Page 22 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

WHEN MY FAMILY AND I PLAY MONOPOLY, a board game in which the goal is to bankrupt your fellow players, I sometimes think about Universal Paperclips, a 2017 video game created by Frank Lantz. In Universal Paperclips, you play the role of an artificial intelligence that has been programmed to create as many paperclips as possible. Over time, you produce more and more paperclips, until eventually you exhaust all of Earth’s iron ore, whereupon you send probes to outer space to mine paperclip materials from other planets, and then eventually other solar systems. After many hours of play, you finally win the game: You’ve turned all the universe’s available resources into paperclips. You did it. Congratulations. Everyone is dead.

In Monopoly, you land on various properties as you move around a square board. In the original game, the properties are from a fictionalized version of Atlantic City, New Jersey, but that changes depending on region and edition. For instance, in the Pokémon version of the game, properties include Tangela and Raichu. Regardless, if you land on an unclaimed property, you can purchase it, and if you establish a monopoly by purchasing related properties, you can build houses and hotels. When other players land on places you own, they must pay you rent. Acquire enough properties, and the rent becomes unsustainable for your fellow players, and they go bankrupt.

There are many problems with Monopoly, but maybe the reason the game has persisted for so long—it has been one of the world’s bestselling board games for over eighty years—is that its problems are our problems: Like life, Monopoly unfolds very slowly at first, and then becomes distressingly fast at the end. Like life, people find meaning in its outcomes even though the game is rigged toward the rich and privileged, and insofar as it isn’t rigged, it’s random. And like life, your friends get mad if you take their money, and then no matter how rich you are, there’s an ever-expanding void inside of you that money can never fill, but gripped by the madness of unregulated enterprise you nonetheless believe that if you just get a couple more hotels or take from your friends their few remaining dollars, you will at last feel complete.

To me, the worst thing about Monopoly is its convoluted, self-contradictory analysis of capitalism. The game is essentially about how acquiring land is literally a roll of the dice, and how the exploitation of monopolies enriches the few and impoverishes the many. And yet, the point of the game is to get as rich as you can.

Monopoly’s mealymouthed take on economic inequality is also like life, at least life in Monopoly’s home nation of the United States, where many of us think of billionaires the way I thought of the popular kids in middle school. I despised them, but also desperately wanted to be them. In Monopoly’s case, the thematic inconsistency of the game is largely a product of its complicated origin story, which turns out to say far more about capitalism than the game itself does.

Here’s the creation myth as it gets told by Monopoly’s current owner, the toy company Hasbro: In 1929, in the wake of the great stock market crash, forty-year-old Charles Darrow lost his job in Philadelphia and was forced to scratch together a living as a door-to-door salesman. But then in 1933, he invented the board game Monopoly, eventually patenting the game and licensing it to the company Parker Brothers. Darrow became the first board game millionaire, a proper rags-to-riches story of an American inventor succeeding via the sweat of his Randian brow.

It’s a great story; so great, in fact, that many copies of Monopoly have been printed with Darrow’s biography alongside the rules. Today, there’s even a plaque in Atlantic City celebrating Charles Darrow. The only problem with the story is that Charles Darrow did not invent Monopoly.

Almost thirty years earlier, a woman named Elizabeth Magie created a board game called the Landlord’s Game. As detailed in Mary Pilon’s wonderful book The Monopolists, Magie was a writer and actor who supported her artistic pursuits with a career as a stenographer and typist, work that she hated. “I wish to be constructive,” she once said, “not a mere mechanical tool for transmitting a man’s spoken thoughts to letter paper.”

In her lifetime, Magie was best known for a newspaper ad in which she offered herself up for sale to the highest bidder. She described herself as “not beautiful, but very attractive,” and a woman of “strong bohemian characteristics.” The ad, which made national news, was meant to call attention to the discrimination against women in every aspect of American life, which forced them out of the workforce and into subservient roles in marriage. She told a reporter, “We are not machines. Girls have minds, desires, hopes, and ambitions.”

Magie also felt that no feminist movement could succeed without larger changes in the economic system. “In a short time,” she said, “men and women will discover that they are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller have more maybe than they know what to do with.” To help show this to the world, in 1906 Magie created the Landlord’s Game. Magie was a follower of Henry George, an economist who believed, as Antonia Noori Farzan put it in the Washington Post, “that railroads, telegraphs, and utilities should be publicly owned, rather than controlled by monopolies, and that land should be considered common property.”

