By Casey Muller
Six Flags is at the top of the amusement park industry, and has
massive brand recognition and plenty of money to spend. As such, their
webpage definitely got some money during the internet boom, and it
shows. The whole thing comes off as professional and vaguely
television-like. Although quite useful, they have made only small
ventures into interactivity or novel use of the internet.
The most important purpose of the site is clearly to disseminate
information about the parks. Each park has it's own area on the site,
although the look is extremely consistent. These sub-sites showcase
the rides and provide information about schedules, prices, and
directions.
Recruiting is another thrust of the site. The site is clearly intended
to bring in bored high school students looking for a summer or
part-time job. Recruiting for most positions is done on a park-by-park
basis, with corporate and full-time positions handled on the main
page. They do their best to sound appealing and fun, and probably
many
an unskilled laborer has been enticed by the lure of working at an
amusement park.
Finally there is the interactive portion of the site. They have two
shockwave games available that you can play to win free tickets. This
sounds like a good idea at first, but in implementation it has a few
problems. The first are technical - the "Boomerang" game
would not get
beyond the loading graphic on any browser I tried. That loading screen
itself has improper viewing plane clipping, as demonstrated by letters
behind the camera getting projected in front.
The maze game shows the social problem with the system- the high
scores are incredibly fast, to the point where I don't believe it
is
possible to solve them in the given time- for instance, several
hundred precise arrow key presses in under 3 seconds. My conclusion,
perhaps wrong, is that someone wrote a small computer program to beat
the game, and is using it to rack up the free tickets. This
illustrates the problem with allowing games of skill online that
result in real-world rewards: they are always cracked by cheaters.
The underlying purpose of the site is very well done. All the
information you could wish for is available online. The presentation
is suitably flashy for the MTV generation, and navigation is easy.
All
in all, a well done site.