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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: Monopoly was originally called The Landlord’s Game and was created by a Georgist Feminist to illustrate the problem of rent:

https://www.stmarys.sa.edu.au/women-in-stem-elizabeth-magie....

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Funny, Monopoly in my childhood invariably ended with a massive fight between siblings. It’s still a ‘sort-of’ family joke.

In my opinion Monopoly is one of the worst possible options to choose for a game night, and has turned countless of people away from board games. It's a real shame that this abomination is so often the default choice when there are literally tens of thousands of better games around.

* Current BGG rank 25002

* https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame

* https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1406/monopoly

It was indeed literally created as a model of a terrible dynamic. The intended result was to come out of the game thinking "this was terrible, we should never get close to anything like this again"

That’s fun and perhaps strangely more relevant than ever. It seems like most capitalist players today strive for playing monopoly games instead of traditional market games (like providing a better price and/or higher quality products). Especially in tech, nobody wants to make merely a better product, but rather a “platform” or “marketplace”, where controlling access is the goal. Sure, sometimes we get a totally cool new product or VC subsidized pricing for a while but the end goal is more often that not that the company sells you permission to access some service that you’ve come to rely on. This is true both if you pay with money or you trade your personal information in exchange for your attention (ie ads).

In some cases, there are legit reasons for middlemen to exist and provide some reputational or safety function. But it feels to me like we’re seeing an unnatural bend towards this model, even for things that serve no such purpose at all (like most iot crap, heated car seats, drm ink etc etc).

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