to the movies last week just in the US.
Movies are a cost and effort-effective way to be entertained, and a predictable and profitable way to invest huge amounts of money. That's why there's everywhere.
The actors stick to a script, and any attempt to interact or change the outcome of the experience is largely ignored. If I wanted to be ignored I'd go to the cinema, musical or a normal theater production.
Other experiences, e.g. Clay Shooting, treetop walks, jetboat rides and the such are generally prohibitively expensive to do once a week, and aren't really accessible unless you live close by. At least with the cinema I can afford to go once a week, see something different each, and it's a short walk/train/bus journey from home.
that said, i've been to shows where they use the audience. it depends on the production. likewise, i'm sure there are some movies you enjoy and some you wouldn't.
Here's what they did for One flew over the Cukoo's nest - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nHZAZZqOqM
Likewise Bugsy Malone - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOnswf7XaOE
Their bungee jumping on steroids, dropping face up from 120 feet, is so scary that it was used in studies of time perception:
Dear Author: you are missing Winkel and Blaktrick http://www.wandbevents.com/redesign/
They host events that are exactly the experiences you describe as missing from the city, and they are local to NYC.
Pro-tip: Don't go to the monthly events, only go to the seasonal ones that have a theme and story.
I'm from NYC; this past Saturday there was a secret Night Market. Not a Winkel and Balktick event per se, but with some of the same people involved.
A Night Market is a collection of box trucks, rented for the evening and parked together in a deserted neighborhood of the city; each truck is kitted out with some form of experience/entertainment: one gave out perogis, another served tea; one was called "Thunder Cube" and hosted big pillow fights; the most elaborate one had a functioning hot tub.
The event's location was kept secret until the last minute, and attendance was limited.
My girlfriend and I produced a truck; it was called the "Peek-a-Boo Lounge" and was simply a place for people to sit and socialize. We used lumber, fabric, and sofa cushions to decorate the back of a 24-foot box truck, turning it into a two-level maze where people crawled around on their knees. There were 2 sets of day-glo Connect Four, a pair of naughty dice (leftover from a Valentine's Day event) and a day-glo stuffed carrot (leftover from Bugs Bunny costume).
It took the two of us a couple of days and about $600 to build (including truck rental). People seemed to enjoy it, judging from the laughter we heard in back; it was childlike. We received donations to help pay for the project.
I've found it's critical to find projects with good "bang-for-the-buck"; you want to enjoy yourself even when you're working.
These sort of "experiences" work because of the community they foster, and because they rely on imagination; much of the 'entertainment" is really just a cheap trick and that's part of the fun.
Science Fiction writers have solved these problems already, just tap directly into the brain, Minority Report style. Now all you scientists just need to catch up.
No, we just need to find the small door. John Malkovich won't be amused, though.
Scale.