The second set was meant to highlight the moral superiority of the first set. Magie drew up two sets of rules for her game: one anti-trust set, where all the players were rewarded for each other’s success, and another set that more closely resembled the rules we know today, where the goal was to buy up as many properties as possible and push your opponents into bankruptcy and out of the game. To that end, Magie came up with “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences… as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, ie, the accumulation of wealth.” Magie saw massive wealth disparities between the working class and these men, who had come to be known as “robber barons.” She set out to craft a message that was not in favor of this unrestrained capitalism but, in fact, a warning against it. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and J.P. In previous decades, the country had gone through an intense period of industrialization facilitated in part by magnates such as John D. was grappling with what a modern capitalist society would look like. Magie was a progressive feminist who bucked traditional gender roles of the era-she remained single into her 40s, owned her own house in a suburb of Washington, D.C., worked as a stenographer and secretary, wrote poetry, performed onstage as a comedienne and, in her free time, was a political activist who taught classes after work.Īt the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. Let’s dig in and find out exactly how Monopoly, now available in countless versions, first came to be.įirst things first, credit where it’s due: The game that we now know as Monopoly was first envisioned as The Landlord’s Game by a woman named Elizabeth “Lizzy” Magie. However, as we’ve seen with other patent claims-such as Alexander Graham Bell’s patent for the invention of the telephone-there’s a tawdry history of intrigue lurking in the proverbial community chest. The game has become synonymous with capitalism and, on the surface, tests players’ business acumen and savvy the end goal is to win by bankrupting your opponents. Although it was patented on December 31, 1935, by a man called Charles Darrow, it’s one of those pieces of pop culture that feels like it’s been around forever-in other words, for as long as it takes to play Monopoly. In 1903, Magie patented The Landlord’s Game, having apparently decided she didn’t have enough identifiers and needed to add “board game inventor.” It was pretty much the same as Monopoly today, designed intentionally to outrage and frustrate players and illustrate the dangers of, you know, monopolies.There are few more iconic board games in the world than Monopoly. Basically, a pretty cool lady by today’s standards, but she was lucky not to have been committed to an asylum in the late 19th century. The story of Monopoly begins with Elizabeth Magie, an unmarried artist, writer, poet, actor, comedian, and amateur engineer. It was entirely designed to teach you how bad capitalism is - until it became a victim of capitalism itself. It turns out, however, that that’s not just an unpleasant side effect but the whole point of the game. It takes forever, there’s only one dog, and it’s definitely destroyed more than a few relationships because it requires you to act like a ruthless capitalist (and also fight over who gets to be the dog). Monopoly has a unique place of dishonor in the family board game cupboard.
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