![]() As detailed in Mary Pilon’s wonderful book The Monopolists, Elizabeth Magie was a writer and actor who supported her artistic pursuits with a career as a stenographer and typist, work that she hated-she once wrote, “Typewriting is hell.” In her lifetime, Magie was best known for a newspaper ad in which she advertised herself as being for sale to the highest bidder. There’s just one problem with the story, which is that Charles Darrow did not invent Monopoly.Īlmost thirty years earlier, a woman named Lizzie Magie created a board game called The Landlord's Game. Today, there’s even a plaque in Atlantic City celebrating Charles Darrow. ![]() It’s a great story, so great that many copies of Monopoly have been printed with Darrow’s biography alongside the rules. And Darrow became the first board game millionaire, a proper rags-to-riches story of an American inventor succeeding via the sweat of his Randian brow. But then in 1933, he invented the board game Monopoly, eventually patenting the game and licensing it to the company Parker Brothers. Here’s the creation myth as it gets told by Monopoly’s current owner, the toy company Hasbro: In 1929, in the wake of the great stock market crash, 40-year-old Charles Darrow lost his job in Philadelphia and was forced to scratch together a living as a door-to-door salesman. ![]() And I think Monopoly’s thematic inconsistency might be a product of the game’s complicated origin story, which, in the end, may say more about capitalism than the game itself does. Monopoly’s mealymouthed take on economic inequality is also like life, of course, at least life in Monopoly’s home nation of the United States, where many of us think of billionaires the way I thought of the popular kids in middle school: I despised them, but I also desperately wanted to be them. ![]() I mean, Monopoly’s cartoon spokesperson is literally named Rich Uncle Pennybags. And yet, the point of the game is to get as rich as you can. Like, the game is essentially about how acquiring land is literally a roll of the dice, and how the exploitation of monopolies enriches the few and impoverishes the many. The worst thing about Monopoly is its convoluted, self-contradictory analysis of capitalism. And like life, your friends get mad if you bankrupt them, and then no matter how rich you are, there’s an ever-expanding void inside of you that money can never fill, but gripped by the madness of unregulated capitalism, you nonetheless believe that if you just get a couple more hotels or take from your friends their few remaining dollars, you will at last feel complete. Like life, people find meaning in its outcomes even though the game is rigged toward the rich, and insofar as it isn’t rigged, it’s random. Like life, Monopoly unfolds very slowly at first, and then distressingly fast at the end. There are many problems with Monopoly, but maybe the reason the game has persisted for so long-it has been one of the world’s bestselling board games for over 80 years-is that its problems are our problems. ![]() And then when other players land on places you own, they have to pay you rent. Anyway, if you land on a property, you can purchase it, and then if you establish a monopoly, you can build houses and hotels on your properties. For instance, in the Pokemon version of the game, properties include Tangela and Raichu. As you move around a square board, you land on various properties-in the original game, they’re from a fictionalized version of Atlantic City, New Jersey, but that changes depending on region and edition. Okay, let’s begin with Monopoly, a board game wherein the goal is to bankrupt your fellow opponents, leaving you with all of their money and property. I’m John Green, and today, I’ll be reviewing the board game Monopoly and a high-school nerdfest called the Academic Decathlon.īy the way, if I sound a little different today, it’s because I am recording at home. Hello and welcome to The Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. ![]()
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