please, explain to me why the Emperor’s chamber on board the Death Star has a hole leading directly to the reactor core without even a guard rail

So the Emperor could have the biggest bong in the universe. That was the Death Star’s secondary purpose.

I’ve had an unwritten essay forming in my head on how games balance Realism and Fun. Think of a Venn Diagram. Some things are Realistic, some are Fun, some are both. Desert Bus is realistic but not fun. When Duke Nukem or B.J. Blazkowitz takes a bullet to the face, eats a chicken leg, and walks it off, it’s fun but not realistic.

When much of the fun in a game is a factor of its realism, adding things for fun that aren’t very realistic can take away from the fun of the game. Faeries and ponies can be fun but not in Counterstrike. That’s the sense you’re getting from running into equivalents of the Galaxy Quest engine room on what is supposed to be a functional, realistic starship.

They could implement a realistic maze by just cutting off sections of the ship, calling them damaged areas, placing closed airlocks where corridor entrances would be, and making up a story about how the ship got hit by a meteor. I’ve also seen games where doors existed in the right place for a corridor but were permanently closed off due to the disaster du jour, be it computer troubles or demonic invasion or both. Some games would even open the doors up for you after you got through the maze and flipped the Big Red Switch, so you don’t have to go through a maze every time you pass through that area again.