New Monopoly Token Will Ruin Game, Possibly America – Slate.com.
The board game Monopoly will soon lose a classic token and gain a new one, by way of a public vote on Facebook. It may sound like harmless fun, but is in fact a travesty, though not for the sake of nostalgia or preservational instinct. Notice the four tokens currently winning the vote, and thus most likely to stay “safe” from elimination. They are, as of this writing, the Scottie dog, the race car, the battleship, and the top hat. What do they have in common? Accoutrements of the 1 percent. A Scottish terrier champion-line puppy may cost $1,500. A roadster, $50,000. A battleship, $100 million in mid-century dollars. The top hat is as much a sign of the filthy rich as the monocle.
Whoa whoa whoa. Let’s keep this in perspective here. We’re talking about Monopoly, which is a game about becoming the 1%. It’s a game that teaches us that being poor, being without capital, being without property is totally wrong and a surefire way to lose. In order to win, you have to not only collect more money and property than anyone else, you have to take everyone else’s money and property and bankrupt them.
Who the fuck cares what the tokens are?? I can’t stomach to even play the game in the 1st place.
I really love playing Monopoly – it’s a Christmas tradition in the Liseuse household. However, I play it wrong! Because I first played it with a friend from middle school, and her family. Her father was our local vicar, and we played socially!conscious Monopoly. Which means I now buy up all the utilities, don’t charge people rent if they land on them and have never built anything on any property I own. I only buy property if I cannot do anything else, and then I scowl and say “property is theft!”. It makes it all much more enjoyable.
That said: can we stop having votes on things on FaffBook, please?
Yes, death to all voting on FaffBook!
I LOVE how you play Monopoly! I’d totally play a game with you! It actually sounds more like the spirit of the original Landlord’s Game, which is what Monopoly was based on. The Landlord’s Game was designed “with the object of showing that rents enriched property owners and impoverished tenants” (quoting from Wikipedia). Ha!
I can’t stand playing Monopoly against anyone other than the CPU of my laptop because my otherwise fairly kind and generous grandfather was a Monopoly GENIUS and would play a pretty vicious game that would ruthlessly crush his family under his iron fist until he finally drove us all from the board. Brutal. I stopped playing entirely at least 25 years ago.