Offscreen Characters

I watched The Chronicles of Narnia a while back and at the time, it really got me in the writing mood about all of the non-principal characters in the movie. (Then the post languished in outline form for a few months before getting written up.) It seemed to me that the human kids had it really easy compared to all the other denizens of the oppressed world behind the wardrobe. Sure, there are some character conflicts and challenges that the humans need to overcome, but that seems to pale in comparison with the unseen hardships endured by all the other creatures of the land, who have been tortured, frozen, and otherwise subjugated for many years. It just seems fundamentally unfair that this bratty kids show up, and after a few weeks of relatively minor trouble, become the rulers of the land.

But of course, life isn’t fair. The reward one reaps is not at all related to the suffering one endures. Since nobody else in the land had the ability to do what the human children were able to do, nobody else was even in the running to reap any kind of reward. The kids are the only game in town, and they’re in the fortunate position of not really being in competition with anyone for the prize. It’s a matter of whether they choose to grasp it or not.

In the real world, we’re faced everyday with the problem of being caught in a game of relative advantage. Resources are finite, and their distribution is based on the relative advantage one party has over the other interested parties. But, as in Narnia, the amount one suffers has nothing to do with this game. It’s about the amount that one can offer.

That has interesting ramifications on the strategies to play the game. Since the game is about relative advantage, that means that both building up oneself and tearing down an opponent are equivalent in some way. The question is, in a multiparty environment, is it easier to build up oneself or tear down every opponent? Well, that depends on how many opponents there are. Theoretically, in a 1-v-1 scenario, +1 for me or -1 for an opponent should be the same. But, it seems to me that in most real world scenarios, it’s very difficult to even define all the parties in the game. There’s a gap between the game that one perceives and the game that is actually being played. MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook are locked in combat for the social networking market. Does Facebook even perceive the others as opponents? This just in, News Corp swoops in and buys MySpace. Now the game has changed. Even if one has a pretty good perception of the game at any given time, how should one play given that the game is ever-changing?

So then, is the focus primarily on building oneself up?