As you get older, it's harder to really play, or at least play
publicly in the way that children do. A lot of that desire gets sublimated into activities with a sort
of grown-up veneer of acceptability: cosplay, paintball, tabletop and video gaming, D&D,
LARPing, and all the other loopholes that allow us to say "let's pretend"
as adults.
For a lot of people, Disneyland is that urge to play writ large, and for me, Galaxy's Edge is the perfect venue to fully experience that. It's a testament to the detail and consistency that Disney's creative people have put into this little alien outpost so that, when I'm there, I feel like I'm actually on another planet, even when surrounded by people in mouse ears and sweat pants.
Part of me wants to explore Galaxy's Edge all on my own, because it would leave me free to enjoy it as if I were part of that world, to quote Ariel. As it is, Karli sometimes worries that I’m not having fun when I'm there, whereas the joke is that I couldn't be enjoying myself more. However, being a dangerous rebel who could be in a life-or-death confrontation with storm troopers at any moment tends to make me look a bit grim - after all, we're not playing around here, this is serious stuff.
Smuggler's Run is another good example. I tolerate the lines and waiting and so on in order to get to where I want to be, but when I sit down at the controls of the Millennium Falcon, I'm not having a simulated experience, I'm flying a starship. As such, when the controls prompt me to perform an action such as take off, go to hyperspace, or steer the ship through an asteroid field, I do it with a certitude, confidence, and gravitas that's appropriate to what I'm doing.
And, hopefully, with a certain degree of style - after all, even if you're just playing at being the Falcon's pilot, you're still playing in the big leagues.
- Sid
P.S. Welcome to the future - the boots and background alien heads in the above photo were created by the Photoshop AI. However, the AI won't accept certain prompts, so I had to do the gun belt and weapon the old-fashioned way.
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