

Guests board the boats of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride only after walking through a warren lit by lanterns and piled up with cannonballs and wooden barrels. Every part of Disney World builds boundaries. “It separates your reality from the reality of the experience that’s being created for you.” In the nineteen-fifties, when Walt Disney sought real estate for his first theme park, in Southern California, he feared that the grandeur of the Pacific would overshadow his creations, so he settled away from the ocean and encircled the park with a railway. “Do you know about the term ‘magic circle’?” Lizzie Stark, an American larp designer, asked me, a few days before I went to experience the Starcruiser myself. At Black Spire Outpost, these interactions last for a few minutes on the Galactic Starcruiser, they go on for two nights. A local in earth-toned robes might draw a visitor into his confidence, to sell her a lightsabre, while a hero from another planet leads a kid behind trash cans to hide from soldiers in white armor. As guests walk between gift shops and rides, the cast members invite them to role-play. Disney calls nearly all its employees “cast members,” and at Black Spire Outpost most cast members are Batuuan. In 2019, Disney opened Black Spire Outpost, which put some of its experiments into practice. Lovecraft, leads archeological expeditions that dig for artifacts in the African desert.įor more than a decade, Imagineers-Disney designers and researchers-have been looking into larps and interactive theatre, and running “playtests” in the parks.

In Sahara Expedition, the Italian larp collective Chaos League, inspired by the fiction of H. P. In the indie LARP Dystopia Rising, people spend the weekend staggering around as zombies-or hiding from them. In a Larp, players, often in costume, improvise stories and borrow from such genres as medieval fantasy, science fiction, and vampire movies. The creation of the Galactic Starcruiser suggests a wager: many “Star Wars” enthusiasts, not content with repeat viewings of “The Mandalorian” or dressing up as a Stormtrooper at a convention, will pay to experience this fantasy universe through live-action role-play, or larp.
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In 2012, Disney spent four billion dollars to buy Lucasfilm, which produces the “Star Wars” films and TV shows, and acquired not just the imaginations at Lucasfilm but those of its fans. In reality, the spacecraft is a massive brutalist building that sits beside a highway.

Black Spire is also the destination of the Galactic Starcruiser, a spaceship that carries hundreds of interstellar tourists to and from the outpost, on what Disney calls an “immersive adventure.” The Starcruiser begins its journey floating in space, light-years from Batuu and Black Spire. Nearby, the Millennium Falcon rested below a control tower built into the rock Stormtrooper helmets were for sale at a sun-bleached military-surplus garage. Before reaching the Magic Kingdom, the bus passed a range of gray crags perched on scaffolding-a sliver of Black Spire Outpost, which, in the “Star Wars” universe, is a settlement on a planet called Batuu. In February, when it was cold and wet in New York, I rode a jitney under blue skies from the Orlando airport into Disney World.
