The Worlds of Monopoly | Hacker News Reader

The Worlds of Monopoly

atlasobscura.com

37 pointsscapecast29 comments

I haven't played Monopoly in decades. Reason: mostly I played with family and we ended up in fights and arguments. It brought out the worst in us, we'd deceive one another, hide $500 notes when others were not looking and gloat when one's opponent was sent to jail, and so on.

Monopoly really is a nasty game, it amplifies the worst aspects of human nature.

How is that the fault of the game? I never experienced any such thing during the dozens of times I played with different groups, including family. The idea of trying to cheat in a board game also seems absurd, to be honest. If there were real prize money - ok, that would at least make sense. But what's the point of deceiving family members over toy cash?

I'll say though that your experience might be in line with how the original game was intended. It was supposed to teach people about the evils of large-scale land grabbing.

Have you tried playing the game with children, who might be more invested in winning (and more upset by losing) than the average adult?

Most of my playing was when I was young and losing was upsetting. It's a highly competitive game.

Yeah, I always heard the intent of the game originally was for basically everyone to lose and say "oh this sucks!" Board game as object lesson.

"But what's the point of deceiving family members over toy cash?"

Why play a game unless the aim is to win—even with family? It's like playing poker, it's a game of one upmanship, such behavior helps deflate the ego of one's opponent which can change his/her decisions to one's advantage.

But then why wouldn't these same family members cheat in every other game?

Well, such behavior never occurred with other games such as chess, etc.—even with card games (outside normal strategies as in poker). I'd suggest the intrinsic design and 'psychology' of Monopoly is the reason. From comments here and those I've read about over the years my experience is far from being unique. Perhaps that's why it's always been controversial and often generated stories like this.

I'm not a psychologist or behavioral expert so I'm unable to make any authoritative comment about why my family would behave differently to perhaps, say, yours.

Players can cheat in any game, but I think the designer of Monopoly would be happy that people do it more in Monopoly than in other games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history:

“The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903, when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game that she hoped would explain the single-tax theory of Henry George. It was intended as an educational tool, to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. She took out a patent in 1904. Her game, The Landlord's Game, was self-published, beginning in 1906.”

> Monopoly really is a nasty game

Nothing about Monopoly has stealing or hiding or gloating, though. Your family is not locked in here with Monopoly. Monopoly is locked in here with your family.

That's... really odd. I loved Monopoly as a kid, but my family didn't love playing because the games dragged on so long. As an adult, I realize the problem with the game is that the result gets decided fairly early on and takes a REALLY long time to play out/drive itself into the ground as the losers get more and more bored.

I don't see anything about the game itself that would lead myself or anyone I know to lie and cheat.

I think the divergence of opinion in these replies illustrates the large difference in the worldviews of players. It's likely why the game remains controversial.

Same with me and my brother when I was a kid. Family story: we made our own Monopoly from paper & cardboard after our parents banned us from playing the game. Wonder where that ended up.

Monopoly really is a nasty game, because it models the nasty aspects of capitalism/markets + human nature quite well, I guess.

It was originally created to demonstrate the evils of capitalist routines. Then bought by a game company.

See wiki article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)

> Baltic and Mediterranean, the cheapest properties on the board, correlate to historically ethnic neighborhoods (even in name), while the historically rich, white enclaves

Am I missing something? I just googled "baltic people" and I think some of these people are whiter than me..

This other article says around Baltic Avenue was an African-American neighbourhood, not a literal ethnic Baltic neighbourhood. https://medium.com/galleys/behind-the-cardboard-streets-6f1d...

I'm guessing that they were poor immigrant enclaves in the past. My understanding is that people have also sometimes differentiated between Western Europe versus Eastern Europe with Western Europe being considered more similar to American culture and perhaps by extension "less backwards".

Ah, based on the sibling comment sounds like I was mistaken.

They're talking about neighborhoods and streets in Atlantic City, NJ. Not the actual regions of Europe.

If we look at American history, we see a pattern of various ethnic groups immigrating, getting low paid jobs, being discriminated against, then slowly becoming "white" as they assimilate. The Irish and Italians immediately come to mind. I have a suspicion that this pattern will continue with Latino people.

Workers from the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) were for a while near the bottom of the immigrant worker totem pole. The protagonist of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" (1905), meatpacker Jurgis Rudkus, was Lithuanian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

This is the point worth reflecting on. Why it's called "monopoly"

In 1904, inventor Lizzie Magie patented The Landlord’s Game, at its heart an educational tool to teach players about taxes. The Landlord’s Game is the same concept and mechanism—players travel around a game board, buy properties, and pay each other rent. But there are crucial differences. For one thing, the game is criticizing, not celebrating, landlords: The purpose is to show players how rents put money into the coffers of fatcat landlords while impoverishing tenants. There are monopolist and anti-monopolist versions of the rule set. Darrow’s 1935 version, while in many ways a copy of Magie’s, misses the original point: The goal of his game is to revel in the fantasy of being a land-grabbing property owner who bleeds renters dry and uses under-the-table deals to create structural inequality. Barring incredible dice luck, you can only win at Monopoly by dominating trades.

It is surprising that the article mentions Karl Marx, but not Henry George, whose ideas were the main inspiration for The Landlord’s Game.

No more surprising than the obligatory references to identity politics. The game was created as a Georgist political/economic screed. Some might even call the simulated in-game economy a straw-man. The article is par for a pop culture econ polemic. Nothing exceptional, nothing we haven't been browbeaten with before.

I think Monopoly is mostly a game of luck. It is also pretty simplistic and unbalanced - just buy up everything you land on. Then, if not landed on complete sets, sit for an hour waiting to be drained slowly. Making feeble attempts to buy missing properties.

One rule modification can fix some of these issues: everyone is allowed to bid on a property that you landed on. It will go the highest bidder, so everyone gets an equal chance.

But anyway, there are much better board games these days.

This is nice video about history of a game. Video is sprinkled with left-ish perspective. But regardless of worldview of the author it's a nice research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7nFA19Gzrw

I love the game of monopoly! Always interested in the different winning strategies but cutting off others from buying a street was always my best winning strategy

My favourite is to build only up to 4 houses, and never build a hotel.

Then if someone else is in money trouble and is forced to sell their hotels, but the stock of houses is empty so that they can't -- they lose.

Oh wow, I’ve done that on the way up—to prevent others from adding houses; but never on the way down. That is interesting.

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