invent that, of course. “Spatial narrative is a very old kind
of storytelling. You see it in ancient Rome, in cave paint-
ings,” says Pearce, a professor at Northeastern University
who teaches, among other classes, Designing Imagi-
nary Worlds. Consider medieval churches. For attend-
ees, many of whom were illiterate and didn’t understand
Church Latin, the church was the Bible—stations of the
cross along the nave or in stained glass, important char-
acters represented as statuary in the transept. “It’s about
where you are, what you can see from where, how you
feel as an embodied entity in the space,” Pearce says.
It’s also true that narratives—books, movies, what-
ever—have spatial elements. Action takes place. In 1938
the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the way people
and things move through narrative a chronotope, a Rus-
sian translation of the Greek for “space-time.” Bakhtin
set out to map the ratios of time and space in stories, and
other critics have extended the idea to a chronotopic net-
work, all the movements in space and time a story covers.
I think Pirates of the Caribbean or the Wizarding
World of Harry Potter are immersive without being
narrative, necessarily. Ditto the new heavy-immersion
theme parks spreading across the Middle East and
China. But Galaxy’s Edge is a full-fledged chronoto-
pia. It exists in the sanctioned Star Wars paracosm; it’s
a door between our universe and theirs.
Two doors, actually. Your character in the phone-
based games in California persists if you go to Florida,
and vice versa. The lands are identical in architecture
(albeit inverted on the north-south axis). Canonically,
in the Star Wars universe, they’re the same place, on
the same day, over and over; several imagineers men-
tioned Groundhog Day to me as a touch point. Galaxy’s
Edge is a Möbius story: one place in the Star Wars uni-
verse trapped in a time bubble that’s also two places in
ours, where we all move through time normally. I’d like
to see Bakhtin unravel that chronotopic fuckmuddle.
Actually, I bet a gamer could speed-run that four-
dimensional topology. In games, “you’re designing a
space that people are going to use and be in and traverse,”
says Frank Lantz, director of the NYU Game Center. “You
want to use it like an artist, to convey ideas.” Games (like
architecture, cinematography, and omnimovers) direct
people’s gaze, put resistance and friction into people’s
movements to guide them in certain directions.
The common element that science fiction and games—
and even cities—share is world-building. “This part of
storytelling was always one of the nerd ingredients in lit-
erature,” Lantz says. World-building rules are especially
overt at theme parks like Disneyland, if you look for them.
“Everything there is mechanical and designed, and that’s
chilling and weird and creepy and beautiful,” Lantz says.
In other words, Disney has literalized world-building
and made a space for people to live out fan fiction—a
massively multiplayer online role-playing game with
a chewy live-action role-playing center. Pearce again:
“You have emergent fan behavior converging with a
spatial experience.”
THE ONLY THING that doesn’t work in an
immersive environment of such refinement
is—with apologies—you. It’s your baseball
cap, your shorts, your churro. Or my note-
pad and backpack. “That takes away from
the immersion, doesn’t it?” Pearce says.
Disney parks have a longtime rule against
adults wearing elaborate costumes, which
militates against that instantiated fanfic;
Galaxy’s Edge is no Comic-Con in terms
of Han Solos and Boba Fetts. (Though it is
a place for Leias, Reys, and Holdos. I saw
more than a few women cosplaying on the
down low, hair done weird, rocking galac-
tically appropriate boots.)
Perhaps Disney will relax these rules.
Eventually, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser will
open. That’s a two-day stay adjacent to the
Orlando park in a hotel designed to look like a
Star Wars spaceship, a luxury liner called the
Halcyon. The windows will somehow look
out onto space, families will get tours of the
bridge, and “port day” will connect to Galaxy’s
Edge. Apparently even the hotel building will
be bermed off from arriving guests—all they’ll
see is the “terminal” where they board a shut-
tle to the Halcyon in orbit above.
It’s murky to me whether that’s an expe-
rience people want—two days of immer-
sion tips away from a vacation and toward
reenactment. In fact, it isn’t clear that people
even want Galaxy’s Edge. Disney anticipated
a huge bolus of visitors for the new lands’
openings, and, hey, I get it—my family went
to opening week of Star Tours in 1987, and
the line ran all the way down Main Street.
For Galaxy’s Edge? Not so much. The com-
pany cracked down on annual passhold-
ers and asked for reservations for entry to
try to avoid a flood, and instead ended up
with a trickle. Disney spokespeople denied
they’d had an attendance problem, and fur-
ther denied that the September departure
from the company of Catherine Powell, pres-
ident of Disney Parks West, had anything to
do with the performance of Galaxy’s Edge.
That’s the business side, though. A whole
other universe. For me, down here, planet-
side, Galaxy’s Edge works. When I stood
inside the Falcon that first time, I stretched
my hand out, reverentially, to touch the pads
that line the rounded corridors, and my
Disney-assigned minder smiled. “Everyone
does that,” she said. The walls felt just
right—a diegetic apotheosis. Stories about
places are common. But this is a place about
a story. It feels, well, maybe not real. Stranger
than that, it feels like Star Wars.