Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism
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aeon.co
- Going around the board once before purchasing: needlessly prolongs the game and makes it unfair
- Fines collected at Free Parking: stretches the run time out artificially and makes the game far too lucked-based
- Landing on GO receives double salary: see above
- No auctions: takes away a major point of the game! You can't just decline to purchase something, you must surrender the opportunity to your opponents who could snap it up on the cheap OR agree to plot against someone else by driving the price up.
- No requirement to build houses evenly: makes commonly-landed spaces death traps long before they should be, giving an unfair advantage to whomever lands on those properties. It's no coincidence that the most commonly-landed on properties are in districts where buildings cost $150 a piece; nobody should be getting one hotel on the red/yellow properties without first shelling out $1800!
- Unlimited buildings: a major late-game play is to deprive your opponents of the opportunity to purchase buildings, either by putting them on as many properties as you can or concentrating four houses on each of a dominated district.
If you don't play with the official rules then, yeah, it's just mindless dice rolling.
I've never been sure if that's an official rule or not, but it seems almost 50-50 in use, if I sat down to play Monopoly with people I hadn't before I'd definitely ask 'do you play the free parking rule'.
I'll be honest, it wasn't until 2006 or so as we were in the midst of the real estate led bubble era that was about to burst and take the whole World economy down it it that I realized how critical the 'jail' part to act as a deterrent to cronyism was to a game like Monopoly, but was entirely absent in real life.
As a biology student I saw Big Pharma play by different rules with no repercussions: Bayer admitted it was selling contaminated medication with HIV to poor countries in Asian and S. America with no repercussions in the 80s and settled out of court, then I saw how Eli Lilly removed panelist off the FDA board (who were Chiefs of Medicine with many accolades) because it wouldn't blindly approve its drug, Gilead Sciences (with Donald Rumsfeld) and Roche were massive benefactors of the H1N1 Tamaflu vaccine that was stock piled by Governments but affected very few people in the US, all while we saw the rampant corruption in the Finance and Banking sectors go wild wit reckless abandoned only to get bailed out and get drunk on golden parachutes and bonuses.
The fact that we see that now in Tech is not even surprising to me, just infuriating that we never seem to learn our lesson, and seems consistent with everything else we've seen; the only exception being that now the Market Cap of many of these tech corps are on par, and often exceed, that of entire Nation States.
The fact that they haven't been broken up goes to show how fundamentally wrong the Nation-State model is at doing anything but enabling it as they directly benefit from the fraud, corruption, and largess and making even less scrupulous people wanting to line up for a seat at the trough. AIG tried to buy off my University's department staff after taking massive amount in bailouts in 2008 in order to get something--why they wanted Health Scientists still baffles me to this day, but it happened and I went to war over it. We already had a large corporate bio-pharma presence on campus prior to that.
That's when I realized that while Capitalism may be the best system we have to create prosperity thus far, we have to create a replacement for it too, because it has a very fundamental flaw and a pernicious habit to revert to corporatism cronyism (fascism) very quickly that concentrates wealth and thus power to a certain series of entities (monopolies) who as a common practice will pay or hire politicians to bend to their will.
And nothing can be really done about it as they legalize these conflicts of interests, so just like when we played Monopoly and one player gets so much of the money/real estate to the determent of all who are still playing they will use every advantage at their disposal to keep the very one-sided advantage going for as long as possible. And the parallels here, especially with COVID shutdowns of certain Industries and enabling of others to record profits (FAANG in particular) and massive unemployment in others shows it most poignantly.
What we really should be calling it is Fascism as paraphrased by Mussolini (the merger of Corporate and State Power):
The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.
0: https://www.politicalresearch.org/2005/01/12/mussolini-corpo...
I've never had a game of Monopoly end well. If I'm winning, I'm bored by the end, and if I'm losing, it's a dragged out miserable defeat.
I may be biased since I mostly win and consider the game to be pretty basic as far as board games go.
I agree. The problem is that you find out fairly early on who is going to win, and then it's somewhere from boring to miserable for the rest of the game.
> I [...] consider the game to be pretty basic as far as board games go.
Definitely agree on that. I can think of a number of other both more complicated and more fun games, and can't really think of a good reason to play monopoly.
He arrived at their home and after dinner they suggested a game, and the pen pal wanted to play Monopoly. He wanted to become a banker, so of course played as the bank.
My dad had never played Monopoly before and was never good at games, but somehow my dad ended up winning big while his pen pal ended up in ruins. This kid go so upset about it they barely talked for the rest of the week my dad spent there...
I haven't played it for years after deciding that it was too divisive and caused too much acrimony among players. For example, deception was often the order of the day—I and other family members would hide assets like surreptitiously sitting on a $500 note only to suddenly produce it to pounce-purchase some property after other players had failed to keep tally of one's earnings/assets and so on.
Fights and arguments would often ensue with people not talking one another for hours, sometimes days. Frankly, it's a horrible game that one could easily argue was designed specifically to bring out the worst in human nature.
https://www.amazon.com/Under-Boardwalk-MONOPOLY-Zachary-Levi...
The Soviets were no longer needed at that time and had become a threat. Socialism would be bashed for decades after that and conflated with the Soviet political model.