Everything in downtown is quiet, nearly silent for a second. When suddenly, a small, classic-looking pewter roadster comes pealing down the vacant thoroughfare on the north end. One, two. Though it has no top, the driver isn’t visible as the flighty automobile races eastward through the upper middle class part of town, past the lone policeman on the corner, and back down into the east side, not showing signs of stopping anytime soon. Three, four, five, six. Pacific Ave., North Carolina Ave., and Pennsylvania Ave., mere side streets and side thoughts lost in the dust behind the car as it heads toward its goal. Seven, eight, nine. The Short Line railway station and Park Pl. disappear into the background just as fast. Ten, eleven. The roadster comes sliding to a screeching halt right where the driver knew it was going and wanted it to be.
“Ha ha, Boardwalk! I’ll buy it!” my brother Yale yells out, as he does every time he gets it, digging through his orderly line of play money to afford the pricey property.
I’ll always remember the first time Yale played the game, nearly a decade ago. All night, the then elementary-schooler was dead set on owning the “Park Place”/”Boardwalk” monopoly. Having acquired the first in the set by sheer luck, he spent round after round trying to weasel our dad into selling him the matching title to “Boardwalk,” which, after some time, wound up costing him some outrageous price in the monopoly-dollar thousands that he was not only willing to pay, but offering to pay. He sat there for a second, mid-game, with no money and these two blue and white land deeds laid out on the table before him, just staring at them with gleefully beady eyes. Then he looked up at the rest of us and defiantly declared that he’d won. Though my prepubescent little brother may not yet have had a firm grasp on the ins and outs of real estate and business, he did have the wily heart of a true Monopoly player down pat.
Though today it is the best selling board game of all time, nightly entertaining millions around the world, the idea behind Monopoly began as something more of an economics lesson in the Brentwood, Maryland home of Lizzie Magie. Being of the Georgist opinion that land should be an unowned, free commodity, Lizzie created a game as a simple and relatively fun way to teach people how the rental system took money from the hands of the impoverished and poured it into the pockets of the wealthy. Originally patented in 1904, The Landlord’s Game didn’t take very quickly. The game had the first board that was a continuous path with no designated start or finish, but it didn’t have most of the key features we think of today: “Free Parking,” “Chance” cards, houses and hotels, etc. It went over well with some of Magie’s friends and a handful of university professors, but when brought to the doorstep of George Parker (founder of Parker Brothers), it was promptly shot down—twice.
As its popularity slowly increased over the next decade—primarily by word of mouth through college students that had used the game in class—it branched out across the nation until it found its way into the hands of one Charles Darrow. With the help of his wife and son, Darrow began producing game sets bearing the names of Atlantic City streets and neighborhoods as well as other trademark features: four “Railroad” spaces, the “Chance” and “Community Chest” cards, and the unmistakable color-coded board layout. Though initially rejected by the company, Parker Brothers eventually noticed the independent success of the game and purchased it, first publishing and selling it with the official Parker Brothers logo in 1935.
Now played in at least twenty-five different languages around the globe, Monopoly has seen all variety of spin-offs, modifications, remakes, and adaptations in the United States: Monopoly Jr., Star Wars Monopoly, Monopoly: The Card Game, Mega Monopoly, Simpsons Monopoly, even NASCAR Monopoly. It has been put on every conceivable videogame console from the Sega Master System to the Xbox, made available on both PC and Mac since the days of the Commodore 64, and can even now be played on your cell phone while you wait for a bus. It is undoubtedly at the level of “cultural icon.”
Just last week, my roommates and I gathered around the dining room table for yet another round of Monopoly. My shiny pewter terrier bounded about the spaces as the dice commanded, acquiring for me an impressive collection of real estate that put my hand into every side of the board, the perfect position for later dealing. As the game progressed, luck began to creep into the picture, only adding to the building success of my roommate Morgan, who, in a few hours’ time, had stockpiled over nine-thousand Monopoly dollars, attained ownership of every piece of land except the red group, used every hotel in the set, and wiped out our other two players, leaving only me—who, incidentally, was being kept alive by his graces.
Strangely, at the end of the game, Morgan said that he felt guilty for crushing us like peasants under the hard, armored fist of a medieval overlord (“crushing-armored-overlord” stuff added for emphasis). The very act of winning had left him feeling somewhat abusive, corrupt even.
The only reason I bring this up is that in Monopoly, concern for the lowly players is by no means normative, and anyone who’s seen the game played has witnessed its more common effects. Take the nicest person you know, put fake money into his hands and the possibility of making more into his head, and before his thimble gets around the board twice, you’ve got a calculated—though perhaps still well-mannered, raging capitalist willing to sell you or anyone else down the tubes for the chance to toss little green houses across the north side of the board.
But this doesn’t sound like Lizzie Magie’s original intent. What happened to the board game that stuck it to the heavy-handed landlords of Magie’s day? What became of her quest for social reform through entertaining education, and why are players today demonstrating the same self-centered, pocket-filling tendencies she sought to expose and end?
Perhaps it is the fact that we who today crave Monopoly money no longer know the original intent of the game’s predecessor, The Landlord’s Game. Some might say that the game today is simply an outlet for a harmless competitive spirit, much like a sporting event. Maybe, though, it’s something deeper.
Former Parker Brothers president, Edward P. Parker is quoted as having offered that the world-engaging draw of Monopoly is “clobbering your best friend without doing any damage.” To some, this may sound like mere competition, but by definition, it’s something more. According to one dictionary, competition is a “rivalry between two or more persons or groups for an object desired in common, usually resulting in a victor and a loser but not necessarily involving the destruction of the latter” (emphasis added). To use a very tangible example, the difference between competition and what Parker described is similar to the difference between a man who boxes to prove that he is a great boxer and one who boxes simply for the opportunity to beat his opponent into tapioca pudding. Edward Parker seems to believe that Monopoly has been so exceedingly successful because it gives people generally confined by the regulations of society a polite way of making tapioca out of their friends.
Though not a fan of the ambivalence of the man’s statement, I rather agree with Parker. Lizzie Magie’s goal of changing society by educating the masses on its business evils was a valiant, commendable effort, but it ignored one very important fact that Monopoly has since revealed; as a whole, the impoverished are just as malicious as the wealthy, they just don’t have the power to demonstrate it on a large scale. Whether rich or poor in the real world, the average Monopoly player engulfed in the board game will almost inevitably seek to “clobber” his best friend, because he now has the means—be it ever so small—and social permission to do so. The problem is not a lack of knowledge; it is some fundamental flaw in the heart of man, some instinctive cruelty, something that makes even the most peaceable person want to cause harm. And no mere game can solve it; they only bring it to light.
“I just can’t play that game anymore,” my friend Bobby told me one night, clenching his fists in my front yard after storming out of the house mid-game.
He’d done this before: throwing his massive arms up the air, almost knocking the entire board over, at another disappointing round. I was quite accustomed to his anger, but I’d never heard him speak of not playing a game again because of it.
“What?” I asked, “Why not?”
“When I play it, I—I just don’t like who I become.”
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