Monopoly, Burger King & The Forbin Project

Do not pass go – OK, if you say so…

Every once in a while you read a book that has an enormous impact on the way you think. Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power was such a book.

Ostensibly, the book is about the how the European addiction to sugar drove both colonization and the slave trade.  As a kind of afterthought, Mintz appended a chapter at the end about how American families used to have regular sit-down meals as a family, but now eat on the run – and whatever they want to eat, whenever they want to eat.  Mintz hypothesized that it was at the family table that children become acculturated. They did this by learning to share common experiences and try new things.  Said Mintz ‘have it your way means you are never prepared to have it anyone else’s way’.

I thought of Mintz, and latterly of David Carr’s new book, The Shallows, when I read about Hasbro’s new Monopoly game.

Called Monopoly Live, it is a computerized version of the old board game.

Of course, with the plethora of free online games, Hasbro has been suffering. So their answer was to create a kind of hybrid computerized board game where an infrared ‘tower’ oversees the game and keeps track of everything from dice rolls to money to purchases of real estate.  Apparently, the tower also tells you when to buy, when to build and what to do.

Said Dale Crabtree, a finalist in the national Monopoly championships in 2009. “The first thing I said was, ‘The next thing they’ll do away with is the players.’ ”

Hasbro found that young people don’t have the patience to read the rules. Too complicated – and you have to read them. So they set out to create a game which anyone could play from the moment they opened the box.  Apparently they also obviated any chance of making a mistake or having to think about what to do next.

The worst thing they seem to have done away with is the internal bickering and negotiating that families engaged in whcn they played at home after dinner. Trading properties – can you do that? Mortgaging? Selling off your Get Out Of Jail Free Card?  The negotiations and the freelance sub-rules were as much a part of the game – and about learning how to deal with other people, as was the roll of the dice. Perhaps it was more important.

But now we live in a world increasingly driven by computers, and apparently, post Watson and Jeopardy (speaking of games) they are now smarter than we and will be, no doubt, telling us what to do in the future.

Ever see Colossus, The Forbin Project?

Soon Hasbro will be selling that one.