A Response to "The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel"
Or On Ethics in Criticism
Ok, just to warn you up front, this essay is essentially a long “Something is Wrong on the Internet” screed, but given that I research this stuff, I feel that part of my academic responsibility is to respond to these things, given that so many others are giving what I consider thin and unproductive responses where they don’t interrogate the content of the video at all, if they even bother to give Disney or other attendees of the experience a voice.
This, in my opinion, is bad because Galactic Starcruiser was an extremely important piece of work in the immersive field and if one long documentary about it is going to define its legacy, we should question what the documentary says and whether it’s accurate. That’s what I’m going to do here.
(Thanks go out to Kathryn Yu, Blake Weil, and Noah Nelson for their own writing and input in this conversation that influenced this piece.)
Sorry, what are we talking about here?
On May 18th, 2024, Jenny Nicholson, an video essayist and influencer around theme parks on YouTube posted a four-hour video titled “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel.” For real, it’s four hours of content; you can wait to watch it if that’s daunting. It’s framed as Nicholson’s personal experience going to Starcruiser with her sister and her resulting analysis of why Starcruiser went out of business, which is then built into a larger thesis about Disney.
Nicholson was very popular on YouTube already, having 1 million followers and a quite well known video about another failed immersive park, but this video blew up even further and has become a talking piece about Galactic Starcruiser in the press. It’s being shared on social media and talked about in the news. The general take is that it’s thorough and compelling and it’s the definitive story of Starcruiser.
Galactic Starcruiser was a two-night immersive experience at DisneyWorld in Florida in which you stayed in a hotel billed as an in-narrative luxury starcruiser and engaged in about 36 hours of watching scenes, talking to characters, playing games, and eating restaurant meals all in Star Wars themed setting with a central story of the Rebellion and the First Order and smugglers and the Force. It cost about $5500 for a room, although the exact cost per person depended on how many people you got into the room. It opened in March of 2022 (having been delayed by COVID) and closed in September of 2023.
And you have an issue with the video?
My context for this is that I know a lot about Starcrusier. I watched the entire video (at double speed - four hours is a LOT of influencer and I do not like influencer) and read a bunch of the surrounding articles. I have researched and taught interactive narrative for over 20 years and have gone to things like this my entire adult life; I even review them for No Proscenium. But most importantly, I’ve been to Starcruiser myself, I know dozens of people who have also, and I personally know at least three people who worked on the design of it. I’m way, way inside on this one, so I feel confident that at least in key places, I am qualified to evaluate Nicholson’s arguments.
The tl;dr version of this is Nicholson is a smart commentator who had a unforgivably horrible experience that she has a right to be livid about and she makes many good points about some aspects of the experience. She’s smart about her subject expertise and tells a good story. But when she gets out of her lane and starts talking about the experience beyond her personal journey, the reporting (and I’m using that word specifically) gets cherry picked, lazy, and manipulative. She says flatly untrue things and comes to conclusions that would be impossible if she honestly presented the state of the world. There are goods and bads in it, but there’s something journalistically unethical about what Nicholson did in this video, and that’s what’s motivating this response.
What follows is my long take on the above. The teacher in me thinks everyone should do primary reading, so you can watch the video here, but as four hours is a lot, I’m going to summarize the key points as I go with references so you can see it yourself. I’ll cite my other sources in the text when I make them. This is going to be divided into good, bad, and ugly (which is my conclusion.)
The Good of Nicholson’s Video
I want to lead this by saying that as many issues as I have with this video, I don’t think Jenny Nicholson is a hack or uninformed. I actually think she has a lot of good points and raises some very solid criticisms about Starcruiser, and I want to start by highlighting them.
The ostensible purpose of this video is to document the experience that Nicholson had when she went to Starcruiser with her sister. It’s not exactly clear when she went, but evidence seems to point to very early in the run, maybe a few weeks after it opened. She very thoroughly documents what she saw and what happened to her from signing up to leaving. I have no reason whatsoever to think she doctored that footage. She gives us a pretty direct view of her experience and I trust that’s accurate. Around that, she also looks at the marketing that Disney did for Starcruiser, the history the park had in exploring Star Wars and interactive things, and the history of the experience beyond her trip.
Here’s what I think is strong:
Nicholson understands theme parks
Nicholson’s critiques of Starcruiser are grounded in a deep appreciation and understanding of theme parks. That’s where her analysis is the strongest. She dissected the functionality of different experiences in ways I did not notice and I appreciated that insight. The sections on the lightsaber training and the bridge were truly informative and while I didn’t agree with all of her reactions (e.g. she said the bridge was cheap-looking which I did not perceive), I could certainly tell that she knew what she was talking about and had interesting things to offer. She also has a whole chapter of the video dedicated to different initiatives that Disney made to make more immersive parts of the park that was truly new information to me. If I watched videos like this regularly, I would definitely pay attention to her videos about pure theme park experiences.
