Here is the crux of the article, beginning with the father of the inventor, Elizabeth Magie:
"Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity of land ownership that bound these two forces – poverty and progress – together. So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to buy land, he called on the state to tax it. On what grounds? Because much of land’s value comes not from what is built on the plot but from nature’s gift of water or minerals that might lie beneath its surface, or from the communally created value of its surroundings: nearby roads and railways; a thriving economy, a safe neighbourhood; good local schools and hospitals. And he argued that the tax receipts should be invested on behalf of all.
Determined to prove the merit of George’s proposal, Magie invented and in 1904 patented what she called the Landlord’s Game. Laid out on the board as a circuit (which was a novelty at the time), it was populated with streets and landmarks for sale. The key innovation of her game, however, lay in the two sets of rules that she wrote for playing it.
Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there – and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner (sound a little familiar?)"
There have been many games that purport to demonstrate that free markets are a failure, all of them had to rig the rules to make that happen.
Monopoly, for example, is a zero sum game. There is no possibility of increasing the supply nor making more efficient use of existing supply. Win-win solutions are pretty much impossible.
“Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it.”
This seems like an arbitrary cut-off point. How do we know that if the game were to continue the result wouldn’t end up being the same, with one player still controlling a monopoly of all the properties?
I believe that there has always been land taxes here in the US. I'd love for the US to break up some of these huge overpowering companies today though.
Monopoly teaches people a view of economics being a zero-sum game and too many people learn the wrong lessons from it. Real life isn't a zero-sum game.
as the article points out the game was in particular desgigned to show the economic effects of private land rent, hence the original title 'the landlord's game', and that is in fact a zero sum game as they aren't making any more of it.
And in particular on tech websites like these people vastly overstate how non 'zero-sum' economic activity actually is mostly because tech has been in a bubble of highly anomalous growth. (A lot of it ironically arguably not real productivity growth but rent collection through platforms and market power).
In many ways the tech startups of today look more like digital landlords than innovators whose disruption is primarily taking over the market from a host of competitors rather than improving process efficiency. If we were living in Fordist times and the assembly line and other innovations delivered 6-7% growth annually, then we could rave on about non-zero sum economies. Total factor productivity growth these days is relatively non-existent.
From a purely monetary point of view at a global level, transactions are indeed a positive sum. But the "positive" value of transactions, globally, is remarkably small - it's effectively inflation minus population growth (between 1 and 3% yearly).
So, if your money is growing more than this 3%, someone else is losing money so you can make it.
EDIT: I figured this would be unpopular - please feel free to correct me, to point out where the money on, for example, 6% returns on investments come from if not from someone else.
I'm not sure about the non-zero sum economics models anymore. Physics says that the planet is finite, so much of the "wealth creation" is little more than changes in perceived valuation. And while a lot of people have a lot more $ and things like iphones, most people have less land, more polluted oceans, and many other things that may turn out to be move valuable in the long run than those iphones.
On the land thing, one of my grandfathers had close to 500 acres of farmland. Today I could barely pay the taxes on that land if it was still in the family. But its not, instead there are a couple dozen families living on smaller 20 acre plots.
Monopoly is about land, and monopoly teaches people a correct view of land: land is a zero-sum game.
It is striking how much real-life has mirrored monopoly: when the game starts and there is plenty of land to go around, there are no problems. After a while, the land runs out, and the wealthy hoard the land and charge the others for its use. The wealthy then get wealthier and the poor get poorer.
We are now in the later stages of the real-life monopoly match.
Wealth may not be zero-sum within the narrow artificial scope of "money", but power is zero sum. Wealth viewed as money is a sneaky neaningless distraction. Wealth viewed outside of power is meaningless.
Lets say bob and alice are in a room. They both have a nerf gun. Now bob gets a machine gun and alice gets another nerf gun. So the "wealth" in the room increased. But the power in the room didn't increase. It shifted from 50/50 between bob and alice to 100/0.
When you view wealth superficially, it's not zero sum. When you view wealth seriously, it's zero sum.
The value of wealth isn't the pile of worthless money. The value of wealth is the power it projects over other human beings.
