Money-opoly

Monopoly is arguably the most popular board game in history, it's likely we've all played it one or more times in our lives. So let's walk through a typical game scenario and learn what we can. Let's say you're playing with two of your friends or family. One takes the race car, the other takes the battleship, and you take the shoe. Everyone starts with the same amount of money and the board is full of unowned properties (presumably owned by the bank) desperate for buyers. In the first four or five times around the square board most properties have been purchased. One of you may have both utilities, another could be the railroad baron with three or four railroads, and you bought both of the purple properties for a sweet deal. Now your building hotels in the ghetto, it's not much but the money starts to roll in.

The game can go on for a while where it seems as though everyone has a fighting chance, but it always seems to end the same way. No one has landed on your properties in the last four times around and you keep landing on those damn railroads and utilities. Someone pulls way ahead and everyone is mortgaging their properties to stay afloat. Then you land on Boardwalk for a short but expensive stay in the fancy new hotel and you're broke, busted, your out of the game. Tough luck. And tough love from the town you used to be a big player in, let's call it Monopolis.

It's true you can learn a few things from this game, but what exactly? It doesn't seem like my life at all. I didn't start life with an equal pile of money as the next guy. And the world was already bought and sold before I came into the game. The board came pre-monopolized and I can't afford a hotel room on Boardwalk! And why don't people have jobs in monopoly? They just drive around town all day collecting money every week, sometimes they go to jail for no apparent reason. The ones who do all the work must be those pathetic schmucks living in the cheap little green houses on Baltic Avenue.

Imagine a game of monopoly that was started over 300 years ago, and has been going on ever since. The original people who dominated the board just handed it all over to their children to continue collecting money. This has been going on for so long that it's just not fun anymore. When we were born the game was already won and maybe we're all suckers for playing at all. But who couldn't understand why the game goes on? When you are the winner and nobody wants to play anymore, that's when you feel like you're just getting started. You don't want to give up, you want to start loaning money and subsidizing other players just to keep the rush of domination flowing.

Is there another game to play? Is it "fun" to share things equally like we were taught to do as children? Can we make a game out of feeding the hungry and healing the sick? Or maybe we should forget about these silly childish games and start living in responsible, sustainable ways, in harmony with each other, and the planet. We can put down the race car and the battleship and just walk peacefully around our world, learning to walk softly again. Does this sound like a good, market-able game? No? Good! Maybe one day the market will just be a small part of our world instead of monopolizing the board. I personally don't care about money, I want to work. I just want everyone to work their fair share and I'd rather not be dominated by anyone at all. But for some, to do any work at all, to lose their wealth and live an average working life however well paid, seems a fate worse than death.


Here's George Carlin using grown up language to give his take on Money-opoly, Enjoy!