More Musings on the Starcruiser

Over the various overlapping illnesses and convalescences of the last two months I finally caught up with the rest of the western hemisphere and made my way though Jenny Nicholson’s remarkable four-hour review/port-mortem of Disney’s “Galactic Starcruiser”—The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel.

It’s a outstanding piece of work, not only reviewing her own trip, but also providing context and some attempted root-cause analysis for the whole misbegotten project. Go carve out some time to watch it if you haven’t already. It’s the definitive work on the subject.

We’ve covered the Star Wars Hotel on Icecano before, but that was based on a trip report from someone whose trip went well. Nicholson’s trip didn’t go so well, and the ways systems fail often shed a lot more light on how they really function then when they work as intended.

The thing that has always stuck me about the Starcruiser is that it was so clearly three different attractions:

• A heavily-themed hotel with a direct “side-door” connection to the park
• A collection of low-barrier-to-entry interactive “games” somewhere between an arcade and an escape room
• A 2-day LARP summer camp with a stage show at the end

Those are all pretty good ideas, but why did they do them as one thing? All those ideas would have been so much cooler as an actual fancy hotel connected to the park, and then separately an EPCOT-style “Star Wars Pavillion”, in the style of the current space restaurant or the old The Living Seas “submarine base” you got into via the “Hydrolater”.

I thought Nicholson’s sharpest insight about the whole debacle was that all the “features” of the hotel were things originally promoted as being part of the main Star Wars Land, but the hotel allowed them to put them behind an extra paywall.

I maintain my belief I alluded to last summer that I don’t think the hotel was ever meant to last very long, it really does feel like a short-term experiment to try out a bunch of ideas and tech in a way where they can charge through the nose for access to the “beta”. So many strange decisions make more sense if you assume it was never meant to last for more than about 2 years. (But still! Why build it way out there instead of something you could turn into a more-permanent fixture?)

But that’s all old news; that was stuff we were speculating on before the thing even opened. No, what I’ve been stewing on since I watched this video was the LARP aspect. Nicholson’s video was the first thing I’d seen or read that really dug into what the “role play” aspect of the experience was like and how that worked—or didn’t. And I can’t believe how amateur-hour it was.

Credit where credit was due, Disney was going for something interesting: an open-to-the-public Diet LARP that still had actual NPC characters played by paid actors with storylines and semi-scripted events. Complexity-wise, not all the way up to a “real” LARP, but certainly up above an escape room or a murder mystery party or a ren faire or something of those ilk. Plus, you have to assume basically everyone who will every play it is doing so for the first time, no veteran players. And at a premium price.

One would think this would come with a fairly straightforward set of rules or guidelines; I imagined an email with a title along the lines of “To ensure you have the best possible experience…” And instead, they just… didn’t?

For example, the marketing made a big deal about “starring in your own story” and guests were strongly encouraged to dress up. But they really didn’t want guests to use character names. That seems mostly logistical, with guest profiles and whatnot tied to their real names. That’s the sort of obvious-in-retrospect but not-so-much ahead of time detail that is the reason Session Zero exists! This isn’t Paranoia, it’s not cheating to tell the players how to play the game, just tell them! For $6000, I’d expect to be told ahead of time “please wear costumes but please don’t use a fake name.”

But it’s the lack of any sort of GameMaster/StoryTeller that stunned me. The just-shy of 40-year DM in me kept watching those video clips going “no, no, no, someone put your thumb on the scale there.” The interaction that really got me is the part of the video where she’s trying and failing to get pulled into the First Order story, and is attempting to have a conversation with the Officer actor to make this happen, and they are just talking past each other. And this made my skin crawl, because this is perfect example of a moment where you need to be able to make the “out of game” hand sign and just tell someone what’s happening. I can’t believe there wasn’t a way to break out of kayfabe and ask for help. Again, this is basic session zero safety tools shit. This is shit my 12 year old figured out on his own with his friends. Metaphorically, and maybe literally, there should always be a giant handle you can pull that means “this isn’t working for me”.

Look, this is not an original view, but for 6 grand, you should be able to do everything wrong and still get a killer experience. You shouldn’t be begging an underpaid SoCal improv actor to let you play the game you paid for halfway though your trip.

I get that they were trying to do something new for Disney, but The Mind's Eye Theatre for Vampire came out in 1993. Running a safe and fun LARP is a solved problem.

I get wanting to make something that’s as mainstream and rookie-friendly as possible, and that you don’t want to just appeal to the sort of folks that can tell you who the seven founding clans of the Camarilla were. But something we talk about a lot in tabletop RPGs is “calling for buy-in”, and holy shit clicking CONFIRM ORDER on a screen with a juicy four digit number of dollars on it is the most extreme RPG buy-in I’ve ever heard of.

I know I keep coming back to the price, and that’s partly because for a price that premium you should get an equivalently premium experience, but more importantly: there was no-one casual at this thing. No one “impulse-bought” a trip on the Starcruiser. Everyone there was as bought-in as anyone ever has been, and they couldn’t figure out how to deliver an experience as good as any random night in the park with the other vampires in the sleepy NorCal farming town I went to college in.

It’s tempting to attribute all that to general Disney arrogance, but I don’t think so. It all feels so much stupider than that. Arrogance would be ignoring the prior art, this feels more like no-one could be bothered to find out if there was any? The most expensive piece of half-ass work I have ever seen. This all could have worked? Beyond the obvious budget cuts and trying to scale down, this could have worked. It’s wild to me that they’d spend that much money, and energy, and marketing mindshare, and then not make sure it did. I mean, really, no one employed by Imagineering used to be the Prince of Glendale or something? Unlikely. I don’t think anyone intentionally sandbagged this project, but it sure doesn’t look like anyone involved cared if it was successful.

Weird.