Do not ask us why we find it fun
Modern America in three games
The Book:
The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game
By Mary Pilon
Bloomsbury USA
2015
The Talk:
In her 2015 book The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game, journalist Mary Pilon chronicles the invention and rise of one of the most popular American board games of the 20th Century: Monopoly.
In 1904 writer, inventor, actress, and game designer Lizzie Magie patented The Landlord’s Game. The original purpose of the game was to teach the tenets of georgism, a 19th Century economic theory proposed to eliminate poverty and inequality in America.
Magie created two sets of rules for the game: A “monopoly” set of rules and an “anti-monopoly” set of rules. Same board, different rules. The idea was that when players played two different economic systems they could discover the virtues of the anti-monopoly (georgist) system of economics.
Monopoly was not alone in having a moral agenda. There were lots of educational and morality-based games in that era. Milton Bradley’s first game was called The Checkered Game of Life, a “game with a purpose,” in which players avoided spaces labeled Intemperance and Idleness and the Gambling space that led to Ruin. (The game even included a square labeled Suicide.) The goal was to get to Happy Old Age.
It appears the particular genius of Magie’s game was that the theme of the game wasn’t as tacked on like Bradley’s Game of Life but rather experienced through the rules of the game itself. (In this way, Magie was perhaps ahead of her time in game design.)
The great irony, however, is that early players preferred playing the monopoly rules rather than the anti-monopoly ones. And the monopoly rules entered the public consciousness while the anti-monopoly rules were forgotten. People made their own boards, changed location names, and adapted house rules—and the game became known in several communities across the eastern U.S. as “the monopoly game.”
What Magie and Parker Brothers stumbled upon was a whole new frontier of games: While the first modern board games in the 19th Century had to prove their moral and educational value to skeptical Victorian parents, there was more money—a lot more more money—to be made in letting people experience the pleasure of doing something morally problematic.
We wanted a real game
Magie continued to design games for the rest of her life. (Parker Brothers published another game of hers titled Mock Trial.) She also remained a devout georgist, long after its ideas has faded from popular interest.
But “the monopoly game” took on a life of its own, gaining local cult followings in different communities. The community that left the biggest mark on the game was that of Quaker hotel owners in Atlantic City during the 1920s. Like other communities, they made their own boards with local streets as the properties.
The streets on the board mirrored the Quaker social network. The Harveys themselves lived on Pennsylvania Avenue, while their friends the Joneses lived on Park Place, an expensive part of town, and the Copes lived on Virginia Avenue at the Quaker-owned Morton Hotel. Ventor Avenue was where the Harveys had lived when Dottie was younger, and the Boardwalk was where they often went for a stroll.
The values of the properties matched the relative values of the neighborhoods they knew, but the place names also held meanings that later players wouldn’t know. The two cheapest properties on the board, Baltic Avenue and Mediterranean Avenue, were the poor black and poor white neighborhoods, respectively. New York Avenue was the gay district, home to some of the earliest gay bars in the country, according to Pilon.
“We wanted a real game,” Cyril [Harvey] said. “A game that fit our situation, was the whole idea of it.”
In short, they were roleplaying themselves, spending late nights battling each other over a board game that simulated their own city and their role in it. And, generations on, Monopoly enthusiasts would play the fantasy of 1920s Atlantic City hotel owners, long after the places and tokens (a thimble, a top hat, an iron) held any practical relevance anymore. But it is perhaps telling that the game we play today is still set during the economic boom (and decadence) of the 1920s, nostalgically revisiting an era that held enormous bad consequences shortly thereafter.
Monopoly, Risk, Settlers
Today there are few board game hobbists who play Monopoly. The last time I played Monopoly was probably in high school before entering college and discovering the eurogame boom of the early 2000s led by Settlers of Catan.
And yet there are some striking similarities between Settlers of Catan and Monopoly that I hadn’t thought about before reading this book. Most notably, the little houses called “settlements” and the upgraded “cities”—not so different from houses and hotels. Players attempt to place settlements in clusters that allow them to collect resources when certain numbers are rolled. In effect, the players possess properties (or rather, occupy positions) that gain them resources. Additionally, trading and dealmaking play an important aspect in the game. And while in Monopoly you can go to jail, in Settlers you can “rob” opponents of resources if you roll a 7.
Unlike Monopoly, which ends in one player becoming a monopoly, Settlers is a hegemonic victory game. A player wins not when all opponents are eliminated but when one player becomes the dominant power among others. To lose in Catan is to remain an independent power but concede that you live in world in which another has the largest army, the longest road, or holds claim to the most natural resources.
The popularity of Settlers coincides with the dawn of a unipolar world order, in which the geopolitical imperative of the U.S. was to use its economic, technological, and military power to break up any challenge to its global dominance. In other words, every game of Settlers tells a little storybook tale that always ends in a tidy Pax Americana. The others powers concede, the hegemony is accepted, and 9/11 never happens.
This happened another time as well, when Risk: The Game of Global Domination came out in the late 1950s—when schools were implementing “duck and cover” drills in the event of atomic war. Winning the war against the U.S.S.R. was critical to the prosperity of the United States, and yet global war was terrifying. But Risk requires the energic pursuit of global domination to its absolute end point.
The Bad Thing
It seems like popular games at a given moment in history—the games people find most fun—are those that place the player in the role of doing the Bad Thing, often the bad thing on which current prosperity rests.
This is why nobody wanted to play the “anti-monopoly rules.” Fun often isn’t about doing the right thing; it’s about doing the wrong thing with pleasure.
Perhaps “fun” works best when you aren’t analyzing it. As long as you don’t think about what makes something fun, it works. (It’s just a game! You’re overthinking it!) But under the spell of fun you often get to fantasize doing the Bad Thing or the ethically conflicted thing.
The era of big monopolies in America was a sign of prosperity, and yet it left people deeply uneasy, threatening free markets, democracy, and Christian values. The game of Monopoly put people in the role of eagerly seeking that which otherwise troubled the public conscience.
In the 1950s, defeating communism is good and is a necessary defense of the freedom and ideals we believe in. But global war is bad, threatening to undermine our very existence. The game of Risk puts people in the role of eagerly pursing global war.
The Pax Americana of the post-Cold War era is seen as a good thing, and yet America is an uneasy hegemon, as its actions in the world often undermine its values (national independence, freedom from foreign influence, level playing field, competition, etc). Settlers of Catan allows players to pursue hegemony with gusto.
We could possibly add a fourth to the list:
We believe in the right to bear arms. Guns are deeply tied to American self-identity and the defense of freedom. But in our current era this right leaves us in the position where our freedom undermines our domestic peace. Society is deeply uneasy about the regularity of mass shootings. But the popularity of first-person shooters put us in the position of identifying with guns without reservation and taking delight in them.
“We wanted a real game. A game that fit our situation, was the whole idea of it.”
The theme can be indirect (sci-fi, fantasy, historical). If it’s right on the nose, it may break the spell. (Though games which simulate real life and the real world are also popular and considered fun.) Risk’s horses and cannons make no sense on a world map. Catan has a kind of “cozy colonizer” feel to it. But the core narrative action is there underneath the theme.
In the end, the pursuit of games that are both popular and morally uplifting is likely folly. What we really want, the itch we really want to scratch, is to, for a brief moment, throw off the anxiety of conflicting values and live out our fantasy of just doing the Bad Thing for once, with pleasure, with relish, with a clean, unambiguous victory.
Related:
Dante's Inferno is a video game
The Lewis Chessmen and why we play the game
12 things this millennial learned about the Reagan Era
What Elon Musk's favorite game tells us about him (The Future, Now and Then)