Tech Debt 2 — Galactic Boogaloo
A viral YouTube video causes us to revisit an article from last year.
Some time ago, I wrote a piece for Boardwalk Times about technical debt and the Disney theme parks: The Cost of Endless Magic — Theme Parks and Technical Debt.
With the explosion of Jenny Nicholson’s new YouTube essay about the history of and problems surrounding the, now defunct, Galactic Starcruiser (2022) at Walt Disney World in Florida, I thought it might be time for a short revisit of that article to see where the parks are now and to make a few suggestions about what I’d like to see to improve the current state of technology at Disney.
In my prior article, we had spent a lot of time looking at Disneyland’s amazing Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye (1995) attraction which had just re-opened from a prolonged rehab. In the parlance of my piece, there had been a conventional refurbishment with some refactoring of troublesome elements, and a few new effects were added (which will, of course, add to the tech debt). Unfortunately, Disney seems to have made a familiar error in judgment with how they utilized this attraction’s extensive downtime. They have plussed it up without fixing many of the core issues.
Within weeks of the re-opening the rotating boulder — assumed to be a major part of the fixes — began failing again. The Indy figure above it also seemed to be working only sporadically and it is clear that a considerable amount of human spackle (Human spackle, per my previous article, is manual intervention by people to correct problems with systems that are supposed to operate automatically.) was being employed. We can tell because people found that adjustments were being made to the figure in such haste that he was being re-dressed, um, wrong.
New effects in the Rat Room, Bug Room, and at the Gates of Doom are what I would call classical refactoring: they have been stripped out and replaced with entirely new mechanisms. More fundamental effects — the boulder, Indy, the Cobra — seem to have been cleaned up, given a new coat of paint, had some oil squirted on the machinery, and put back in service. As if no rehab had taken place, they are again frequently inoperable and the ride itself is suffering from significant downtime.
It seems at this point that the refactoring that has been done has paid down the attraction’s debt principle very little and the need for human spackle is still high.
Trying to draw a bead on the state of technical debt across the American theme parks, it is hard to hold any other opinion that it’s rising and that they may be defaulting on its interest.
In the past year, point-of-sale outages have shut down the ability to even walk through the gates of the parks at times, attraction downtime has reached surprising levels, and maintenance of attractions seems to be slipping (I watched a performance of It’s Tough to be a Bug where Flik’s jaw just hung open the entire time.) and, as predicted in my previous article, the debt grows as more technical features are added to the parks without the problems of earlier debt being refactored or retired.
I don’t mean to be doom-and-gloomy about all of this. I love the parks. I still think they’re wonderful. But building an entire new “Beyond Big Thunder” land when the Magic Kingdom can’t keep Pirates of the Caribbean (1967) consistently on-line is a questionable move operationally. It might bring in a short-term boost in ticket sales but leaves Disney with long-term problems. The Starcruiser, by the nature of its ambitions, was sure to bring on the highest level of tech debt that the park had ever dealt with: complex effects, extremely immersive environments, human interactivity in the gameplay mechanism, all while coordinating a simulation of a full-service luxury cruise. As Nicholson points out in her video, if the technology had worked consistently on The Galactic Starcruiser — if it had facilitated the story rather than instigated user frustration — we might be having a different discussion about the experience today. But Disney made two sizeable errors.
They built the experience with little opportunity for refactoring — the permanent structure would be an unforgiving building to alter and its remote backstage location limited the amount of repurposing that could happen — and thus locked themselves into the totality of an unproven experience. They also did not account for the lack of resources available to not only maintain, but adapt the scenario as needed. If you go back to my previous article and read the “canary in a coal mine” section about cascading failures leading to even dependable attractions having trouble, you’ll see that this might have been an inevitability that Disney should have seen coming.
I’m not here to do a snarky victory lap or to rehash Jenny Nicholson’s excellent work. My goals are to show Disney fans how they can look at the parks using this model of technical debt and the interest on that debt to gain some insight into why the parks perform the way that they do and also to make some suggestions from the point-of-view of my work as a solutions architect.
So here is what I would do if I were asked to address the technical debt issue at the parks.
- Unify information services across the Florida and California Parks. The fact that there are disparate back-ends between the two resorts — disparate security systems, disparate phone apps, disparate point-of-sale, and ticket redeeming mechanisms — is a costly and cumbersome way to run this business.
- Give the Chief Technology Officer and their teams autonomy. It is all too common for a CTO who is answerable to other departments, rather than a peer to them, to have their budget co-opted by those other departments’ immediate needs.
- This is going to be a bitter pill, but use the next two years, when Epic Universe is going to sink or swim no matter what Disney does, to bolster the infrastructure. Take stuff offline and fix it. The Universal battle is one that Disney should simply not fight for a few years and, while retreating, should use their retreat wisely. Restructure maintenance. Decide what needs some serious refactoring. (Rise of the Resistance, I’m looking at you!) Fix stuff and make it public that this is what’s happening. It’s the proper judo move.
- While this is all going on, put character and cast member interactions at the forefront. Take the pressure off of the technical resources by utilizing the skills of the hospitality staff. While getting the technical house in order, be Disney; not Disney playing catch-up to that place down the road: be Disney. Disney Cast Members are the parks’ greatest assets. A Disney Cast Member can make a guest’s day more than any attraction. Let them cover for the outages and let the guests see what they maybe haven’t in quite some time, Disneyland and Walt Disney World as parks to spend time enjoying human interaction and with a sense of leisure.
Alright, I’m done playing armchair CEO. Let’s hope that the next time we revisit this article it will be describing a Disney where the technical debt in the parks is under control, the stations are reset and ready for the next technical challenge; a Disney with a renewed focus and sense of determination. Wouldn’t that be something? A Disney with their ambitious, technical, house in order? I’m rooting for them.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times