OK, I missed the first thirty minutes and heard the rest in a blurry Mexican dub. My question remains: What does scarcity mean in a fantasy film?
If you are a Queen with an ice palace and a magic sword, why do you use (hire?) two lumbering polar bears to pull your chariot? Especially in the temperate climate of New Zealand. If a lion can be reincarnated, is the rest of the plot all for show or a test? Just how do resources get allocated?
Perhaps it is faith which is scarce in fantasy stories. As stocks of faith rise and fall, other complementary resources, including the power of your weapons, are reallocated accordingly by the principles of the imaginary world.
That seems to imply that fantasy films cannot operate under the game-theoretic assumption of "common knowledge." People must disagree about the true model governing the world, otherwise greater faith yields no relative advantage.
Are fantasy movies what economic models would look more like if we took the absence of common knowledge more seriously? (Yes there are stylized models of non-common knowledge in the specialized literature but the notion is kept under check; the game-theoretic results we use typically are built on common knowledge assumptions.) Keep in mind that, above a certain level of subsistence, much of your welfare springs from your inner stories and narratives, not from concrete goods and services. Your real advantage in life, if you are born sufficiently wealthy, is your ability to tell yourself beneficial stories.
If the lion stands in for Christ, who stands in for Roger Douglas?
Alex once suggested to me that computer games were blurring the differences between models, novels, and films.
In other words, I enjoyed it.
Addendum: If you wish to explore these issues, I will soon put my paper on them on-line. In the meantime, watch The Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies and a useful source of inspiration.
[If you are a Queen with an ice palace and a magic sword, why do you use (hire?) two lumbering polar bears to pull your chariot? ]
Surely Veblen’s “Conspicuous consumption” concept has some role to play here. Or possibly it is a signal; that someone who has polar bears pulling her chairot clearly has magical power to spare and thus should not be messed with. But I think that the theory of the magical leisure class would be a better model.
I imagine they’re are a set of physical laws governing the magic in Narnia. I guess the character just act under the restrictions imposed by when and how a lion can be reincarnated. I guess.
You might as well ask why Christians think it’s a big deal that Christ died for our sins, given that God could create as many sons as he wanted, and reincarnate them at his whimsy.
Ted Castronova’s book, Synthetic Worlds, (discussed previously on MR) gets into issues of scarcity in worlds that are whatever we make them to be. Further discussion in the “Invidious Comparison” thread at Terra Nova, Castronova’s “Theory of the Avatar” and my own “Virtual Worlds as Comparative Law.”
Brent, I was going to make the same point, but I think the White Witch had never known it. One of the best lines from the book, roughly: “Yes, she was there at the dawn of time, and knew the deep magic. But if she had known the deeper magic from before the dawn of time, she would have known that if a willing victim is sacrificed on the stone table…”
Unfortunately, they cut that line from the movie and replaced it with some drivel about sacrifice that wasn’t nearly as cool.
“If you could do miracles at will, according to some set principle, they would not be miracles.”
That doesn’t seem to correspond to the ‘commonsense’ Christian view of miracles, since one of the best known miracles is that of the loaves and fishes which, in the biblical accounts, clearly was done at will.
If you want to see miracles + economics, read Walter Jon Williams’ _Metropolitan_ and _City on Fire_. They’re set in a world where some feng shui-like effect of buildings produces pools of mana. If you have access to mana, you can do miracles, but the mana gets used up pretty quickly.
All miracles are done at will–the will of a god. If you aren’t a god, you can hope & ask, but that’s about it.
Now, if someone wants to tell a story where the gods themselves are the primary actors, then the whole thing gets pretty boring pretty fast if these gods can do whatever they want. In these stories, what the gods do is magic. Except that it isn’t, because not everyone can do magic, and all of the gods can do “miracles”.
Have you read any L.E. Modesitt?
Me neither. But he is my neighbor down the street, so quite a few of my non-fantasy reading friends have.
It’s hard to say whether he qualifies as science fiction , fantasy, or a cross, but he has several novels in which faith plays a big role.
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