Free Parking

The other day, I was having a conversation about board games and the question arose, "Does anyone actually like playing Monopoly?" It's an engaging question, because, despite the widespread belief that Monopoly is a poorly designed and, more importantly, unenjoyable game, it's also, I believe, the best selling board game of all time. Ask almost anyone, even confirmed haters, if they have a copy of it and there's a very good chance that they do. And, with the proliferation of so many downright bizarre themed versions of the game, it's not at all unlikely that many people have multiple copies of the game. I think I own three copies myself, though, in my defense, all of them have been exiled to the garage, alongside old paint brushes and the bottle of coyote urine I use to keep raccoons out of my recycling bin.

Leaving aside the more specific question of why nearly everyone owns at least one copy of the game, I sometimes advance a theory about the broader question of why most people seem to hate it – two theories, actually. The first and perhaps less contentious theory is that Monopoly is no different than Candyland or Mouse Trap – to cite just two more terribly unenjoyable games – in that it was designed for children. Children's board games have different design goals than games geared at an adult audience. To expect that a childish entertainment should be able to hold the attention of adults is both absurd and unfair (and likely explains why so much of contemporary pop culture is awful, but that's a topic for another day). On this theory, most of the people who vociferously hate Monopoly are adults or older children, who are not the intended audience of the game.

My second theory is a bit more contentious and even I will admit that it's not without its flaws. I contend that the reason Monopoly is unfun is because almost no one plays it correctly. Most of us never bother to read the rules of the game, because "everybody knows" how to play it. You need only do a very quick search online to find many articles pointing out which aspects of the game's actual rules people either misunderstand or don't use at all. All these various house rules and folkloric interpretations contribute to making the game a tedious, tiresome slog that no one in his right mind would call entertaining. It's my feeling that, if the game were played as intended, it wouldn't be nearly so abhorrent. To be fair, I've never tested this theory – and, honestly, don't have much enthusiasm for doing so – so I could well be completely mistaken. However, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that, if game is widely played in ways that are contrary to its actual rules, one cannot then blame those rules for being terrible or poorly designed. That's not to say that Monopoly is, in fact, a good game, only that, to make that claim, would have to play the game as written and vanishingly few people do.

Naturally, all of the foregoing is a prelude to several issues near and dear to my heart, namely, the nexus of game design, house rules, and "everybody knows" interpretations of the rules as written. Squabbling about these matters is a time honored tradition of the hobby, one that's been going on since its inception (and, arguably, contributed to its birth in the first place). I don't see these squabbles as fruitless and in fact believe they're a good source of insight into both game design and what we, as individuals, want out of a game. 

They're also an entry into explorations of the "culture" that inevitably grows up around any communal human activity. Over the years, I've played RPGs with many people, some of whose early experiences are similar to my own and others whose experiences are not. For instance, some, like me, were inducted into the hobby by a mentor, while others taught themselves to play simply by reading a rulebook. That seemingly small difference has far-reaching consequences and I find those fascinating. Then there are regional differences in style and content, as well as temporal ones and probably many more besides, all of which explain why it is that gamers don't always understand one another, despite ostensibly playing the same games (I find myself reminded of the apocryphal Shaw quote about Americans and Englishmen being divided by a common language).