Galaxy Quest Part 3

I feel like we're all having a lot of fun with this one. An aspect of the movie which I hadn't considered, is that a lot of the main characters are kind of terrible people to start with. Particularly my character (Jason) who is a raging narcissist, who hides his lack of empathy with a sort of cheap charm. That kind of a character (in a comedy) is kind of a ton of fun to play. But I'd sort of forgotten how slimy he is at the beginning of this movie because he has growth in the film. The events of the movie force him to grow up and be a leader in a way that his real life did not.

This raises an interesting question about how characters evolve in movies and how we can choose to let them evolve in games. Movies typically come in neat little packages where a lesson needs to be learned in under two hours. But a table-top game doesn't have anyone engineering to teach a lesson; the narcissist we are handed at the beginning has no guarantee of being forced to grow up. Character growth is necessarily messier than in a scripted story, but I think in a way that's more interesting. Character growth is a choice, more than anything. And the fact that a person may be forced to act like an adult by circumstance is no guarantee that they will continue to act that way once the circumstance is removed. Character is not built in stone, it comes from a thousand individual choices every day in how we respond and react to the world.

In our Galaxy Quest, the characters are in even more over there heads than in the movie (well some of us are.) I'm not sure that the same lessons will be there to be learned; we may even end up learning bad lessons, as I suspect my Jason has begun to do. And yet, inevitably character growth creeps in, not because the world demands it, but because our understanding of our characters will grow and change. As they become a part of us, our natural reactions will feed into theirs. After all, the character is a lens, but ultimately we the players are the ones making the decisions for them.

I'm having a lot of fun with Jason. I don't want him to change too much; he's so distinct just the way he is. But I also don't want to hold him back from growth. Like with any character, you just take it one choice at a time, and see what emerges.

Alright, we're breaking on this one to do Hocus Pocus, but we'll be back with more GQ soon!