If everyone on earth died but jeff bezos, his wealth would be meaningless. What does $130 billion mean when only he's around? It means nothing because it can't be converted to power in a world with 1 person.
I'd argue that in terms of land/housing market, in an established, multi-centuries contiguous (ie not disrupted by revolution, nationalization, large redistribution) urbanized area it becomes a zero-sum game and hence all the problems that entails.
IMO this is more or less the inevitable result of long surviving land ownership rights. You can see this in the correlation between home ownership rates and when was the last time land was nationalized/redistributed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_owne...
What do the top 10 countries have in common: they were communist dictatorships in the previous century were all land was taken and managed by the state.
What do the bottom 10 countries have in common: very long standing property rights with no redistribution in the last few centuries.
Not saying that what we need is nationalization/revolution but simply pointing out statistics and trends which may help inform people in order to counter their effects.
I love how everyone who wins at monopoly acts like a right arse to the other people and it turns out it was just rolls of the dice that decided if they won... I certainly always feel like I deserve to have won.
Often that is how things happen in the real world. When people win they look back and attribute it purely to their own hard work. Some act like assholes, too. So at least in that respect it is a good model :-)
Believe it or not there is an element of strategy in Monopoly (or can be, if you take the time to learn it). Not all spaces are landed on equally, and not all properties have the same return on investment.
Playing with common house rules tends to remove elements of strategy.
I've always used Monopoly as a good way to explain inflation.
If you play by the stated rules in the game, any property landed on goes up for auction to all players if the current player doesn't want to purchase it. Imagine what happens to the purchase price of properties in this scenario if every player started the game with 10 times more money...
I've always used it as a business negotiations lesson.
The winner of the game is often the person who makes the most deals to secure the most property monopolies.
The KEY lesson is that you can trade "down" as the loser of every single deal, and yet still win by virtue of the fact that you've made the MOST deals.
Making deals captures untapped value. There's actually a LOT more strategy to Monopoly than the people in this thread realize.
Further, The introduction of hotels to the game was not intended initially. Adding hotels causes more housing to appear, which is antithetical to the point of housing shortages
Calling Georgism "common ownership of land" is seriously misleading. A tax is not ownership, no matter how many times the neo-feudal "vulgar libertarians" (as Georgists and geolibertarians call them) try to establish the trope via mere repetition.
"Georgism" is actually a really great idea but the name is terrible. I remember I tried to discuss it with someone once and they chuckled when I said the word "Georgism". They couldn't actually listen to my argument.
I think names are very important. For example, I find it ingenious that the country "French Guyana" has the word "French" in it and that there is another country in South America already called "Guyana"; it's probably a key reason why "French Guyana" is still part of France; they literally have no identity without France; they'd have to invent and popularize a new word first and that's very difficult to do.
And I always thought we were missing something because players would always end up bickering and hating the experience (except the winner, and it brought out the worst in them).
The board game Cashflow is closer to reality than Monopoly, especially the 202 version, which provides for paper assets options, as well as loss of investment properties to acts of nature. A good way to learn basic investment evaluation using play money.
Think of the WWW as a Monopoly board. Except unlike the board game the first move involves no roll of the dice. The class of players known as users always start the game on the same certain properties, owned by a small set of players known as Google, Amazon, etc. Microsoft used to have a marketing slogan to address the growing presence of the internet: "Where do you want to go today?" The question we should have is, "Why does Microsoft need to know?" Why do these companies need to know what we are going to do next? In the WWW monopoly a small set of players collect rent from nearly every user and strive to know every users' next move. It may be through the control of websites or devices, or both. As they say, the game is rigged.
How else should land be distributed if not via free market capitalism? Land is a scarce resource that people want. Either some person/corporation owns it or the government does. Its easy to see models where the government owns all the property as this exists in many places around the world such as Nigeria, China, and North Korea.
The best policy is a balance between total government control and total private control. An individual can own land, but the government can tax it, or allow easements, etc. Governments can own land and allow individuals on it. So it doesn't have to be one or the other.