Magie designed the Landlord’s Game to illustrate George’s ideas, and believed that as children played it, they would “see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system.” The Landlord’s Game was similar to Monopoly in many ways: Like Monopoly, it had a square board with properties, and like Monopoly, if you made a bad roll you could go to jail. But Magie released her game with two sets of rules. In one, the goal—like contemporary Monopoly—was to impoverish your opponents and acquire land monopolies. In the other set of rules, “all were rewarded when wealth was created,” as Pilon put it. One set of rules showcased how rent systems enriched landlords while keeping tenants poor, leading to capital over time concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. The other set sought to suggest a better way—in which wealth generated by the many was shared by the many.

The monopolist rules for the Landlord’s Game proved more popular, and as college students learned the game and played handmade versions of it, they expanded and changed rules to make it even more similar to the Monopoly we know today. An Indianapolis version, called the Fascinating Game of Finance, was released in 1932, and it was in Indianapolis that a woman named Ruth Hoskins learned the game. She soon moved to Atlantic City, and adapted the game to her new hometown. Hoskins taught the game to many people, including a couple who later moved to Philadelphia, where they taught the Fascinating Game of Finance to a guy named Charles Todd, who in turn taught it to Charles Darrow. Darrow then asked for a copy of the rules, altered some of the design, patented the game, and became a millionaire.

Here’s how much Charles Darrow did not invent Monopoly: Marven Gardens is a neighborhood near Atlantic City. In Charles Todd’s version of the game, which he learned by way of Ruth Hoskins, the neighborhood is misspelled as Marvin Gardens. That misspelling is repeated in Darrow’s version of the game, because Charles Darrow didn’t invent Monopoly.

So the story we hear of an individual rightly rewarded for his genius turns out to be a far more complicated story of a woman who created a game that thousands of collaborators then improved by playing it. A story of capitalism working turns out to be a story of capitalism failing. So many people got robbed by Darrow’s monopolism, but Elizabeth Magie’s loss is especially galling, because it wasn’t only her game that got buried by Monopoly but also the ideals she worked so hard to share. Magie’s rebuke of unregulated extractive capitalism was transformed into a celebration of getting rich by making others poor.

In the game of Monopoly, power and resources get unjustly distributed until one individual ends up with everything, and only in that sense is it Charles Darrow’s game. Still, more than a hundred years after Magie first debuted the Landlord’s Game, Hasbro continues to credit Charles Darrow as the inventor of Monopoly, and will say of Elizabeth Magie only, “There have been a number of popular property trading games throughout history. Elizabeth Magie—a writer, inventor, and feminist—was one of the pioneers of land-grabbing games.” In short, Hasbro still refuses to acknowledge that the land they grabbed was never theirs for the taking.

I give Monopoly one and a half stars.

SUPER MARIO KART

SUPER MARIO KART IS A RACING GAME, first released in 1992 for the Super Nintendo, in which characters from the Mario universe squat atop go-karts, rather like I do when trying to ride my daughter’s tricycle. It was initially slated to be a game with Formula One–style cars, but technical constraints forced the designers to build tightly woven tracks that folded in on themselves, the kind that only go-karts can navigate. The game was co-created by Super Mario Brothers lead designer and video game legend Shigeru Miyamoto, who would later say, “We set out to make a game where we could display the game screen for two players at the same time.” This split-screen mode is part of what made the first Super Mario Kart game so thrilling.

In the Super Nintendo game, players can choose from among eight characters in the Mario universe—including Princess Peach, Mario, Luigi, and Donkey Kong, Jr. Each character has particular strengths and weaknesses. Bowser, for instance, is strong and travels at a high top speed but accelerates very slowly. Toad, on the other hand, is quick and handles well, but has a lower top speed. Once you choose a character (I recommend Luigi), you’re pitted against the seven other drivers in a series of increasingly surreal tracks. You might navigate a regular pavement go-kart track, or a ship of ghosts, or a castle, or the famed Rainbow Road, which has a many-splendored driving surface and no guardrails to prevent you from falling into the abyss below.

