Depiction of Trade in Games or Media




 
 
   The striking lack of managerial competence and financial
good-heartedness in normal society has always been a concern for me and a
kind of mission, to keep appealing to those I deal with to be minimally
rational in trading with me. Friendly sexuality and ecologically sane
shitting and peeing are likewise non-subjects that cannot get usefully
addressed in normal polite company.
   A forum in the Zeitgeist Movement describing a proposed video game
design that would provide a mock experience of a resource based society
reminded me again of this quandary. Not even the games of Monopoly and
Life, wherein play money is a large symbol in the game, is there any
example of actual trade activity between players, wherein some service or
item of actual value to a player is exchanged for the play money. Both
games present money as a tragic mockery of the human spirit.
   No movie or book presents any good-hearted trade activity either.
Everyone's entire day involves action motivated by whim or curiosity or
participation in a group pursuit of a whim. Often some activity is
compelled by technical trouble that the actors focus on for awhile, or some
actors deliberately make trouble for some others and force this.
   For example, in the Wizard of Oz, the tin woodman appears for the first
time in the story describing his identity as being someone who chops wood
entirely as a life expression, not for any sort of compensation. Dorothy
easily talks him into suddenly forsaking it, with no reference to any
accountable context that he is in. Each member of the group joins the
journey likewise, motivated by a whim to ask the Wizard for a vaguely
described benefit which none of them intend to offer trade for. At no point
in the story does anyone balk at the banter of whim expression among the
players, and even the wicked witch makes trouble in a way that is of no
benefit to herself or any of her likewise non-trading associates.
   The Oz story is quite representitive. Every romance novel, every major
movie, every radio song presents similar imagery of a trade-free world in
which no human motivation is ever related to results oriented accountability
in the manner that seems to occupy half or more of the average day in any
real person's life. Likewise the factors of consumptive need and bodily
function never make it into paid for media depiction. The fantasy of the
effortless resource based society is the only social system that has ever
been a subject of art.
   Even the modern video games like Second Life, Wizard 101 and World of
Warcraft make no attempt to model trade used to cope with genuine physical
needs like food and staying dry in the rain. Most turn trade activity into
a video game within a video game, buying and selling toys and fashion
accessories. Only Second Life models actual responsiveness to customer
interest, taxes on land ownership and overt boundary definition for
creative expression.
   The image of media showing the trade system comes from advertising. The
ads very often encourage the viewer to come swindle the advertiser, for a
product that answers a real physical need. Occassionally a business will
present itself as offering high integrity rather than low price but their
ad inevitably isn't highly memorable to people looking for something for
nothing.
   This is what I think inspires rejection of the trade economy by members
of the Zeitgeist Movement. The overt delight in opportunity to engage in
economic evil, expressed by many advertisers, is what gets remembered,
rather than the resource based idilic world of the show or game that drew
the viewer in the first place. The boy scout ethics underlying the actual
stable economy go unnoticed and underappreciated.




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