The ideas of Henry George [0] address this, without resorting to "Tragedy of the Commons" solutions of collective ownership. The short answer is a Land Value Tax [1], based only on "ground rent" (the usage value combined with the value of proximity to community), as opposed to taxing improvements, as most property taxes do currently.
The rough theory is that the tax should be proportional to the unearned "rent-seeking" profits that derive indirectly from the surrounding community; moreover, a higher tax on ground rent disincentivizes pure speculation [2], while removing the disincentive of value-creation/development baked into our property taxes now. And unlike communist policies, this system would preserve the distributed intelligence of markets; there are some libertarian economists who favor the idea, the most notable of whom was Milton Friedman, who called LVT "the least worst tax".
In some sense, it could be seen as closer to a voluntarist system that most forms of government: one essentially pays the surrounding community to compensate them for their violent exclusion from a portion of nature. This video articulates the idea fairly well in plain language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I
>This game may look familiar, but don't be fooled – it's a real estate trading game with an exciting twist! Players choose free enterprise or monopoly, then play under different rules. Competitors charge fair market value while monopolists take over whole neighborhoods and jack up rents. In real life, monopolists have an unfair advantage. But in Anti-Monopoly, competitors have a fair shot at coming out on top!
>Anti-Monopoly is a board game made by San Francisco State University Professor Ralph Anspach in response to Monopoly.
>Background and history
>Anspach created Anti-Monopoly in part as a response to the lessons taught by the mainstream game, which he believed created the impression that monopolies were something desirable. His intent was to demonstrate how harmful monopolies could be to a free-enterprise system, and how antitrust laws work to curtail them in the real world.
>The game was originally to be produced in 1973 as Bust the Trust, but the title was changed to Anti-Monopoly. It has seen multiple printings and revisions since 1973. In 1984, a new version appeared as Anti-Monopoly II; this version was updated and re-released in 2005 without the numerical designation. The game is currently still in print, and is produced and distributed worldwide by University Games.
>Trademark lawsuit
>See also: History of the board game Monopoly (Anti-Monopoly, Inc. vs. General Mills Fun Group)
>In 1974, Parker Brothers sued Anspach over the use of the "Monopoly" name, claiming trademark infringement. While preparing his legal defense, Anspach became aware of Monopoly's history prior to Charles Darrow's sale of the game to Parker in 1935, and how it had evolved from Elizabeth Magie's original Landlord's Game into the version Darrow appropriated. Anspach based his defense on the grounds that the game itself existed in effectively the public domain before Parker purchased it, and therefore Parker's trademark claim on it should be nullified. The case dragged on for ten years,[1] with numerous appeals and overturned judicial verdicts, until Anspach and Parker ultimately reached a settlement, permitting him to continue using the name Anti-Monopoly and distributing the game.[2]
>For a time during the dispute, the game was marketed as simply "Anti."
How a Fight Over a Board Game Monopolized an Economist's Life
Micropoly is the Microsoft Monopoly Game! It's a parody of Microsoft that's fun to play, a free board game based the rules of Anti-Monopoly, and a political statement protected under the First Amendment.
This web site exists to freely distribute the full set of graphics and rules for Micropoly, in the "open source" spirit of the original folk game monopoly invented by an Atlantic City Quaker woman.
You are encouraged to download the graphics, print out copies of the game set for yourself and friends, and have fun playing Micropoly!
The Goals of the Micropoly Project:
To make a political statement about the effect of Microsoft's monopoly on the economy.
To raise awareness of the original folk game monopoly invented by Quakers and illegitimately patented and pirated by Parker Brothers.
To promote the alternative Anti-Monopoly rules, invented by Ralph Anspach in 1973, that teach why monopolies are bad.
To distribute the graphics and rules of Micropoly as a free "open source" game, true to the spirit of the Quaker who originally invented monopoly.
To develop a computerized version of monopoly, that can be customized with any local theme and artwork, and played over the Internet.
To imitate life imitating art imitating life imitating art, and so forth.
Micropoly synergistically illustrates several important points, by drawing parallels between the time of the Great Depression and the end of the Twentieth Century:
Monopolies are bad, and competition is good.
