Prosperity, Monopoly, Misogyny, Hypocrisy

Last week I changed my thesis in order to be able to explore subjects and practices that I have always been passionate about but have never found an excuse to pursue in an academic context. My project explores 'game as argument' and the potential of the video game as a medium in a neo-print age. At the core of this project is the attempt to create a proof of theory, a game that delivers an argument in a  fundamentally different but equally effective way than a printed text. Then last week I found out that a Maryland woman beat me to the punch over a hundred years ago. 

 'Lizzie' Magie, Single-Taxer and Hardcore Gamer
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"Lizzie" Elizabeth Magie was a passionate feminist, an economic activist, inventor, actress, and writer who promoted the Single-Tax theory also known as Georgism by inventing what some consider America's most popular board game, Monopoly.

She didn't just want people to have fun though. The game, called Prosperity or The Land Renter's Game at the time, demonstrated two different economic systems. The first version, the rules of which we would be completely unfamiliar with today, resulted in prosperity as the players would practice the core tenets of Georgism: every player would benefit from the value of land as rent was paid. In other words under the prosperity model all players would gain money as each player progressed because rent was redistributed among the group rather than being awarded to the land holder. The game was 'won' when the player with the least money had twice as much as he or she started with at the beginning of the game. The alternative 'monopoly' set of rules is much closer to the game we know today where each player attempts to acquire monopolies on properties,railroads, and utilities in order to force his or her fellow magnates into bankruptcy.

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At first this game was hugely popular and people made their own boards, tweaking the games here and there. It became particularly popular among Atlantic-City Quakers who adapted the rules for children so that they were even simpler and named the properties after famous Atlantic City streets.

It was this version of the game that Charles Darrow eventually took and sold by the thousands until he licensed it to Parker Bros, a company that perpetuated that game's creation as a rags-to-riches story: the claimed Darrow dreamed up the game during the depression era and it saved him and Parker Bros.

This was the official history until Monopoly filed a lawsuit against economist and game-designer Ralph Anspach, who created the game Anti-Monopoly as a commentary on the problems of capitalism taken to such extremes as in the game.

In the trial, Anspach's lawyers were ultimately defeated as Parker Bros. purchased the rights from Magie after selling Monopoly for years, but they were still able to uncover the true history of the game and its Georgist origins.

What's fascinating is that this history has so many correlations to the issues we've talked about surrounding DH. First off, it seems highly unlikely that Magie would not have been able to successfully contest Monopoly's patent rather than merely settling for selling her own patent to Parker Bros. for $500 had she been a man. She also wouldn't have been forgotten by the history books. Moreover, the history of the situation seems to suggest that Magie was content to let this game flourish as an educative tool in the form of a folk game. Much like Disney and other corporations, Parker Bros. snatched up this public IP and made it subject to copyright so that others were prevented from doing exactly what the company itself did. The irony of course, is that this happened to a game meant to demonstrate a means of more evenly distributing wealth and that the game was twisted into its most strictly capitalist form in Monopoly.

The good news of all this? I finally found out why we all hate Monopoly.

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