In this vein, one of the critiques of Starcruiser I totally agreed with Nicholson on was the trip to Batuu. In the Excursion chapter of the video, she talks about how on the second day of Starcruiser you go to the Galaxy’s Edge part of Disney World and go on the rides there. That to me was the weakest part of the Starcruiser experience. Nicholson picks on the rides a bit and I disagree with her — the Smugglers Run ride is re-themed to match your plot in Starcruiser in a very cool way that Nicholson missed because of her app failures and while she didn’t have interaction with cast in Rise of the Resistance, we had an amazing one. But she’s totally right that the game activities in the park are sad. You just scan QR codes and solve far-too-easy puzzles on your phone. As Nicholson points out, the games should have been richer and the park should have been more reactive to your play. All of Nicholson’s arguments here are fair.
Nicholson had a truly bad experience in ways that she did not cause
The bulk of the video (chapters 5-15 of a 20-chapter video) are grounded in Nicholson’s experience. The short version of the story is that Nicholson spent $6k for her and her sister to rent a room on Starcruiser and do the experience. She documents each step of that experience from booking to arrival through both days in the hotel until the finale. The video is thorough and you can see just about everything she experienced. (Disney had no issue with people filming everything that was happening if they wanted.)
To be blunt, Nicholson’s trip was a disaster. A lot of how Starcruiser worked was through an app that allowed you to have virtual conversations with ship characters, gave you and tracked your progress in quests, and showed you your schedule. The app is the key way that users were moved through story content, and depending on what you did in Starcruiser, the app would push you to different content. Importantly for later, this is not a pathing system — it’s not a choose-your-own-adventure structure where you are going down branches based on individual choices. It’s more like building trust (numerically) with different factions and then having the system push you into scenes based on your trust levels. Games such as Fallout do this. You can find talks on how it works.
Nicholson’s app completely failed. It essentially did not track what she did and did not build the trust attributes correctly. This meant she was getting essentially random story content. Random content was very bad for Nicholson because she wanted a First Order story and ended up getting a Rebellion/Force story instead. She alludes to the fact that she didn’t know what was going on, which makes sense since she had effectively random content the whole time. And most painfully, this persisted despite her trying to correct it. There is a character on the ship (Lt. Croy) who works with the First Order and Nicholson tries to make a connection with that character, but the actor rejects her ask as a potential trick. That actor made a massive misread of the moment that cut Nicholson out of what she wanted most.
There were other issues that Nicholson cites. During the first dinner, she is seated behind a pillar so she can’t see the stage clearly and misses a lot of the show. And Disney messes up shipping on a number of things she bought and only corrects it when she shames them on Twitter. She adds all of this up to say that the trip was not worth the $6k she paid for it.
I’m not arguing with her here. She had an awful experience that Disney could have and should have fixed. A buggy app should have worked. She played along and expressed her desires in spite of that and Disney didn’t catch it. And Disney failed at basic customer service in a very expensive experience. She is absolutely right to slam them hard about charging $6k for something so broken.
Nicholson is absolutely right that the marketing was a huge part of this problem
The price tag keeps coming up in Nicholson’s video. It’s understandable given how high the price was, but it also speaks to one of the generally recognized issues with Starcruiser. The hotel was consistently talked about as a luxury cruise. Narratively, it’s a cruise ship in space, quite literally. The cast presents the ship as one of the oldest cruise liners in the galaxy. But it’s also the way that the experience is sold to customers. You are going on a luxury cruise in Star Wars.
This is important because Disney has luxury cruises. I worked on a project involving them like 10 years ago. They are what you think they are — big boats with lots of restaurants and pools and shows, with a heavy Disney brand feel. So when you hear “luxury Star Wars cruise/hotel,” you have a model in your head. You are going to have a great room. You are going to have activities to do. You are going to be taken care of.
But Starcruiser is not a cruise — it’s a LARP in a cruise themed setting. And that is a real problem if you are expecting a luxury cruise. LARPs don’t care about rooms; you should be running around doing things until you sleep. LARPs don’t pamper you; instead, they push you to constantly do things and if you choose not to, leave you alone. And LARPs don’t really care about amenities. There aren’t going to be spa elements and places to lounge. It’s going to be action and characters and engagement that drives the piece, and any non-active time is meant to be immersed in a set that looks consistent around players all inhabiting the same universe. The cost is not going towards luxury elements; it’s going towards the massive infrastructure of actors and showrunners who are putting together a dynamic, fluid interactive show for hundreds of guests at a time.
