The title sounds like a joke, but it isn’t, sadly. It’s more irony. The game of Monopoly has a history stretching back to about 1903, but the official history misses out about the first three decades of it. I’ll start with today’s experience of playing it.
I am not good at any board games. Oddly, when I learned chess at about the age of six, I was quite good until I forgot how to play and relearned to join a chess club a couple of years later, when I turned out to be rubbish. My problems are that I have no strategy and only defend rather than attack, so I lose every time. Monopoly is about as difficult as any other game for me, and in particular I don’t understand how building houses and hotels works. Before I knew the history of the game, I intensely disliked what seemed to be the idea behind it, because it seemed to be about greed and exploitation. Admittedly, chess is very aggressive too, which is one reason I haven’t been keen, but I still preferred it to Monopoly and there’s another way of understanding chess which kind of sees it as making patterns with pieces which are either successful or unsuccessful, but I can’t do that either. I suppose the thing to do would be to visualise a tree with a checkmate at the top and the fresh board at the root, and work out the route to that final twig, but I lack the ability to think that way. I know enough to realise that there are twenty possible opening moves and many orders of magnitude more final moves, determined by the pieces protecting the King, the position of the King, the positions of one’s opponent and so on. Even considering both Kings there are around four thousand possible positions in the last move. I think there must be a more intuitive way of thinking it through but don’t know what that might be. Some kind of data compression perhaps?
Monopoly is a bit different because luck is involved in a way it isn’t with chess. Each turn has six immediate outcomes but the game also seems to remember things in a different way to the pre-existing state of a chessboard when one makes a move, and there are also Community Chest and Chance cards, among other things. Apparently one of the innovations of Monopoly was to have a necessarily repeating route around the board rather than a sequential route across it like Snakes & Ladders or Ludo. There are ways of looping round in chess and of course in Snakes & Ladders, but circulating one’s pieces repeatedly across the entire board is inevitable in Monopoly.
Monopoly was invented by an ethnic Scot living in the US (she was from Illinois) called Elizabeth Magie and usually referred to as Lizzie Magie (as in “Maggie”), in 1903. It was only one of several games she invented, and being a typist and stenographer she also invented a method of improving typewriter roller mechanisms, which, like the games, she patented. Monopoly was originally called “The Landlord’s Game” and was devised to publicise Georgism, a tax régime involving taxing land ownership according to size and potential instead of having a straightforward income tax. Magie’s father was a keen exponent of Georgism, known today as Geoism. The idea was promoted by Henry George but built on earlier work by John Locke and Baruch Spinoza. Magie’s game was intended to illustrate the problems perceived by the contemporary economic system and was really two games in one. One had rules based on Georgist ideology and the other was based on the actual local economic system at the time, and unsurprisingly if you followed the Georgist-based rules things worked out a lot better. The pieces were originally pawns but were later changed to household items.
The game was in the public domain and players used to pass it around, making their own cards, boards and the like, and just as now, they used to localise it. It was popular among Quakers, although I don’t know for sure if Magie was herself a member of the Society of Friends. She was, however, a feminist, never married and was head of her own household.
What happened a couple of decades later is in a way understandable, but illustrates a process which is depressingly common. Speaking of depression, a man called Charles Darrow fell on hard times after the Wall Street Crash and marketed the game without the Georgist set of rules, making a one-off payment of $500 to Magie for the rights to the game. She received no royalties and there ensued a legal battle. The $500, incidentally, didn’t even cover her expenses in developing the game, and the game company Hasbro ended up owning it. Then, in 1983, a man called Ralph Anspach, who had come up with a game called ‘Anti-Monopoly’, won a court case against General Mills, who had tried to sue him for using their trademark, and the research done in pursuit of the case revealed the true history of Monopoly. The name cannot be trademarked because of this history. Anspach planned to release Magie’s version of the game under the terrible name of ‘Original-opoly’, but I’m not sure if anything came of it.
There is a clearly discernible trajectory here. What was originally held in common was successfully claimed as property by someone who was desperate, and I understand that Darrow really was on his uppers at that point. The situation evolved into one in which lots of people’s livelihoods depended on this pretence being continued, but the motives of the people involved weren’t clearly altruistic and they appeared to have become greedy or lost touch with their roots. The question arises of when it got beyond the point of mainly altruism and turned into something else, and to some extent whether this interpretation is even accurate. Poor and rich people have a smaller base of things in common and the poor would have to rely on the wealthy to be honest to the world and to themselves to trust that the motives for defending that intellectual property are pure. This is quite close to the idea of Marxian class consciousness and maybe also false consciousness if outsiders accept a false narrative about this situation. But I have to say, if the details of Darrow’s life up to the point where he used Magie’s idea can be relied upon, it makes complete sense that he would take that opportunity. I’m not devoid of sympathy for him.
A second way of looking at this is that although there are no self-made people, Magie comes remarkably close to that mirage, particularly for a woman of that period and place, and her ideas were taken away from her and used to make a lot of money. It’s also notable that the ideas she intended to promote within the game were close to being socialistic, although Geoism nowadays has also been adopted by right-wing libertarians as a source for limited taxation for the defence of property rights, and it makes me wonder what it means that trust appears to have been abused here. Is it that there was, and probably still is, a large group of socialists and Quakers who were/are easily exploited because of their trust and naïveté? I wouldn’t accuse Darrow of sociopathic tendencies, but if sociopathy is a spectrum, do they ruin it for everyone and make socialism impracticable, and should we just throw up our hands in despair or should we get sociopathy in perspective as a sometimes useful personality type which however should keep people away from the levers of power, if those even exist? To some extent that is the job of the police and law enforcement, but I do believe we have a major psychopathy/sociopathy problem in this society.
Anyway, once again I want to bring this back to ‘Blake’s 7’. In the current collaborative project relating to this, I mentioned how I missed my deadline with the story, but I’m also involved in attempting to elevate the sketchy ‘Cosmos’ board game concept seen a couple of times on the show into a playable form. It seems to resemble Monopoly, also known incidentally mainly to Quakers as without a capital M, but I suspect it would work better as a form of Risk, which I hardly know at all. I do know Britannia, which is somewhat similar. I am not a board game geek, and it’s quite challenging to try to do this. I think there are two possible approaches. One is to “skin” Monopoly or Risk with the trappings of the Blake’s 7 universe and end up with a heavily modified but essentially indentically-structured game, which is a safe option but not very original. The other is to devise a somewhat more original game which, however, might not work. The problem is that just as I am usually more interested in world-building than plot and characters, I am interested in board games in terms of the basic mechanics, but not in playing them. GURPS, for instance, interests me as a system, but actually playing an RPG is utterly yawn-inspiring to me. I don’t understand why this is, because in view of my general personality you might think I’d be really keen on escaping into that or otherwise using it in a positive way. Of course, if someone’s willing to test the game once it’s finished, that would be really good. The easiest thing to do would be to “localise” Monopoly to the Federation Galaxy and be done with it. I have a significant problem with the artwork in the corners of the board because I can’t draw.
A Box Of Chocolates 