If you want to craft your own lightsaber at Galaxy’s Edge, reserve 20 minutes and $200.Think about what all that requires. Ker-
rison’s story team comes up with that bit
of plot and writes the dialog of the mes-
sages. “Blaster specialists” carve the impact
marks into the wet plaster of the walls under
construction—the imagineers decided that
each one should look different depend-
ing on the type of blaster and the angle of
impact. Kalama’s interactive group has to
code all that into the minigames and link
those games to Bluetooth beacons around
the park. This fine-grained, fractal detail
adds to the sense that not only is Batuu in
canon, but so is anyone who buys a ticket.
On my second trip to Batuu—to the one in
Anaheim—I watched a little girl race off
Smugglers Run at hyperspeed and slam
into her dad. “Papa, I was pilot!” she
screamed, making swooshing noises.
Kids, right? All the Starwarsification
didn’t much move my adult partner,
until she took over my phone to help
our 10-year-old hack the giant First
Order ship looming over one corner of
Black Spire Outpost. Its running lights
flashed and its engine roared, and so
did her delight. She was in the story.
IN 1997, REALISTIC, highly rendered
videogames were ascendant, and devel-
opers and the people who study narra-
tive were arguing about whether a game
could—or should—tell a story. Celia
Pearce, a game designer and for-
mer theme park builder,
coined a phrase to cut
through the fight: spa-
tial narrative.
Games didn’t