I went to Starcruiser expecting a LARP and I loved it. Nicholson went expecting a luxury experience and constantly found ways it fell short. I think both of these reactions are valid. And the fault of that is in Disney’s marketing. Nicholson walks through the marketing in detail in the second chapter of the video, and while I don’t know how comprehensive her analysis is, her take certainly matches what I knew about Starcruiser in the run-up to launch and I can absolutely see why she would walk away thinking she would have Disney luxury experience at this price point. She’s also very critical of some of the marketing elements, and I can’t argue with her evaluations.
This entirely matched the experience of people I talked to at Starcruiser, by the way. Several people I met on my trip I was on said they were there for a second time because the first time they had done it wrongly. They didn’t realize they needed to have a strong character and be active in pursuing plot, so they paid the full price again to make sure they experienced it. Some of these people were roleplayers in their normal lives. How did they get to an experience this expensive and feel like they didn’t know what to do?
When immersive people talk about why Starcruiser closed, this is what they talk about. How could such an amazing experience not sell tickets? Why would users show up and not know this was going to require LARP-levels of interaction? Disney did not pitch this correctly. Their marketing misrepresented the experience and did not explain what users were getting. That is a pure own-goal, an absolute failure on Disney’s part that if corrected could have prevented a lot of disappointment and confusion.
As a result, Nicholson (and I assume many others) followed an already existent Disney model, a luxury experience. Nicholson constantly returns to the price in her video, talking about the per-minute cost of everything she did. From that lens, I agree with her. Galactic Starcruiser is a rip-off as a luxury hotel. And given the marketing failure, there’s no reason why Nicholson wouldn’t use that perspective to judge everything.
(Quick side note here that the one place where Nicholson does praise the luxury experience was the food, and I can verify that. The food on Starcruiser was phenomenal, delicious and elaborate and appropriately sci-fi.)
When the video is personal observation, it’s excellent
What I’m trying to say here is that my issues with the video are not with Nicholson's ability to tell a story or how she presents her experience. She seems honest, she’s smart, and the details of what happened to her are both clear and compelling. Insofar as she’s talking about her personal experience of Starcruiser and stays in her domain expertises of theme parks and marketing, she does a terrific job. A lot of this video, maybe even most of this video, is excellent.
I’m going to start attacking now, but I just want to be as clear as I can that I don’t think Nicholson is a hack or opportunist or stupid on these topics. She is very good at what she does and she’s very smart about her subject. I want to give clear respect for that. As a story of her personal experience, it’s excellent.
The Bad of Nicholson’s Video
The issue is that this is not a personal experience video. It’s a report on Starcruiser and as reporting, it’s very uneven. Nicholson gets basic facts of the experience wrong and presents them in a way that is inaccurate. Some of that inaccuracy is about the content of the experience, but some of it is about selectively choosing what she shows and that IMHO is much worse.
Core facts about Starcruiser are wrong
Given the failure of her app and the way she bounced off the cast, Nicholson never really got a clear sense of the story of Starcruiser. In the video, she make some guesses at points about things that were happening that she didn’t see herself. Here, she gets a lot of things very wrong.
Obviously, if she didn’t see the experience, she shouldn’t be expected to know about it, so why am I picking on this? Well, Nicholson has clearly done research on other things in this video. It’s a FOUR HOUR VIDEO, FFS. She had the time to, I don’t know, ask ANYONE ELSE who went on Starcruiser what happened. And it’s not like there aren’t a ton of those on the internet. If Nicholson is capable of researching the entire history of the marketing and theme park innovation, she certainly could have talked to a few people who had successful journeys to find out what she didn’t see. It actually boggles my mind that she could make a four hour video of something and not do the simple homework to get this right.
The specific things I’m talking about are:
Nicholson says repeatedly that Starcruiser was a choose-your-own-adventure. It wasn’t. You are not on a plot path and you can see many elements of different stories. Anyone with a successful journey experienced that. I can count at least 5 different plots I saw parts of.
Nicholson claims there are three plots: Rebellion, First Order, and Smuggler. During the video, she considers some of the Force-related things she sees and concludes there is no Force plot. There was a Force plot. I did it in my experience. Some of the things she experienced are actually part of that plot. So many people talk about the Force plot as the most meaningful part of Starcruiser. You would have to willfully ignore other stories of the experience to not know this.
