Because of Monopoly,
the most popular of the board games patented in the 20th century, almost all of
us have been real estate speculators at some point. It has been our particular
school of bulimic capitalism and social Darwinism. It has taught us to collect
streets and hotels like a stamp collector, to conceive of life as a frantic
race in circles collecting tolls, accumulating indecent amounts of money round
by round, crushing the competition and doing everything possible. for avoiding
that pair of twin curses that are prison and taxes.
One of the rituals of
passing Barcelona children and adolescents has spent decades spending a quintal
of play money to buy the duo of blue streets that was going to make us rich,
Balmes and Passeig de Grà cia. The same goes for Madrid with the Prado and
Castellana promenades, Americans with Boardwalk and Park Place, Parisians with
rue de la Paix and the Champs Elysees or Londoners with Mayfair and Park Lane.
And there are also editions dedicated to Cairo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaga,
Tokyo, Nairobi, Bilbao, Cape Town, Prague, Berlin, Istanbul, Bogota or Lima.
In total, more than
200 local or thematic editions distributed among 103 different countries
contribute to giving a universal dimension to this game converted to date into
37 languages and of which, according to estimates by Hasbro, the current
owner of its rights, more than 250 million copies. Its implementation is such
that between 1975 and 2015 a Monopoly world championship was held, in venues
such as New York, Monte Carlo, Bermuda, London, Berlin, Las Vegas or Macau. In
2004, a man from Madrid, Antonio Zafra Fernández, was proclaimed world champion
in Tokyo, the king of table real estate speculators, and pocketed an amount in
cash equivalent to the total money that moved in the original version of the
game: $15,140.
Crying game
Surely in these days
of Christmas holidays many of you have again incurred the guilty pleasure of
playing Monopoly with family or friends. It is much more democratic than chess,
more intuitive than Stratego or Cluedo, less childish than goose or ludo, more
substantial than tic tac toe, not as stressful as Trivial and somewhat less
depressing and ideologically questionable than Risk .
It has fierce
detractors, of course, and many of them insist on what is almost obvious by
now: that it's an outdated hobby (so old-fashioned that the rich still go to
jail for it), that it's usually only enjoy if you are winning, that games tend
to go on forever, that sooner or later the unscrupulous predator that we all
carry inside will be brought out, that winning or losing is a simple matter of
luck (no matter how much those who win consider themselves same financial
geniuses and formidable strategists) and that its rules, despite the fact that
everyone thinks they know them, continue to be the subject of infinite
controversy.
However, if something
can reconcile us with Monopoly, it is its random and very unconventional
history. Because this playful arm of global capitalism was actually the
brainchild of a left-wing feminist who envisioned it as a pedagogical tool, a
kind of crash course in the risks of speculation and the toxicity of
unrestrained capitalism. Years later, a salesman who had lost his job as a
result of the Great Depression appropriated that alien idea, distorted it
without even intending to, and ended up selling it to a multinational toy
company that was still in its infancy at the time, Parker Brothers.
What do we play
The penultimate
chapter of this intricate story begins on a fall soiree in 1932 in
Philadelphia. That night, Charles Darrow, an unemployed door-to-door salesman
at the time, played for the first time, together with his wife Esther, an
unnamed game at the home of their close friends, Charles and Olive Todd. The
pastime consisted of traversing a rectangular cardboard board while buying
property, building hotels, and collecting passing taxes from players
unfortunate enough to stumble upon your possessions.
It was fast, simple
and addictive, although Charles Darrow was struck by the fact that its rules
were somewhat imprecise. Charles Todd insisted that he had learned them as he
went along, that during his business trips he had had the opportunity to play
the game in various corners of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and that in
each of those places it was played by different rules. At Darrow's insistence,
Todd made the effort to collect all the rules he knew of and put them in
writing.
Darrow stuck with the
variants that seemed most coherent to him, created a better-looking handmade
board than Todd had at home, and made an appointment with local Parker Brothers
representatives, to whom he offered the game as if it were his own invention. .
The toy company did not show excessive interest in this rather rudimentary
hobby, so Darrow, despite his precarious situation (he had been unemployed for
several months) chose to register it and try to market it on his own.
Against all odds, it
was somewhat successful: it sold several hundred copies in the next two years.
Furthermore, the game was reported as a curious novelty by the Philadelphia and
New York press, and Parker Brothers, this time, approached Darrow in 1935 to
buy out his patent and make a first professional edition of the game, which was
christened Monopoly.
I patented it because it was mine
(or nobody's)
Darrow always insisted
that this was not an act of misappropriation, because the game did not seem to
belong to anyone, it was played on improvised boards and with not entirely
defined rules. It was, from his point of view, the result of a process of
collective creation that was decanted over the years, and what he did was give
it a certain entity and coherence. Turn an informal and somewhat chaotic
pastime into a fully fledged board game.
