Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

The spy 'experience' described is just a theme park ride or haunted house with different set dressing.

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.

Indeed, the obvious way that society has found to achieve these things is ... video games.

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.

What I take to be your mistake ('fax' for 'wax poetic') is an intriguing Freudian slip in this context.

These "experiences" like flying like Peter Pan absolutely exist now, things like bungee jumping or hang gliding or ziplines. Most tourist areas and theme parks have lots of upcharge attractions of this sort. The scarcity of their limited capacity drives prices up. (Remember, in capitalism, prices are set by supply and demand, not by cost.)

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.

Sure, but the original article is talking expressly about immersive experiences. A line of people waiting to crawl through a laser-tripwire room is the only economically feasible way to scale what he's talking about, but it's expressly not what he's talking about. That's what I was trying to get at.

You can build it. But it's dubiously economical (or incredibly expensive) unless you start stripping away at the immersion to streamline it.

The spy 'experience' described is just a theme park ride or haunted house with different set dressing.

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

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