The original rules of monopoly require everyone to play as a monopolist. That's why companies like Microsoft and Parker Brothers like the lesson it teaches: being a monopolist is good, and in order to win you have to make the biggest monopoly. But the rules of Anti-Monopoly divide players into monopolists versus competitors, resulting in a dynamic, unpredictable, more interesting game. Competition has the same benefits in real life!
The "open source" philosophy has been around a long time before computers.
The Atlantic City Quaker woman who invented the original board game spread it around to her friends for free. She would invite people over to play, and they loved the game, so they made their own copies with crayons on oil cloth. This free folk game spread around the country and was played by many people, long before Parker Brothers knowingly decided pirated it. Today we have computer networks, desktop publishing, color printers, and the "open source" model of software development, so it is much easier to spread the free Micropoly game all over the world.
Big companies abuse the patent and legal systems to pirate and exploit other peoples original ideas.
Parker Brothers pirated monopoly from its original inventors, illegitimately patented an "open source" folk game, perpetrated an extremely successful propaganda campaign to convince the world that Monopoly(TM) was invented by Charles B Darrow, and aggressively drove other companies out of business with frivolous lawsuits.
They waged a nasty 10 year legal assault on Ralph Anspach, inventor of the "Anti-Monopoly" game, ruining his successful game company, even though his case finally made it to the Supreme Court and won!
As a result of his hard fought victory, the true story of Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle has been published for all to read, and it's safe to call a game "anything-opoly".
We are very grateful that he never gave up, and won in spite of Parker Brothers' dirty tricks. We thank him, because he made it possible for us to publish Micropoly, and generously offered to let us use his superior Anti-Monopoly rules, which so perfectly illustrate the point of Micropoly.
The similarities in the monopolistic behaviors of Parker Brothers and Microsoft should be obvious.
Openopoly
The software used to produce Micropoly will be freely distributed, as well as the Micropoly content, to serve as an example of how to make your own personalized monopoly game.
We are developing a free "Openopoly" architecture based on XML, whose purpose is to automate the production of custom monopoly games, both printed board games and multi-player online computer games.
Micropoly will be the first example of such a custom game, so anyone will be able to drop in their own text and graphics, turn the crank, and produce a version of monopoly localized for their own city, university, company, church, sports team, or favorite political cause.
Wow, I guess that was a revelation and something worth appreciating: the idea that if we just take a little bit of everyone's wealth and share it with the Commonwealth, then there can be a lot more wealth for all.
If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more?
If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and the problem will solve itself.
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|6 years ago|reply
"Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity of land ownership that bound these two forces – poverty and progress – together. So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to buy land, he called on the state to tax it. On what grounds? Because much of land’s value comes not from what is built on the plot but from nature’s gift of water or minerals that might lie beneath its surface, or from the communally created value of its surroundings: nearby roads and railways; a thriving economy, a safe neighbourhood; good local schools and hospitals. And he argued that the tax receipts should be invested on behalf of all.
Determined to prove the merit of George’s proposal, Magie invented and in 1904 patented what she called the Landlord’s Game. Laid out on the board as a circuit (which was a novelty at the time), it was populated with streets and landmarks for sale. The key innovation of her game, however, lay in the two sets of rules that she wrote for playing it.
Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there – and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner (sound a little familiar?)"
[+] [-] WalterBright|6 years ago|reply
Monopoly, for example, is a zero sum game. There is no possibility of increasing the supply nor making more efficient use of existing supply. Win-win solutions are pretty much impossible.
[+] [-] chuniverse|6 years ago|reply
This seems like an arbitrary cut-off point. How do we know that if the game were to continue the result wouldn’t end up being the same, with one player still controlling a monopoly of all the properties?
[+] [-] vondur|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chungy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|6 years ago|reply
And in particular on tech websites like these people vastly overstate how non 'zero-sum' economic activity actually is mostly because tech has been in a bubble of highly anomalous growth. (A lot of it ironically arguably not real productivity growth but rent collection through platforms and market power).
