We’ve all played it, most of us hate it, and yet Monopoly is usually the first thing we think of when someone says ‘board games.’ A relatively tactic-less game –Monopoly is the ultimate Capitalist hyperbole – every player enters the game on equal footing, but circumstances develop which leads to the wealth of one player at the expense of financial ruin for the rest.
Often the outcome of the game depends on being able to buy up key properties during the first few laps around GO. An early trip to jail can leave you stranded trying to roll doubles while your friends buy up all the property around you. Later in the game you can smugly sit in jail and collect your monopomonies with impunity while your friends traverse the fiscally hazardous monopoly landscape. Given the involvement of our big Wall Street bankers in the recent recession, I thought I would spend some time analyzing crime and capitalism in Monopoly.
The official Monopoly rules regarding jail are below:
In Monopoly, there is no agency in crime. A player has to go to jail if they land on a space marked “go to jail,” draws a random card marked “go to jail,” or rolls an apparently illegal combination of numbers. Players can’t make a conscious decision to do something illegal – they just play the game like everyone else is and hope their behavior isn’t randomly determined to be a crime.
“Even though you are in Jail, you may buy and sell property, buy and sell houses and hotels and collect rents.”
This sounds like a completely unbiased rule right? Except that later in the game the jailhouse becomes a sanctuary – a free hotel. Wealthy players can sit in jail and milk that rent moneys whilst avoiding landing on a hotelled up Park Place.
In the world that Monopoly attempts to portray, criminals are victims of the system – a system of poorly defined laws in which people either have no control over their illegal behaviors, or illegality is so loosely monitored and regulated that it becomes the norm. Given the chance, players can manipulate this sense of legality to ensure their own financial security, while others can be negatively impacted by a jail sentence for the rest of their monopolives.
But how do we know which way it will go?
Well, how much Monopomonies do you got?
The SKEPTICAL GAMER 