A Treatise on Monopoly

So, my brother unintentionally convinced me to write a critical analysis of Monopoly in spite of/because of the fact that I hate it.

Monopoly, designed in 1933 and produced in 1935, is so steeped in American culture that if someone utters the phrase "boardgame," most people will think of Monopoly before any others.

For those somehow unfamiliar, Monopoly is a board game that takes place on a square board with the four edges representing streets with properties on them for the players to buy. Players roll a pair of dice and move down the avenue of the board clockwise, buying properties and charging rent from other players who land on those properties. The goal of the game is to not go bankrupt. The more extravagant your property becomes, the more money charged when another player lands on it, allowing you to force people into bankruptcy by staying at your crummy hotel. Along with the 22 main properties (that can have houses and hotels on them), there are 6 lesser properties that can never make a huge amount of money from the other players, but are cheap sources of decent money. Monopoly is a game that thrives on a model of board gaming that had then become the norm for almost an entire generation: roll-and-move. The idea is that the game more or less plays itself. You roll the dice and move that number of spaces forward, doing whatever you are instructed to do on the space upon which you landed.

Meaningful decisions were entirely in how/when/what deals you brokered with other players. Beyond that, the game was an automated luck-machine that took two hours to play. Parker Brothers pushed Monopoly as a patriotic symbol of Americanism in a time when communism had become the major perceived threat. The concept of capitalism being the "best" economic policy was being reinforced as new generations grew up playing Monopoly. Additionally, because of its incredibly small learning curve, it was easy to introduce new players. It was the ideal family night activity for rambunctious kids and exasperated parents- one that didn't require thought, but still allowed you to bond with your children.

This accessibility, however, has played the part of a double-edged sword. While more people accepted the idea of gaming as a "normal" activity, the simplicity of Monopoly (and games developed thereafter) gave our culture the implication that gaming was a strictly childish activity, to be turned to by children or as a means of captivating children. For those that have accepted the idea of playing games as a valid past time for adults, the problem is that all games were seen to be filled to the brim with luck and low on meaningful choices. This led to the stagnation of boardgame design for just shy of 60 years when Settlers of Catan took the world by storm.

More than being an overly simplistic game, however, Monopoly started a dangerous precedent in the world of gaming; that in order to win, everyone else must lose. In this particular case, everyone else must lose everything. Even the person who comes in "second," despite lasting potentially much longer than other players, walks away with exactly nothing, giving early boardgames a sense of "all or none." It's only recently that gaming has broken away from that convention using common mechanics like victory points to definitively place players on a spectrum towards victory, rather than a binary switch between "victor" and "loser."

Monopoly is a game about following orders, never making decisions, and accepting that luck will determine who wins. The fact that this formula has worked its way so deeply into the expected culture of boardgaming is at least partially indicative of why Americans often feel that "games" are toys for children. That one game can set back the course of game design/development by decades on its own is astonishing, and yet here we are, almost 80 years later, only now coming to our own as a hobby.


Socially, Monopoly has done its share of harm as well, but that's not the main purpose of this post, so I'll just touch a tiny bit on that.

Not only has the aspect of winner v. loser been damaging to the longevity of gaming as a culture, but it actually has been perpetuating negative expectations about American economics. Namely, that the middle class can't exist. You have one hyper-rich person for every 2-4 people. The rest? Dirt poor. This mindset has reinforced a refusal to compromise in our society, as well as the tendency to think that if someone has nothing, they simply weren't as "good" as the person who has everything. Monopoly also starts players on equal footing, reinforcing the notion that everyone has the same opportunities