Monopoly is one of those games you played as a kid when you had exhausted every other activity on the planet. It was all you and your best friends had during the second week of winter break when your mom was back at work and you two were stranded at the house alone, left to wallow in a pit of pretzel sticks and Full House reruns until your brains melted into the pizza bagels you slightly burned in the oven an hour earlier. Someone would suggest Sorry, but there was always at least two blues and a green piece missing, and Risk felt far too ambitious for a three eleven-year-olds that couldn’t pronounce Irkutsk.
If you play by the rules, Monopoly is a very long game, and thus for most people, it’s a game they so often start but never finish. When you were younger, the game usually ended because someone’s mom would come home with Chick-fil-A around the same time as the premier of the newest Disney Channel original movie. Or because Sarah would have to ditch to go to dinner with her grandma and her grandma’s new boyfriend at Olive Garden, and it was far too exhausting and bellicose to redistribute both of the utilities and her light blue Monopoly. Or, given that there were no distractions, the group would get so bored of passing go that they turned to drugs. One out of three stoners I talked to outside a hipster taco truck in Brooklyn said he could trace his habit back to a failed run of the Disney edition in 2007. Experts like my cousin Kyle say that 33% of marijuana users is a significant statistic, and in his professional opinion as a three-year resident of Portland, it suggests that Americans should be playing a lot more Monopoly.
But the most common end to the game during young adulthood and beyond is far more hostile than 4/20. It’s always over when Dave gets cocky after he purchases his third railroad, and Jeff has a temper tantrum, throwing his properties and the stack of community chest cards at his cat because his entire strategy rested on obtaining Pennsylvania and making the left side of the board his “safe space”.
Monopoly is savage, and only the most-able can stomach the lifestyle.
It takes at least two that caught the bug to really delve into the addiction with a craving for financial world domination and utter confidence in or disregard for the longevity of their friendship. Committed players ride it out to the end, regardless of the pain and suffering and likely PTSD it will affect when making contentious purchases at Walmart on Black Friday. Yet, trends show that the shortest Monopoly games come from practiced veterans; these players know that they only way to win – and ensure a quick and thus humane demise of their opponents into bankruptcy – is to be ruthless and unforgiving. Deals don’t have to be fair when you have leverage and desperation is waxing on the sensibilities of your counterparts. While it’s pure chance when it comes to where you land on the board, it’s clear that manipulation is the key regardless of how the die roll. It makes one wonder how riveting it would be to witness a game between Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Charles Manson. My money would be on Manson, but honestly who’s really to say.
Regardless of the outcome of the game, its innate ability to bring out the demons in all of us is a prime analogy to corporate culture in today’s economy. Power comes from money and immovable control of property and people when subject to external forces of unlucky twists in the market or turns around the board. That’s exactly what Elizabeth Magie and Charles Darrow allegedly sought to teach peers and posterity when they created the game. Unfortunately, it seems as if we’ve learned less about the dangers of concentrated private landownership and more about how Aunt Darcy was warranted when she tried to force Uncle Corey into anger management.
However, the analogy isn’t completely lost. The fact that most of us have piercing memories of obliteration at the hands of your loved ones and that guy your friend dated for a month in high school that you always thought was an asshole anyway is a testament to your inferior skills of manipulation and persuasion, as well as the subconscious realization that a seemingly harmless person or entity can fall short of empathy and morality when Boardwalk is still on the market.
But personally, none of it matters much to me as long as I get to be the dog.