In many ways the tech startups of today look more like digital landlords than innovators whose disruption is primarily taking over the market from a host of competitors rather than improving process efficiency. If we were living in Fordist times and the assembly line and other innovations delivered 6-7% growth annually, then we could rave on about non-zero sum economies. Total factor productivity growth these days is relatively non-existent.
[+] [-] pyrale|6 years ago|reply
In fact, the money owned by players inflates as the game goes on.
[+] [-] falcolas|6 years ago|reply
So, if your money is growing more than this 3%, someone else is losing money so you can make it.
EDIT: I figured this would be unpopular - please feel free to correct me, to point out where the money on, for example, 6% returns on investments come from if not from someone else.
[+] [-] StillBored|6 years ago|reply
On the land thing, one of my grandfathers had close to 500 acres of farmland. Today I could barely pay the taxes on that land if it was still in the family. But its not, instead there are a couple dozen families living on smaller 20 acre plots.
[+] [-] mytherin|6 years ago|reply
It is striking how much real-life has mirrored monopoly: when the game starts and there is plenty of land to go around, there are no problems. After a while, the land runs out, and the wealthy hoard the land and charge the others for its use. The wealthy then get wealthier and the poor get poorer.
We are now in the later stages of the real-life monopoly match.
[+] [-] dntbnmpls|6 years ago|reply
Wealth may not be zero-sum within the narrow artificial scope of "money", but power is zero sum. Wealth viewed as money is a sneaky neaningless distraction. Wealth viewed outside of power is meaningless.
Lets say bob and alice are in a room. They both have a nerf gun. Now bob gets a machine gun and alice gets another nerf gun. So the "wealth" in the room increased. But the power in the room didn't increase. It shifted from 50/50 between bob and alice to 100/0.
When you view wealth superficially, it's not zero sum. When you view wealth seriously, it's zero sum.
The value of wealth isn't the pile of worthless money. The value of wealth is the power it projects over other human beings.
If everyone on earth died but jeff bezos, his wealth would be meaningless. What does $130 billion mean when only he's around? It means nothing because it can't be converted to power in a world with 1 person.
[+] [-] standardUser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d1zzy|6 years ago|reply
IMO this is more or less the inevitable result of long surviving land ownership rights. You can see this in the correlation between home ownership rates and when was the last time land was nationalized/redistributed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_owne...
What do the top 10 countries have in common: they were communist dictatorships in the previous century were all land was taken and managed by the state.
What do the bottom 10 countries have in common: very long standing property rights with no redistribution in the last few centuries.
Not saying that what we need is nationalization/revolution but simply pointing out statistics and trends which may help inform people in order to counter their effects.
[+] [-] grabbalacious|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praptak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mewpmewp2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikestew|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] travisoneill1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|6 years ago|reply
Often that is how things happen in the real world. When people win they look back and attribute it purely to their own hard work. Some act like assholes, too. So at least in that respect it is a good model :-)
[+] [-] nck4222|6 years ago|reply
Playing with common house rules tends to remove elements of strategy.
[+] [-] koheripbal|6 years ago|reply
The way to win monopoly is in trading cards to gain monopolies. The winner is almost always the person who makes the most deals.
A player can win the game simple by making the most deals with other players, even if they are a loser in every single one of those deals.
It's far more a lesson on negotiations and trading - ie. business lessons, not capitalism lessons.
[+] [-] mdszy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|6 years ago|reply
That's how monopoly works in real life.
(Thinking about it, I guess demonstrating this is the function of the jail in the game).
[+] [-] howmayiannoyyou|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuesnayJr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsiegel2275|6 years ago|reply
If you play by the stated rules in the game, any property landed on goes up for auction to all players if the current player doesn't want to purchase it. Imagine what happens to the purchase price of properties in this scenario if every player started the game with 10 times more money...
[+] [-] koheripbal|6 years ago|reply
The winner of the game is often the person who makes the most deals to secure the most property monopolies.
The KEY lesson is that you can trade "down" as the loser of every single deal, and yet still win by virtue of the fact that you've made the MOST deals.
Making deals captures untapped value. There's actually a LOT more strategy to Monopoly than the people in this thread realize.
