A somewhat off-topic comment on a post on Ethics Alarms got
me thinking about Monopoly, and indeed about the two recent commercials I’ve
seen for the board game.
It’s now well-established that the game was actually
invented by a leftist stenographer named Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie. Her idea, for a game called the Landlord’s
Game, was originally intended to have two sets of rules: one in which everyone
was rewarded if wealth was created, and a monopolistic version, in which
players seek to accumulate all the wealth by crushing all the opponents.
Were Curmie of a cynical disposition (perish the thought!),
he might suggest that the former represents the “rising tide lifts all boats” rhetoric
of the predatory capitalists at the top of the economic food chain, and the
latter represents their actual practice.
Magie wrote that the game “might well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’
as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and
the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, i.e.,
the accumulation of wealth.”
The latter version of the game, the one we now recognize as
Monopoly, although patented, was essentially stolen by a scoundrel named Charles
Darrow, who made minor changes and sold the idea to Parker Brothers, making
millions. In turn, they simultaneously
pretended that the game was Darrow’s invention and also bought the rights to
Magie’s game for an absurdly low price.
In other words, the history of the game mirrors the game
itself: it is a story of greed, shrewdness, and opportunism supplanting ethical
behavior as a guiding principle. Oh, and
don’t forget luck. It’s better to be
lucky than good… in Monopoly and in life. There are advantages to having a skillset in
both, but it sure is easier IRL to have Daddy give you a few million dollars to
start your business or in Monopoly to land on Boardwalk when it’s for sale rather
than when someone else has a hotel there.
Interestingly, the reverse of this latter phenomenon happens
if you go to jail. It’s a disadvantage
early because you can’t buy anything, but late in the game staying in jail
means you’re not landing on someone else’s hotel-bearing property. (One is tempted to note that a certain IRL late-in-the-game
real estate mogul currently facing the possibility of jail time might actually
benefit politically from incarceration by claiming to have been unjustly tried
and convicted.)
It strikes me that, contrary to the arguments made by others
on that Ethics Alarms thread, Monopoly stands alone (or at least virtually
so—Curmie doesn’t claim to know all the other possibilities) as a game. It is, in some ways, not about winning, but
about your opponents losing. It’s
certainly not about the mutual benefit of all the competitors, as the other set
of Lizzie Magie’s rules would have it.
Even Life, the other board game from Curmie’s youth to
involve “money” rather than points, usually ends with winners who have more
money than their opponents, not all the money. Yes, there’s a chance of winning at the end by
literally going for broke (and heading to the poorhouse 90% of the time), but
that just adds a little late-game interest to a game that is almost exclusively
decided by luck. No one suggests that
the winner employed any particular skill, as there’s only one choice: go to
college or don’t.
Let Curmie respond to comments by EA readers: Baseball games
involve only two teams at a time, and despite the occasional shutout generally
end with scores of 3-1 or 7-2 or whatever: not all the runs on one
side. And whereas there is an element of
luck—the line drive right at the 2nd baseman, the bloop double, the
blast that fades foul or stays fair by inches, and so on—the ratio of skill to
luck is significantly higher there than in Monopoly. Poker lasts as long as it lasts, except in high-stakes
tournaments. There’s not a sense of an
unfinished competition if the game ends at midnight or after 20 hands or
whatever. It doesn’t require all the
chips to be in a single player’s possession to call it a night. Sure, games like Risk involve the
annihilation of the opposition (and strategy often involving deceit), but
they’re not being marketed to primary school kids.
For all its heritage as a critique of the landlord class, Monopoly
has come to be regarded as a paean to capitalism, just as Bruce Springsteen’s
“Born in the USA” has somehow been transformed in the public
imagination to a patriotic anthem to be blared over the speakers to the
accompaniment of 4th of July fireworks. It’s pretty clear that Lizzie Magie knew that
kind of transformation might happen: a society smitten with financial wealth
will envy the “haves,” and will jump at the chance to live that life even if
only in a fictive world.
So… about those ads…
Curmie has seen two of them for the standard game (there are far too many
variations on the theme than Curmie wants to contemplate). The first, known as “8-Year Old Landlord,” shows, as the title suggests, a little girl in Leona Helmsley drag. She’s owner of Park Place Apartments; we see
her firing the janitor (her father), raising rents on her brother and the
family dog, and issuing her pregnant mom a final notice before eviction. The tag is “It’s all in the name of the
game. All is fair in Monopoly.” Curmie supposes the ad is cute in a creepy
sort of way, but it certainly condones if not encourages behavior we’d find
objectionable in real life: the sort of legal but acquisitive and narcissistic
impulses many renters see in their landlords.
Still, that focused amorality is a strategy for winning at
Monopoly. Can’t complain too much.
The other commercial, however, is far more problematic. The title character and narrator of “Grand Theft Nai Nai” (“nai
nai” is Chinese for “grandmother”) tells us that being 75 has its perks,
notably that “People just trust you. Blindly.” In
her capacity as a bank teller she steals a huge amount of money from customers
and/or the bank itself, stuffing wads of bills into her clothing, even into her
shoes. We then cut to a shot of her
doing the same thing with Monopoly money as she gloats about her wealth. It may be that it’s her own money she’s
stuffing up her sleeve in the image above, but then the parallelism is fractured. The context certainly suggests that she’s
taking money from the game’s bank, just as she did from the real-life bank for
which she works. Again, the tag is “All
is fair in Monopoly.”
Except that it isn’t.
The young landlady of Park Place Apartments may be unfeeling and
rapacious, but what she does is legal (well, the rationale for raising
the brother’s rent may not be, but it goes by so fast that virtually no one
will notice). The old lady in the other
ad is engaged in actual theft. That’s
against the rules in real life, and guess what, Gentle Reader?
It’s against the rules in Monopoly, too!
All is not fair in Monopoly; this isn’t Calvinball, where the
rules are made up as the game progresses.
Does this ad really encourage cheating? Well, actually, yes. The other commercial may demonstrate how to win at Monopoly; this one shows how to get arrested in real life, or at least how to deserve to be. That’s not a good look, even for a game that has for years de facto conflated success and wealth. Metaphoric, legal, stealing—tax breaks on yachts and private jets, huge “loans” that miraculously don’t need to be repaid, that sort of thing—is one thing. Literal theft is another. Hasbro (which acquired Parker Brothers and therefore Monopoly in 1991) needs to ditch the ad, no matter how cute they think it is.
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