[On December 1, 1948, a Connecticut inventor named James Brunot copyrighted a new board game called Scrabble. Like many great games Scrabble has endured and grown ever since, so for the 75th anniversary of that pivotal moment I’ll AmericanStudy it and a handful of other board games. I’d love your thoughts on these, others, and board games over for a competitive yet collaborative crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On point,
counterpoint, and counter-counterpoint when it comes to a complex game of capitalism.
I think it’s
become relatively common knowledge that the board game which evolved into
Monopoly was originally invented to be critical of that capitalist concept. But
it still bears repeating just how fully and intentionally that was the case: Elizabeth
“Lizzie” Magie (1866-1948), a radical feminist author and activist who
subscribed to Henry
George’s progressive and anti-monopolist economic theories, invented The Landlord’s Game in 1904 and began
self-publishing copies in 1906 in order to educate the public on the dangers of
monopolies. To that point (but perhaps also unintentionally complicating it, as
we will see), Magie
included two sets of rules with that original version of the game: a
monopolist set that rewarded players for bankrupting their opponents; and an
anti-monopolist set which rewarded each player when all players did well. I’ll
dedicate a post later in the week to collaborative games, but it’s pretty interesting
to think that Monopoly had the potential to be part of that genre.
That it
did not evolve that way is due largely to a moment and person which together
embody the worst kind of the capitalism that Magie and her game critiqued. The
Landlord’s Game never achieved huge success but remained in distribution for
the rest of Magie’s life, and at a 1932 dinner party in Philadelphia an
unemployed man (as with the invention of Scrabble yesterday, this was the
Depression era) named Charles Darrow
played the game with a few friends. Darrow loved the game, took a written copy
of the rules home with him that night, and apparently decided to start
distributing it (with some changes to the rules and board, but with the core
concepts the same) as his own invention under the name Monopoly. It was from
Darrow that Parker
Brothers originally bought the rights to the game in 1935, although to
their credit when they learned about Magie’s version they also bought the
rights to her patent. But while Parker Brothers may have done the right thing,
Darrow clearly learned precisely the wrong lesson from The Landlord’s Game, and
then some—he didn’t even purchase the property from which he would seek to make
his fortune, but simply stole it from its rightful owner. (That’s my interpretation
of a
somewhat ambiguous situation, at least.)
In any
case, after Parker Brothers acquired the game and (with the help of cartoonist
F.O. Alexander) significantly developed the board and look, Monopoly took
off and became the iconic board game it has remained ever since. One
particularly interesting moment in that trajectory, and one that definitely
relates to Magie’s original vision, took place in 1973, when San Francisco
State University Economics Professor
Ralph Anspach (1926-2022) published his own competing game entitled Anti-Monopoly
(alternately known as Bust the Trust). Parker Brothers successfully sued for
trademark infringement, but Anspach
won on appeal, with the court ruling that monopoly was too generic of a
concept to be trademarked; Anspach was able to keep producing his game for the
rest of his life, even after a new 1984 law generally
protected trademarks more rigorously. I won’t pretend to know the ins and outs
of copyright law, past or present, but I will say that a game called
Anti-Monopoly challenging Monopoly’s hold on the market is about as
pitch-perfect for the origin story and inventor of this board game as any
detail could get.
Next board
game tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other games you’d highlight for the weekend post?
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