[+] [-] neilparikh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayhhakdl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiliantics|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
[+] [-] notacoward|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptica|6 years ago|reply
I think names are very important. For example, I find it ingenious that the country "French Guyana" has the word "French" in it and that there is another country in South America already called "Guyana"; it's probably a key reason why "French Guyana" is still part of France; they literally have no identity without France; they'd have to invent and popularize a new word first and that's very difficult to do.
[+] [-] joshspankit|6 years ago|reply
And I always thought we were missing something because players would always end up bickering and hating the experience (except the winner, and it brought out the worst in them).
Now I see that was actually the core lesson.
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819622
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14889109
[+] [-] raintrees|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3xblah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iso1210|6 years ago|reply
Amazon, Google, Facebook moved in and bought almost all the properties.
Apple are doing very well from owning the purples.
[+] [-] dzhiurgis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solotronics|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] francisofascii|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukifer|6 years ago|reply
The rough theory is that the tax should be proportional to the unearned "rent-seeking" profits that derive indirectly from the surrounding community; moreover, a higher tax on ground rent disincentivizes pure speculation [2], while removing the disincentive of value-creation/development baked into our property taxes now. And unlike communist policies, this system would preserve the distributed intelligence of markets; there are some libertarian economists who favor the idea, the most notable of whom was Milton Friedman, who called LVT "the least worst tax".
In some sense, it could be seen as closer to a voluntarist system that most forms of government: one essentially pays the surrounding community to compensate them for their violent exclusion from a portion of nature. This video articulates the idea fairly well in plain language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
[1] http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_but_...
[+] [-] DonHopkins|6 years ago|reply
http://www.antimonopoly.com/
>Anti-Monopoly – a board game with a twist
>This game may look familiar, but don't be fooled – it's a real estate trading game with an exciting twist! Players choose free enterprise or monopoly, then play under different rules. Competitors charge fair market value while monopolists take over whole neighborhoods and jack up rents. In real life, monopolists have an unfair advantage. But in Anti-Monopoly, competitors have a fair shot at coming out on top!
Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle
https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Monopoly-Swindle/dp/09...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Anspach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monopoly
>Anti-Monopoly is a board game made by San Francisco State University Professor Ralph Anspach in response to Monopoly.
>Background and history
>Anspach created Anti-Monopoly in part as a response to the lessons taught by the mainstream game, which he believed created the impression that monopolies were something desirable. His intent was to demonstrate how harmful monopolies could be to a free-enterprise system, and how antitrust laws work to curtail them in the real world.
>The game was originally to be produced in 1973 as Bust the Trust, but the title was changed to Anti-Monopoly. It has seen multiple printings and revisions since 1973. In 1984, a new version appeared as Anti-Monopoly II; this version was updated and re-released in 2005 without the numerical designation. The game is currently still in print, and is produced and distributed worldwide by University Games.
>Trademark lawsuit
>See also: History of the board game Monopoly (Anti-Monopoly, Inc. vs. General Mills Fun Group)
>In 1974, Parker Brothers sued Anspach over the use of the "Monopoly" name, claiming trademark infringement. While preparing his legal defense, Anspach became aware of Monopoly's history prior to Charles Darrow's sale of the game to Parker in 1935, and how it had evolved from Elizabeth Magie's original Landlord's Game into the version Darrow appropriated. Anspach based his defense on the grounds that the game itself existed in effectively the public domain before Parker purchased it, and therefore Parker's trademark claim on it should be nullified. The case dragged on for ten years,[1] with numerous appeals and overturned judicial verdicts, until Anspach and Parker ultimately reached a settlement, permitting him to continue using the name Anti-Monopoly and distributing the game.[2]
>For a time during the dispute, the game was marketed as simply "Anti."
How a Fight Over a Board Game Monopolized an Economist's Life
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125599860004295449?mod=rss_US...
The Story of Class Struggle, America's Most Popular Marxist Board Game
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58318/story-class-strugg...
[+] [-] DonHopkins|6 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20001018211021/http://www.microp...