Nicholson claims that the cast’s headsets are giving instructions on how to deal with guests. They are not. Members of the design team have publicly discussed how cast members work — they actually just memorize everything and get notes during breaks from showrunners.
Nicholson critiques several rooms (the engine room and at length the cargo hold) as being underwhelming in terms of interaction without realizing that huge scenes happen in those rooms if you have plots in them. Maybe you can make an argument they should have been more fun on their own, but to not mention that whole scenes are based around the interactivity in those spaces is just omitting critical information.
Nicholson elides over major scenes including everything with Chewbacca, everything with Rey, and just about everything with Sammy. She didn’t experience those scenes personally so I understand why she isn’t documenting them. But you don’t get to make guesses or judgments about what those experiences were when you could just ask someone who saw them what happened.
And perhaps the biggest one, the price. Starcruiser is basically priced per room, not per person. The more people you can get into a room, the cheaper it is. I didn’t pay $3k to go to Starcruiser — I paid about half of that. Nicholson briefly mentions you could put up to 5 people in a room, but dismisses it as unlivable. Given that’s what I did, and what almost everyone I know who went at the tail end of the experience did, I can guarantee it’s livable. It’s not luxury, of course; that’s the misunderstanding that Disney created we already talked about. But if so many people did just that and had a cheaper experience, there’s something dishonest about constantly referencing the $6k figure as a benchmark for everything. You did not need to spend $2/minute at Starcruiser. Given how central that is to Nicholson’s argument, it’s a very manipulative way to present her case.
Again, if this were just a personal experience video and Nicholson didn’t speculate on things she didn’t see, none of this would be an issue. But in a video this long with this much research, it’s unbelievable that she couldn’t have found a way to investigate and report what the experience truly was. I would call that lazy, except for what happens at the end of the report.
All of the discussion of fan response is biased and misrepresented
In chapter 17 of the video, titled “Worth It?” Nicholson talks about other people’s responses to Starcruiser in part as a defense of her position and in part as a takedown of people posting shit to her because they don’t like her or her argument. Here she quickly shows about 60 social media comments of other people who didn’t like Starcruiser and then several different defenses of Starcruiser she diagnoses to be contradictory (e.g. some people tell her she should pay attention to the app over the cast, some people tell her the opposite) or motivated by Disney fanaticism. She ends up brushing off all critiques of her position as coming from “die-hard fans” with “not good enough” arguments.
I cannot put into words how cheap and deceptive I find this. There are literally 1000s of responses to Starcruiser. Several people, including me, have done podcasts and reviews of Starcruiser. I know dozens of people who have been to the experience. Many of them are not die-hard Star Wars fans (I’m not.) Many of them have never heard of Jenny Nicholson before this (I haven’t.) And shockingly, many of them DISAGREE that Starcruiser was a spectacular failure. In the immersive community, many people (again, including me) consider Starcruiser one of the most important pieces of work of our field. And we talk about it a lot.
Now, I have no idea what the percentage of people who enjoyed Starcruiser is to people who didn’t. I don’t know how large a group Nicholson represents of people who went on the experience and were disappointed. And I certainly would never judge anyone for not liking it, especially if they had the Disney trash fire that Nicholson did. But what I do know is that Disney does tons of customer satisfaction research and Caro Murphy, who worked on Starcruiser, posted this in an essay titled “Reaction to a Reaction,” a note which I have every reason to believe is true:
We can certainly question some of the methodology of how Disney does its research. It could be there is selective bias in the participants — it’s Star Wars after all. But this is a comparative stat: it’s the highest rating of DISNEY ATTRACTIONS. That means Disney fandom is built in. And I would hazard that Disney has spent a lot of money getting customer satisfaction data correctly.
None of this is hard to find. Nicholson certainly knew it existed if she did any research at all. The only conclusion I can come to is that she knew it hurt her argument, so she deliberately omitted it.
When the video is journalism, it’s unethical
My point here is that Nicholson wants to call her video “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel” and that’s what she’s going to make, facts be damned. And when it’s just your opinion, that’s fine. You can hate any art you want for whatever reason you have. But there are clearly points, many points, where Nicholson says something that’s outside of her direct experience that’s not true. She never lies as I see it. Instead, she either guesses at something wrongly that she could have fact-checked or she cherry picks information that helps her and ignores and dismisses information that doesn’t.
