"Fun is cheap. I can have fun in an inflatable pool in my backyard. I can have fun playing basketball by the garage. I can have fun watching videos of snarky cats. This fun costs very little. An inflatable pool costs 50 bucks or less and can be used many times. A trip to a major entertainment venue like a Broadway play or Theme Park can cost many hundreds of dollars per visit, all in. So…are these places just plain fun? Are they hundreds or thousands of times more fun than shooting silly string at each other on the porch? Probably not. Therefore, fun cannot possibly be the motivating factor in the compulsive, repetitive, over-scale patronage of the theme park industry. The motive is simply not competitive enough based on other options. People must be paying this kind of money and making this kind of effort for a reward that is of higher value, more rare, and of greater impact than fun. That reward is many things, among which is the sensation of transport, of being moved magically into another place or another time. It is the intensity of experience which results in permanent memories. It is the rare sensation of cohesiveness, harmony, and thematic organization which allows the human brain to relax and be absorbed. I could go on. But all of these properties reside in the obsessive execution of coordinated detail, resulting in places with a strange otherworldly attraction. And that is not cheap. In fact, theme parks are repositories of human time, effort, and, yes, money…which guests sense through the level of detail, organization, and intensity. Theme parks are a form of communication between designers and audiences… They are relationships. People like worthy, meaningful, invested relationships… Not cheap ones."
- Joe Rohde
