The Meaning Behind Monopoly

All of the avid board game fans out there will probably be able to relate to a recent experience I had. As we dedicated players know, Monopoly games can become brutal; they are a merciless battle of wits, a test of strength, and a harbinger of future success. The values of Monopoly: shrewd money managing, heartless business dealings, and greedy, ceaseless expansion would make Captain Industry extremely proud.

After one particularly long game with Harvard students on a late night, to which I came out on the losing end, I began to see some parallels between the results of the game and events in world history, specifically the Cold War. Was I reading far too much in between the properties? Perhaps. However, the lessons a group of freshmen took away from this elementary board game can be seen as good indicators of how much our society has internalized the Cold War.

As the game progressed, it became clear that some players were accumulating properties more quickly than others. As usual, a dearth of money appeared as those quickest to the monopolies began racking up huge, price-gouged rents. Yet, curiously, well into the game, there was an unusually generous exchange of money between two players, who covered each other as they landed on particularly large rents and were short on money.

Clearly, there was some illegal colluding going on between the players, which they defended as ‘gotcha back-ing’. For the next few turns, these two players began giving each other low-interest loans whenever the other was short on cash, helping each other build up houses and hotels, while giving each other safe havens.

Fortunately, the other players refused to allow such egregious cheating go unanswered. Three other players decided to form a collective team, which they—coincidentally—dubbed the “Communist Team.” In their scenario, the three players pooled all of their money and properties together, openly and willingly paying for all of the debts owed as the three characters made it across the board. This seemed like a good counterweight, one large conglomeration responding to a pair of cold-hearted venture capitalists.

As the Communist Team soon discovered, money was short. Despite holding onto prized properties, they consistently lacked the money to build new hotels, since they had to cover costs of three members, who quite unsurreptitiously landed on well-built properties.

Where was I, you might ask? I controlled my monopoly of the Oranges, a small but profitable area, and stayed neutral. One onlooker even congratulated me for my independence and rooted for me, the incorruptible, fair-playing nation.

Yet, this not-so-subtle allegory of the Cold War turned out to be sadly accurate. My hard-earned money quickly fell to the capitalists who had the most rapid development and the largest cash reserves. I was like the India of the 1960s, attempting to chart my own course yet constantly being pulled in two directions. After I fell, the Communist bloc quickly dissolved too, burdened by the costs and failure to expand, much like Soviet Russia and Red China were by vast populations and energy but a lack of capital. Like the result of the Cold War, the Monopoly capitalists used fearless consumerism and merciless business activity to squash communism and control the board.

The fact that my friends and I recreated the Cold War says something about how much we have internalized and moved on from this history. What was once a vivid and real ideological division is now a trifling conceit for board games. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, two years before most of us were born, and we take for granted that it happened and that the free marketers won. Communism has been reduced to a losing strategy, from the day we can say “free parking” or “go to jail.”

James L. Wu ’13, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Weld Hall.