Foundation and Empire

The last time I played Monopoly it was with pounds and the real estate had names like Mayfair and Islington. My parents had an English relic from before the war.

Today I played the modern incarnation, Monopoly Empire.

The money is undenominated, presumably to save costs on international sales.

Instead of real estate, one buys billboards which are added to one’s skyscraper.

The first person to cover their skyscraper to the top with billboards wins the game, ignoring the fact that even in the extreme case of Japan that billboards only climb up as far as the fifth floor.

In the old version, rent was due when one was found lurking, squatting even, in someone else’s property.

Now one pays the owner of a billboard the full cost of purchase of the billboard just for looking at the billboard.

This makes no sense since billboards are a form of paid broadcast media designed to catch the unwitting eyes. No money changes hands in the eye catching.

It would have made more sense to have a fine for graffiti crimes against the corporate machine.

There are bunch of other rules and cards (including baseless legal injunctions) which make just as little financial sense but are designed to even out the game a little; an improvement over the old game in which the first person to become a slumlord slowly drove the others into liquidation.

Very slowly, like an inevitable and quite unenjoyable train wreck.

The billboards themselves are a random selection of global corporate brands which have presumably paid Hasbro healthily for this opportunity to place all these micro billboards in front of consumer’s eyes.

And since the consumers pay for this privilege one has to admire the completeness of the logic; there are occasions when consumers do pay to see billboards!

Ultimately kids get to learn very little useful finance or economics from the modern game but they do get a first hand consumer’s view of neoliberal capitalism in action.

Which is to say, they get to play a game in which there is one winner and lots of losers but where the real winners aren’t even playing the game.

And most of the players would be none the wiser! Just downright bloody genius…