As the journalist Mary
Pilon explains in an article in The Guardian, Darrow's was for decades the
official version of the origins of Monopoly, "a very suggestive and very
profitable myth, since it attributed all the credit to a brilliant entrepreneur
that it was going through a rough patch, which gave the story a certain
dimension of an American parable, and granted Parker Brothers the rights to
exploit the product.” But the point is that the game itself, its general
concept, board, and rules, had been created and patented in Washington, D.C29
years before the Darrows and Todds spent that fall evening playing Monopoly of the future.
The mother of the idea
was the activist, journalist, designer and inventor Elizabeth Magie. In 1903,
at the age of 37, Magie presented in the enlightened leftist circles of the
capital of the United States a brilliant occurrence called The Landlord's Game (the
game of the landlord) whose purpose was to show in a practical way the ideas of
one of his intellectual mentors. , the heterodox economist Henry George.
Capitalism with a human face
George believed that
the original sin of the American economy was that it was controlled by a landed
elite, urban and rural, which held back innovation, technological development,
and the redistribution of wealth. In his opinion, it was that economic caste
born of privilege, not effort or talent, that had the moral duty to finance the
nation's development. And because she wasn't willing to do that, George was
proposing to replace all federal taxes with a single, very high rate that
landowners would have to pay.
Elizabeth Magie
believed in this fiscal doctrine, the so-called Geordicism, and the game she
had created was an attempt to show the benefits of the idea. In The Landlord's
Game, you could play in two ways: cooperating or competing. In the first case,
all the players prospered reasonably, the areas of influence were distributed
harmoniously and they developed their business initiatives based on mutual
respect and the desire not to interfere. In the second scenario, stark
competition ruined all but one.
At the dawn of the
20th century, the United States was immersed in a period of prosperity and
optimism that came to be called the Progressive Era. The country had also
endowed itself with legal protections against monopolistic practices such as
the Sherman Act of 1890, an attempt to guide national development along the lines
of free competition, thus preventing the collective effort from being
exclusively capitalized by the selfish elites that George denounced. Magie, a
stubborn progressive, was convinced that those who played her game would end up
understanding as well as she did the benefits of harmonious cooperation and the
absurdity of developing a predatory economy, with a letter of marque, destined
to create prosperity for a few, the less scrupulous, and misery for the rest.
How to lose (and how to win)
What happened between
1903 and 1932 is that The Landlord's Game gradually acquired a life of its own,
completely outside the intentions and expectations of its creator. It had been
marketed very modestly, as Magie had always envisioned it as an educational
project, not a business, and it was sold mostly to schools and libraries.
However, many of those who had the opportunity to play it found it downright
fun, and began to create homemade variants that circulated profusely on the
east coast of the US and, most especially, the States of Pennsylvania and
Illinois.
As it diverged from
its original referent, the game gradually became skewed. The idea that sensible
and balanced cooperation was the way for everyone to win within the framework
of a capitalist economy oriented to the common good ceased to be intuitive
after the First World War, in those years of convulsive and frenetic prosperity
that were the ferocious years twenty (roaring twenties), and not to mention
from 1929, when the Wall Street crash gave way to the Great Depression and an
even worse intensification of the logic of every man for himself.
In the home version of
the game that the Todds taught the Darrows that night in 1932, it was no longer
about learning about economics and ethics, but simply about winning. Of being
the smart type, with initiative and without fuss that ruins the rest. Any other
way of conceiving it was already beginning to be supremely naive. In fact, as
Pilon explains, among the little that had survived of Magie's spirit was
"that order written in capital letters in one of the corners of the board,
GO TO JAIL (go to jail)" that the activist intended to be a warning for
sailors: if you act against society, society will end up acting against you.
To add to the
ridicule, when Parker Brothers got hold of the patent and gave Monopoly the
final form in which it was released commercially, almost identical to the
current one, the names of the streets were taken from those of Atlantic City,
in the state of New Sweater. It was not a random choice. This was the city most
Americans associated with that decade of speculative, riotous growth that was
the 1920s, the time when Elizabeth Magie's and Henry George's worst nightmares
came true. You can get a rough idea of what Atlantic City was like back then
by watching the Boardwalk Empire series, chronicling the rise of a local
gangster, Nucky Thompson, who would certainly have made a terrific Monopoly
player.
The color code chosen
for the streets of the game also has sinister connotations. As the final
stretch of the board approached, the players entered the segregated area of
the city, that is, prohibited to African-American residents and, in general,
those who were not wealthy, Protestants and Anglo-Saxons. The pair of blue
streets, Boardwalk and Park Place, were the epicenter of that ghetto of white
opulence where the middle class dreamed of one day settling.
Elizabeth Magie died
in 1948 without even bothering to claim motherhood from the game that had been
usurped from her. It had to be another heterodox economist, Ralph Anspach, who
took it upon himself to do him some retrospective justice. In 1974, Anspach
created Anti-Monopoly, a countercultural inducement to cooperate instead of
compete very much in the spirit of what Magie had done 70 years earlier. He was
sued by Parker Brothers, and in his research work to prepare his legal defense
he ended up finding the patent for The Landlord's Game. That document related
to the prehistory of board games allowed him to reach a very advantageous
agreement and continue to market his variant.