Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Tell Me It Isn’t

In yesterday’s post I told you about the upcoming Disney movie based on the “It’s A Small World” ride; a project which has the potential to be either the best or the very worst thing ever to come out of Hollywood depending on your tolerance for cutesy and your need to keep small children entertained without resorting to cable television. As potentially horrifying as this might be, there was a note contained within the same Los Angeles Times article cited below that contains something far more disturbing, at least in its potential. The Times author notes that Six Flags Magic Mountain is going to dismantle the Colossus rollercoaster – and that this one-time monument to adrenaline is no longer in the top ten rides in any major category…

For those unfamiliar with the installation, the amusement park originally called simply “Magic Mountain” is located just north of Los Angeles along Interstate 5. It’s on the other side of Los Angeles from the various parks in Anaheim and the surrounding areas, and is thus two or three hours closer by car to a large percentage of the city’s residents. The park began with only a few rollercoasters, and relatively modest ones at that, but gradually added various other rides and attractions. When Colossus was introduced in 1978 it was the tallest and fastest wooden rollercoaster in the world, and the first to have drops of 100 feet or more. The park was purchased by Six Flags in 1979, and has since been expanded to include newer rides incorporating increasingly exotic technological elements. Meanwhile, larger and faster rides of various types have appeared in various facilities around the world…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that Six Flags has any ethical, moral or historical responsibility to keep Colossus operating. It occupies an enormous amount of highly valuable real estate – over ten acres – and if the company can find a more productive and/or lucrative use for that space, one could argue that they have a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders to do just that. What I find troubling about these events is the ongoing drive for faster, scarier and more extreme rides, and the corresponding increase in the number of adrenaline junkies demanding that manufacturers and park owners continue pushing the limits on ride performance. I have to ask, where does it end?

Once something becomes commonplace it loses whatever appeal it may have had by virtue of being unfamiliar, unexpected, or just extraordinary, and therefore is no longer a selling point. In management theory this phenomenon is the basis for the Resource-Based View of the firm (RBV), which states that in order to offer the company a competitive advantage a given asset must be valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and difficult to substitute for. In the case of the rollercoaster market, once there are higher, faster and/or scarier rides than Colossus, it is no longer a draw for the park and should probably be replaced with something that does give Magic Mountain an edge over the competition. But while this makes perfect sense from a business standpoint, I can’t help worrying about the human costs involved…

Once you’ve traveled down a 100-foot drop at 62 miles per hour it’s harder to get excited by a ride traveling half that distance at two-thirds of that speed. So the competition might respond with something that drops 120 feet at 70 miles per hour, forcing Magic Mountain to create something that drops 140 feet while traveling at 75 miles per hour while upside-down – and the cycle continues until we reach the state of the art in terms of what can be built or what the riders can survive. I have no scientific evidence to suggest that this process makes the people who ride such installations edgy, impatient, or hard to keep focused, but it seems possible that the decrease in attention spans that everyone keeps bemoaning might have something to do with a culture that places ever greater importance on high levels of excitement at all times. Speaking as an educator, this worries me…

I’m not saying there’s a direct causal relationship between these stimuli and a fall-off in attention spans, patience and good behavior among the members of the key demographic groups to whom rollercoasters are marketed. But I would very much like it if somebody could tell me there isn’t…

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