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I made a comment about this in a reply to you on BlueSky, but geez it sure is hard to design "game rides" and nobody seems to have truly figured it out yet. Not only do you have to account for the varying skill levels of the guests, you also have to account for them not paying any attention to the instructions, and perhaps choosing to not play the game part at all.

I still think the first major game ride, Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin (known by slightly different names in each Disney park) does it best. Disney took an existing omnimover ride (Dream Flight) and turned it into a Buzz Lightyear themed moving shooting gallery. If you choose to engage with the game aspect you can try and compete against your friends to see who can score the highest. If you choose NOT to engage with it, it still functions just fine as a traditional Buzz themed dark ride.

But then they followed this up with Toy Story Mania. Gone are the physical sets covered in targets to shoot with your infrared gun. Instead they use screens and 3D goggles. The game part is really fun, same idea as Buzz - just try and score as much as you can, shoot some difficult targets to cause crazy things to happen. But the ride part is terrible. The ride vehicle exists only to shuttle you from screen to screen, with nothing to really look at in-between. If grandpa just wants to sit next to his granddaughter and not play the game, unlike the Buzz ride there's nothing for him to experience. Spider-Man WEB Adventure improves on this concept a bit by giving you something (anything!) to look at in-between the screens, but there's still basically nothing to do if you just want to sit next to your kid while they enjoy playing the game.

Then Disney got a really big idea to let you fly the Millennium Falcon with "Smuggler's Run." It's really cool... if you know what you're doing. But if you're on the ride with strangers or even with friends who haven't done it before, it's going to be nigh impossible to do well enough to get the good ending. The game is just too complicated. One person steers up/down while another steers left/right, which by itself is a truly insane decision for the designers to have made. With this one they basically swung too big when they actually needed a bit more restraint to make the game part more approachable.

I got real excited when I heard a Mario Kart ride was coming to Universal because I figured that with the help of a real game company like Nintendo the ride designers would be able to finally figure out how to make a "game ride" that is good as both a game and as a ride. But when it finally opened, a lot of people were really disappointed. When you think of a Mario Kart ride the first thing that comes to mind is a fast ride, but that's not what Universal built. They built a slow dark ride with an AR game laid on top of it, and it's probably one of the most divisive rides in the history of "theme park discourse" as a result of that. They seem to have prioritized the game over the ride in an attempt to build a Mario Kart ride "for everyone." But they ended up with a ride that's actually not truly satisfying anyone. The game part isn't good/engaging enough, and the ride part doesn't match guest expectations of what a ride themed around racing should be (perhaps we can thank Disney's excellent non-game ride Radiator Springs Racers for setting up that expectation that racing rides should be fast?).

This all leaves me to feel that nobody's ever going to get it right. Apart from that first simple but fun Buzz ride, every attempt at a game ride seems to miss at striking the proper balance between game and ride.

Edit: I should have called out Universal's Men In Black Alien Attack as another example of a good game ride. It's basically just a much lager version of original Disney's Buzz Lightyear concept, except at one point you can shoot the other ride vehicles to cause them to spin (fun!). Tokyo Disney's Monsters Inc. Ride and Go Seek is an interesting concept too. It's not really a "game" ride since there's no score or win/loss element, but it is highly interactive in a very similar way.

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Smuggler's Run was WILD. The sensory overload outweighed our inability to actually play the game, which I suspect requires people to return multiple times with a sense of how to work together to actually "win." While I was pretty sure we "lost" at the end, the wild visuals and everything that goes into the production ended up making sure we had a total blast.

I do think the Mario Kart right is a little disappointing. I was more interested in looking at the visuals of the ride, than the AR game, but the AR game, which isn't very good and is disappointingly unresponsive, is constantly taking your eyes away from the physical visuals.

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I've yet to ride Smuggler's Run but I've heard multiple people say similar things, and even that the queue and just getting to be inside the incredibly accurate interior of the Falcon was actually their favorite part.

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Yeah. Plus, it doesn’t feel like you “fail,” you know? At Super Nintendo World, they play the damn “you died” music lol

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Oh man, I had the same exact experience a little over a month ago with my 8-year-old boys. Of *course* they wanted to be the ones to do the crank, but I saw kids failing left and right while we were waiting in that 30 min line. When we got up there, I asked them for sure if they wanted to do on their own, and they said yes....and promptly failed. No tears, but definitely sadness. Thankfully we figured out that "quickly hit the blocks on the video blocks" game rarely had a line because it was hidden in a cave, so we did that a few times to get the keys -- great, because that final game is super cool! But why for that crank game in particular they don't give you two tries is mind boggling... especially because you get a few tries with the Koopa shell game.

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Too funny, because that was exactly what we did to get our last key. I have to imagine preventing two people from using the crank is to prevent it from breaking, but, maybe...build a better crank? lol

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I don't know the details of these games' designs, but there are ways of including a kind of win/loss that isn't a get-back-in-line travesty. But then again, if there's a lack of activities, burning (literally) hundreds of family hours there maybe isn't seen as a loss at all to the park.

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That's kind of where I fall on it. Have a special reward for winning (i.e. a special stamp, which is a huge part of the Nintendo park's appeal), but let those who lose still get the key.

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There’s an element here that’s integral, which is that Universal Hollywood draws more locals than tourists, on average. So generally, visitors are likely to be able to return, and thus if they fail or spend a lot of time redoing attractions, it’s maybe a perk as much as it’s a bug if it convinces them to get a season pass.

It makes me wonder how they might need to adjust things in Orlando next year - it will be the first time the land has been tied more strongly to “once in a lifetime tourist trips,” compared to Hollywood and Osaka.

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Oh, that's such an interesting observation.

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This is a very validating comment I will keep in mind as I write that chapter of my book this summer, thank you.

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I'm shocked they don't make it so everyone wins? I understand failure if playing the experience was the end goal, but to gatekeep part of the park behind succeeding is madness!

Leave some competition in by making up tiers so there's still a point to the game so teens and adults can show off to their buddies, but don't lock out access because of it!!

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I think having some risk, some tension, is really fun. I'm not trying to hide my children from failure. It's healthy. Just disagree on how they decided this risk and tension to work.

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