I was in tenth grade when Super Mario Kart was released, and as far as my friends and I were concerned, it was the greatest video game ever. We spent hundreds of hours playing it. The game was so interwoven into our high school experience that, even now, the soundtrack takes me back to a linoleum-floored dorm room that smelled like sweat and Gatorade. I can feel myself sitting on a golden microfiber couch that had been handed down through generations of students, trying to out-turn my friends Chip and Sean on the final race of the Mushroom Cup.

We almost never talked about the game while playing it—we were always talking over each other about our flailing attempts at romance or the ways we were oppressed by this or that teacher or the endless gossip that churns around insular communities like boarding schools. We didn’t need to talk about Mario Kart, but we needed Mario Kart to have an excuse to be together—three or four of us squeezed on that couch, hip to hip. What I remember most was the incredible—and for me, novel—joy of being included.

Like the rest of us, Mario Kart has changed a lot since I was in high school. In the recently released Mario Kart 8, you can fly and go underwater and drive upside down; you can now choose from among dozens of playable characters and vehicles. But at its core, the game hasn’t changed much. Mostly, you win contemporary Mario Kart games in the same way you won them in 1992, by driving in the straightest possible line and cornering well. There is a measure of skill involved—you can carry speed better through corners by drifting, for instance, and there’s some strategy to passing. But Mario Kart is almost ridiculously straightforward.

Except, that is, for the question boxes, which make Mario Kart either a brilliant game or a problematic one, depending on what you think games should do. As you navigate a track in Mario Kart, you may pass over or through question boxes, at which point you receive one of several tools. You might get a mushroom, which you can use to get a one-time speed boost. Or you may get a red turtle shell, a kind of heat-seeking missile that will go looking for the kart in front of you and hit it from behind, causing that kart to spin out. Or you might get the coveted lightning bolt, which makes all your opponents miniaturized and slow for a bit, while you remain as big and fast as ever. In the newer editions of Mario Kart, your question box might even provide you with the chance to transform for a few seconds into Bullet Bill, a speeding bullet that corners amazingly and destroys every kart in its path.

Once, I was playing Mario Kart 8 with my son, and because I am in my twenty-sixth year of regular Mario Kart play, I was leading the game comfortably. But then on the last lap he got Bullet Bill from a question box and proceeded to blow right past me, winning the race and destroying my kart in the process. I ended up finishing fourth.

This sort of thing often happens in Mario Kart, because the question boxes know if you’re in first place. If you are, you’ll usually get a banana peel, or a coin, which are minimally useful. You’ll never get one of those sweet bullets. But if you’re in last place—because, say, you’re an eight-year-old playing a grizzled Mario Kart veteran—you’re much more likely to get lightning or Bullet Bill or an infinite supply of speed-boost mushrooms.

In a Mario Kart game, the best player still usually wins, but luck plays a significant role. Mario Kart is more poker than chess.

Depending on your worldview, the question boxes either make the game fair, because anyone can win, or they make the game unfair, because the person with the most skill doesn’t always win.

In that respect, at least in my experience, real life is the precise opposite of Mario Kart. In real life, when you are ahead, you are given lots of power-ups to get further ahead. After one of my books became commercially successful, for instance, my bank called to inform me that I would no longer be charged ATM fees, even if I used an ATM from a different bank. Why? Because people with money in the bank get all kinds of perks just for having money in the bank. Then there are the much bigger power-ups, like the graduating-from-college-with-no-debt power-up, or the being-white power-up, or the being-male power-up. This doesn’t mean that people with good power-ups will succeed, of course, or that those without them won’t. But I don’t buy the argument that these structural power-ups are irrelevant. The fact that our political, social, and economic systems are biased in favor of the already rich and the already powerful is the single greatest failure of the American democratic ideal. I have benefited from this, directly and profoundly, for my entire life. Almost every time I’ve driven through a question box in my life, I’ve been given at the very least a red turtle shell. It happens so routinely that it’s easy for those of us who benefit from these power-ups to see them as fair. But if I don’t grapple with the reality that I owe much of my success to injustice, I’ll only further the hoarding of wealth and opportunity.

Some might argue that games should reward talent and skill and hard work precisely because real life doesn’t. But to me the real fairness is when everyone has a shot to win, even if their hands are small, even if they haven’t been playing the game since 1992.

In an age of extremes in gaming and elsewhere, Mario Kart is refreshingly nuanced. I give it four stars.