The game rewards you if you’re ruthless, compete savagely, think only about yourself and win at all costs. Sounds like Mumbai today, doesn’t it?
Monopoly has an incentive structure that leaves no room for mercy or sharing — you either dominate or lose. illustration by C Y Gopinath using Ai
One of life’s earth-shaking questions when we were boys was about how much people knew about countries other than theirs. As Indians, we were champions of trivia and knew all sorts of things about places we had never visited outside India. I could hold forth about the Empire State Building, Manhattan, London’s Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden as though I lived next door.
But would a Britisher know where Dhobi Ghat, Khotachiwadi, and Dombivli were?
We knew the answer, of course. White people could not even pronounce our long and winding names, much less remember them, unless they were Anglicised out of shape. How did we know so much about them? British authors such as PG Wodehouse helped introduce us to British culture, mores, and topography; movies like My Fair Lady did their bit.
But much more than that, it was a dice-based board game that just about everybody played. Called Monopoly, it taught us how to buy property, build houses, charge rent, and become obscenely rich. Players received start-up money for buying and selling prime real estate. We could scoop up entire London localities and streets like Piccadilly, Euston, Charing Cross, Oxford Street, and Savile Row.
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An Indian version was released soon and we found ourselves picking up Charni Road, Churchgate, Byculla, Colaba, Marine Lines, Dadar, Sion, and so on.
But Monopoly subtly taught us something else: capitalism, and the power of money. Generations of children learned how to acquire property, fill it with condos and hotels, and charge fellow players obscene rents. The game’s goal was ludicrously simple: accumulate as much money and property as possible, monopolise the market and bankrupt everyone else. Be ruthless, compete savagely, think only about yourself and win at all costs.
Sounds like Mumbai today, doesn’t it?
Monopoly gave us a crash course in unrestrained free-market ideology. It taught us how to stop thinking about people, and focus on money instead. It taught us greed.
Did it? Really? Many people I know are neither very rich nor very greedy, no matter how much they loved Monopoly. I played the game too and I’m as poor as a church mouse. Can a board game really indoctrinate players with a political ideology?
Monopoly’s little-known inventor, an outspoken American rebel called Lizzie Magie, might have gone to jail without passing Go or collecting 200$ if she could see what they have done to her game. When she launched it in 1904, it was called The Landlord’s Game, and its goal was to introduce players to the evils that follow when robber-barons monopolise property and fleece poor people to enrich themselves.
The game did this with two sets of rules. Under the ‘Prosperity’ rules, every player received wealth when someone acquired new property, mirroring a land-value tax that benefits everyone. Everyone won the game collectively when the poorest player doubled their starting money. Under the ‘Monopolist’ rules, the winner was the property owner who bankrupted everyone else.
Magie hoped this would demonstrate the perils of unfettered capitalist land grabs.
The Landlord’s Game was popular and spread informally among left-wing intellectuals and Quaker communities but struggled to go mainstream. It taught important lessons but it just wasn’t as much fun as crushing poor people underfoot while becoming fabulously rich.
In 1935, an unemployed salesman called Charles Darrow left out Magie’s prosperity rules and sold the game to Parker Brothers, calling it Monopoly and passing it off as his own. The game took over the market like a forest fire, spreading its one message: Chase wealth and crush your opponents if you want to come out on top.
Monopoly rewards those who enrich themselves with an incentive structure that leaves no room for mercy or sharing — you either dominate or lose. Social psychologist Paul Piff notes that even in short-term play, Monopoly brings out a streak of ruthless behavior. In ‘rigged’ experiments where one player is given a starting advantage like extra cash or more dice rolls, the “rich” player rapidly becomes more aggressive and less empathetic, gleefully trash-talking his struggling opponent.
They’re playing Monopoly all over Mumbai today, and the rules have not changed. Only this time they don’t need boards. Real estate developers are the wealthiest, most powerful people in the city now, and their money is bending rules, subverting policy, and reshaping the city to their profit. Everything is up for grabs. Anyone who gets in the way is in for a harrowing time.
As in the board game, a single individual can buy up entire localities like Kalina or Kurla, and construct on it, charging exorbitant prices and fleecing those who buy or rent from him. A thriving community like Dharavi can be bought up by one man and razed to the ground while its poorest occupants either stuffed into a single tall building (provided they meet certain ‘criteria’) or separated from their families and exiled to distant salt pans.
America’s legendary real estate investor Warren Buffett used to play Monopoly as a boy. His younger sister Bertie Buffett Elliot, who played with him, says she always lost but Warren was intensely competitive. “He won everything, every time.”
He still does.
You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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