I’m only an amateur journalist myself, but I’ve worked with journalists on game projects for news publications. I’ve seen a bunch of journalistic ethics at work. Sources get rejected if they can’t be verified. People have to see things for themselves if it’s at all possible before they comment. Part of the core practice is deliberately looking for contradictory takes, just to make sure your current take is accurate. The rigor of truth-seeking I saw from the journalists I worked with was impressive and I see why you need it. If you don’t hunt that hard, you are just manipulating people. You’re not making journalism; you’re making marketing material.
Which of course is what Nicholson’s video is. It’s marketing for her brand. I suppose she has the right to do that, but when she presents something as a documentary report on an experience (even implicitly), I have every right to call out bad journalistic practice in it. It’s a dishonest set of manipulative tactics that sully the good work that the video did elsewhere.
The Ugly of Nicholson’s Video
I don’t watch YouTube influencers mostly. It’s not a judgment — I don’t think you get millions of followers for videos by making terrible work. I think it takes skill to create these essays and it’s an entertaining form for many. It’s just not my thing. But having watched this video, it reminds me of other issues we’ve seen from social media and that troubles me.
Most of the defenses I hear when I say the criticisms above are that Nicholson did not SAY she was making journalism. The video is framed as personal observation. But it’s not personal observation — there are tons of facts about marketing videos and press reports and historic events in the parks. Those are not Nicholson’s experiences; it’s her research. So even if she tries to dodge the idea that it’s journalism, the whole thing walks and talks like reporting, so that’s how we should judge it. It would be like saying John Oliver’s show is not journalism. He can claim that if he wants, but if you spend time showing me graphs about poverty and citations from newspapers, you aren’t doing pure comedy anymore.
The journalism Nicholson is doing here is criticism. It’s interesting to think of criticism as journalism. How is something journalism when it involves opinion and taste? As a critic, my opinion is that there’s a bar of fairness that makes criticism more than just a statement of my preferences. The goal of criticism is not just to tell you to watch or not watch something. The goal should be to offer the audience insight into a piece of work and its context. You are trying to provide a more nuanced understanding to an experience. If you attack something, you’re trying to show how it could be better or why it’s a bad trend in the form or what other work does better that the audience should know. It’s a kind of teaching, really, just one that uses examples to do it. It’s still taste of course — you could disagree with my take on something and you should at times honestly if your own opinions are developed — but you should be able to read my criticism and think about the work slightly differently for a second or I haven’t succeeded at my job.
But to do this, you have to be truthful to the work. That’s the base standard you have to have to do honest criticism. I can’t lie about what I saw and I can’t use completely idiosyncratic experiences to speak to the whole. For example:
If I walk out of a show in the middle, I can’t talk about the ending.
I can’t say if I fall asleep during a movie, that the movie was the dream I had and judge that. I similarly can’t wear headphones during the show and critique the show because it didn’t match the music I was playing.
If I see a show with paths, I can’t imagine what the other paths were and then make up my own explanation of how they worked. I have to not talk about them or do research and talk to someone who did experience them to find out what I didn’t see.
I can’t flat out lie and say that something happened in the story that didn’t or omit something that did. I can’t erase a character or a scene. I need to talk about the complete picture as I understand it.
In a more fuzzy way, I have to have an idea of fairness in my mind and I have to treat the show that way. That might be assuming other experiences of something (maybe someone with more skill would enjoy a challenge), using context to evaluate (recognizing production budget or experience when making a review), or qualifying judgments to reflect uncertainty (using specific language to make clear when something is unknown).
I usually try to see work with other people in part so I can hear other perspectives when I’m critiquing something. I actually have changed or completely aborted reviews because I didn’t think I saw the thing correctly. I am very careful to qualify my reviews with what I know and don’t know, what I experience and what I see others experience. I’m not doing anything special there. I’m just doing ethical criticism.
So the reason why I wrote this whole thing is that I think Nicholson is getting credit for a great piece of criticism and that’s not deserved. It’s actually a disservice to the rigor that criticism is. Nicholson is very talented and I do respect her success and work, but this video has been completely manipulated to tell people a story that will sell — that Starcruiser was an expensive, half-assed rip-off from an evil corporation that’s been going downhill for years. And as tempting as that story is, it’s just not true. I don’t think I have to say much more about what other fields in which YouTube videos do this and how bad it can be for finding the truth.
I know this is futile. But something in me just wanted to say all of this out loud. Criticism can be journalism. It can be ethical. But you need to be honest and tell the truth. Nicholson didn’t. I would argue that the “spectacular failure” here is the way that packaging something to look like reporting can trick lots of people in buying an argument that is simply not factual. Starcruiser was complicated - amazing and painful, successful and disastrous, with life-changing experiences for some and bitter disappointment for others. But I guess that’s a story that doesn’t get the views.