Galaxy’s Edge Datapad is a secret weapon for immersion.

When it comes to Disney Parks’ plans for Star Wars, the name of the game is immersion. First came Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disney World and Disneyland, two themed lands that transport visitors to the outer rim planet Batuu. 

At Galaxy’s Edge, guests encounter signs written in the space language Aurebesh, walk alongside Stormtrooper patrols, and buy merchandise with “credits” instead of dollars. Nothing in the park is branded with the Star Wars name or logo — that would ruin the suspension of disbelief required to pretend that a trip to Batuu is really a visit to a galaxy far, far away. 

Then came Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, the second attraction available at Galaxy’s Edge after the launch day release of its first attraction Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run. Smuggler’s Run is plenty immersive in that riders take the place of employees at a fictional transport company, but Rise of the Resistance goes further than Smuggler’s Run by including live actors that recruit, capture, and break free its riders in a 15-plus minute adventure. 

Ride of the Resistance’s actors and plot are a half-step towards live action roleplaying, and that step will be complete in 2021 with the opening of the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel in 2021. Guests booked in the Starcruiser will take part in a two-day storyline that evolves over the course of their visit, with their experience changing based on their decisions on board, interactions with in-character staff, and their actions during the Starcruiser’s included “shore excursion” to the Galaxy’s Edge park. 

Somewhere in the middle of these attempts to get visitors on the Star Wars LARPing train is another, smaller element of the park experience — the Disney Play app’s Star Wars: Datapad minigame. It doesn’t have the scale of the Starcruiser or the cast member presence of Rise of the Resistance, but the Datapad is actually the most effective way for any Star Wars fan to immerse themselves in their own story at Galaxy’s Edge. 

With the Datapad minigame, visitors to Galaxy’s Edge step into the role of an interstellar traveller to Batuu who has the tools to interact with the land on a personal level. It contains a translator for Aurebesh signage, a hacking interface for interacting with droids and ships, a QR code scanner for checking the contents of the outposts’s scattered shipping crates, and a scanner that emulates picking up radio signals. 

Datapad users can use those tools on their own, unlocking in-universe easter eggs that add to the park’s fun, or they can use them in tandem with the datapad’s “Jobs” feature and fully inhabit a character they’ve created in their heads. 

Both ways to use the datapad make Galaxy’s Edge a more dynamic, alive place to visit. Hacking a communications tower near the front of the park causes the physical structure to spark and fizzle in response to the intrusion, and translating the Aurebesh sign near one of the market water fountains reveals a hilarious message that would make anyone reconsider taking a sip. 

Some of the possible interactions even reward die-hard Star Wars fans by referring to “historical” events — for example, one tuneable transmission involves a collector explaining how he came to acquire the handcuffs Luke Skywalker used to restrain Chewbacca during their rescue of Princess Leia in Star Wars Episode IV: a New Hope (the cuffs turned up years later in the Yavin system). 

Combining the tools with jobs, however, is what really makes the datapad shine as an immersive tool. Visitors can pick up jobs from First Order officers, Resistance agents, and other self-interested personnel who reward careful exploration of the park with credits (non-spendable in Batuu, unfortunately) and in-app cosmetic rewards like outfits or titles. 

Some of the jobs don’t require moving around much and thus are better to play when waiting in line for one of the park’s two rides, but they contain compelling, choose-your-own adventure stories that tie directly into the plot lines of the park’s rides, including the new Rise of the Resistance. 

Other jobs include searching for specific crates, droids, and tuning stations in the park and interacting with them to track down items or information for whichever side of the war you decide to be on. If Galaxy’s Edge were a video game, the constant moving and hacking/scanning/tuning might fall into the realm of the dreaded “fetch quest” grind, but visitors already primed with enough imagination to turn the experience into a custom live-action adventure can get a lot out of creating their “character” and determining their alignment through their actions in the park. 

Even if one isn’t interested in LARPing through Galaxy’s Edge, there’s still some magic in the datapad app that doesn’t require a full buy-in on the park’s immersion. Since the datapad app can cause real, physical reactions in the world, visitors can time their hacks for maximum effect on their fellow earthlings. Someone could, as an abstract example that the writer of this article has no knowledge of whatsoever, hide by the Millennium Falcon, wait for a school group to pose for a picture, and hack the ship to “wake up,” releasing a photogenic cloud of steam as if the Falcon were about to take off.

From the kids’ perspective, they’ve just witnessed a true, random act of the Force, but the hand that holds the datapad knows. The name of the game is immersion, after all. No one ever said whose immersion we have to aim for.