Here's the board:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010615183227/http://www.microp...
And this is the XML file that defined the board, properties, utilities, cards, etc, which were generated by a Perl script and some PostScript:
https://donhopkins.com/home/micropoly
MicropolyThe Microsoft Monopoly Game
Micropoly is the Microsoft Monopoly Game! It's a parody of Microsoft that's fun to play, a free board game based the rules of Anti-Monopoly, and a political statement protected under the First Amendment.
This web site exists to freely distribute the full set of graphics and rules for Micropoly, in the "open source" spirit of the original folk game monopoly invented by an Atlantic City Quaker woman.
You are encouraged to download the graphics, print out copies of the game set for yourself and friends, and have fun playing Micropoly!
The Goals of the Micropoly Project:
To make a political statement about the effect of Microsoft's monopoly on the economy.
To raise awareness of the original folk game monopoly invented by Quakers and illegitimately patented and pirated by Parker Brothers.
To promote the alternative Anti-Monopoly rules, invented by Ralph Anspach in 1973, that teach why monopolies are bad.
To distribute the graphics and rules of Micropoly as a free "open source" game, true to the spirit of the Quaker who originally invented monopoly.
To develop a computerized version of monopoly, that can be customized with any local theme and artwork, and played over the Internet.
To imitate life imitating art imitating life imitating art, and so forth.
Micropoly synergistically illustrates several important points, by drawing parallels between the time of the Great Depression and the end of the Twentieth Century:
Monopolies are bad, and competition is good.
The original rules of monopoly require everyone to play as a monopolist. That's why companies like Microsoft and Parker Brothers like the lesson it teaches: being a monopolist is good, and in order to win you have to make the biggest monopoly. But the rules of Anti-Monopoly divide players into monopolists versus competitors, resulting in a dynamic, unpredictable, more interesting game. Competition has the same benefits in real life!
The "open source" philosophy has been around a long time before computers.
The Atlantic City Quaker woman who invented the original board game spread it around to her friends for free. She would invite people over to play, and they loved the game, so they made their own copies with crayons on oil cloth. This free folk game spread around the country and was played by many people, long before Parker Brothers knowingly decided pirated it. Today we have computer networks, desktop publishing, color printers, and the "open source" model of software development, so it is much easier to spread the free Micropoly game all over the world.
Big companies abuse the patent and legal systems to pirate and exploit other peoples original ideas.
Parker Brothers pirated monopoly from its original inventors, illegitimately patented an "open source" folk game, perpetrated an extremely successful propaganda campaign to convince the world that Monopoly(TM) was invented by Charles B Darrow, and aggressively drove other companies out of business with frivolous lawsuits.
They waged a nasty 10 year legal assault on Ralph Anspach, inventor of the "Anti-Monopoly" game, ruining his successful game company, even though his case finally made it to the Supreme Court and won!
As a result of his hard fought victory, the true story of Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle has been published for all to read, and it's safe to call a game "anything-opoly".
We are very grateful that he never gave up, and won in spite of Parker Brothers' dirty tricks. We thank him, because he made it possible for us to publish Micropoly, and generously offered to let us use his superior Anti-Monopoly rules, which so perfectly illustrate the point of Micropoly.
The similarities in the monopolistic behaviors of Parker Brothers and Microsoft should be obvious.
Openopoly
The software used to produce Micropoly will be freely distributed, as well as the Micropoly content, to serve as an example of how to make your own personalized monopoly game.
We are developing a free "Openopoly" architecture based on XML, whose purpose is to automate the production of custom monopoly games, both printed board games and multi-player online computer games.
Micropoly will be the first example of such a custom game, so anyone will be able to drop in their own text and graphics, turn the crank, and produce a version of monopoly localized for their own city, university, company, church, sports team, or favorite political cause.
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[+] [-] dr_dshiv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GreenJelloShot|6 years ago|reply
If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and the problem will solve itself.
[+] [-] blackflame7000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] planetzero|6 years ago|reply
The outcome is still the same: a stalled industry, little to no innovation, and many times, high prices.
[+] [-] Jonahgay|6 years ago|reply
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