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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