Use your leisure time wisely: the fatal attraction of Monopoly
All in the family
“The problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat” — Lily Tomlin.
Now the above doesn’t reflect well on rats, which are complex and intelligent enough rodents, but it does encapsulate the feeling that playing Monopoly engenders.
Growing up in a working class, second generation British Indian household, Monopoly was a cornerstone in familial leisure time. Reflecting now, it was a way to psychically ‘win’ in a capitalist, unequal and prejudiced society.
During the family games, no quarter was given, but then neither was it asked for. It was understood that capitalism was the only game in town worth playing, and a Social Darwinism was accepted as sacrosanct. During one particularly gruelling game in Lanzarote (yes, we packed a full size Monopoly board! Who needs clothes?), my dad even used the hotel safe (not the room safe, the central hotel safe!) to protect his Monopoly money overnight. I was 10 years old. My sister 7.
A blood, sweat and tears soaked ledger accompanied the ‘fun’ and games for years, detailing all the unwieldy deals that would take place. Derivatives trading is basic arithmetic compared to the deals negotiated at our games.
The Landlord’s Game
Monopoly emerged in its contemporary guise out of a 1903 experiment conducted by American game designer and anti-monopolist, Lizzie Magie. Along with Monopoly, which was created to warn players about the dangers of such an inherently imbalanced socio-economic model, Magie also created The Landlord’s Game. This parallel game was anti-monopolist, and used as an educational tool to promote a quasi-state Socialist way of generating and distributing wealth.
The fate of The Landlord’s Game is that it is one of the rarest twentieth century board games around (thus, ironically, owing to the law of supply and demand, it’s an expensive commodity!). The fate of Monopoly is that it is globally ubiquitous, and a perennial cash cow for multinational conglomerate Hasbro.
Less sure about leisure
I remember the moment I realised the insidiousness of Monopoly, and how it had infiltrated my physiology so deeply: it was 2010 and I was on a date with a staunch Marxist in a wonderfully hippie and Indian themed café (run, of course, by middle class white people) in Stokes Croft, Bristol. The Christmas holidays were approaching, and I mentioned how violent Monopoly ordeals, and unhealthy whiskey consumption were to be the order of the day. A course mate on my MA Ethics and Social Philosophy at Cardiff University, my date was disgusted that I could willingly engage in such a practice in my leisure time (playing Monopoly, not the unhealthy whiskey consumption!). This led to deep reflection, and how in spite of my burgeoning interest in left-wing intellectual history (e.g. Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin), I had blindly continued to engage in leisure pursuits that were incommensurate with my developing socio-political outlook. In the spirit of Charles K. Brightbill’s observation from his 1976 Man and Leisure — A Philosophy of Recreation: “the future will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely,” I set about eschewing outdated habits that engendered an uncritical and rampant capitalist way of seeing the world (watching the nauseating The Apprentice, for one). I never played Monopoly again, until February 2021.
Without Ruth
My partner’s family reside in Horncastle, an old market town in the Lincolnshire Wolds. Unsurprisingly, it’s a Tory stronghold. The family run a local bakery, and are also, unsurprisingly, economically and politically conservative. As part of my father-in-law’s recent birthday celebrations, he proposed a ‘friendly’ game of Monopoly. Having consigned the game to my sin bin over a decade earlier, I was intrigued to see how I would find playing it after years of digesting left-wing theory so radical it would make Tony Benn seem a Tory.
The result was alarming. I passed Go quickly, and proceeded to buy up properties across the board. My partner (who, it must be noted was 8 months pregnant at the time), and mother-in-law suffered hard luck, and made repeat visits to Jail, unable to partake in the spoils of the board proper. It quickly emerged that my sister-in-law and I were front runners to monopolise. Roll by roll, my heart beat faster, and my voice grew louder, sharper, more aggressive; there were even shrieks and exasperated ‘out-of-the-seat’ and into the adjoining room moments. I was determined to beat my sister-in-law (a vulnerable individual owing to an auto-immune disorder), whose tone I considered a ‘bit too cocky’ for my liking.
Whilst I started the game driven by curiosity, soon past Go I became obsessed with buying up the board via reckless spending. This obsession morphed into a need to get one over my sister-in-law, and in doing so, I took all three other players out of the game, quickly. Still supposedly unflappable in my bleedin’ heart Socialist leanings, I repeatedly assisted my partner by waiving fees, and even donating her properties. Critically, however, through this charity (emblematic of the supposed virtues of ‘trickle-down’ neoliberal economics) my partner felt embarrassed, indebted, and alienated. Eventually, I could no longer afford to both assist her and continue my crusade to beat her sister. So, she was sacrificed for my cause. Eventually, I ‘won’ the game. None of us felt positive about what had just taken place. My partner declared how in three years of dating, that she’d never found me more unattractive! My mother-in-law, shell-shocked, remarked on how I was ruthless: “you’re without Ruth!” she cried.
Immediately after the storm, I retreated to an incense filled bedroom, and the solace of a yoga mat to recalibrate. Perhaps I was trying to induce the clarity I felt all those years ago in that Bristol café, reminding myself that I was a kind and fair person, and by no means susceptible to the attraction of the dominant capitalist narrative? What that afternoon in Horncastle reminded me of, however, was the insidious way in which the hyper-capitalist logic of Monopoly had entered my being from a young age. Vigilance was, and remains, necessary in the face of such a brutish way of engaging with others. This Christmas, I think I’ll stick to tiddlywinks.
Sunny Dhillon is a soon-to-be father of a little baby boy, Sachin. His partner, Victoria, has burned the Monopoly board.
