Monopoly. Elizabeth J. Magie and Charles Darrow. Hasbro, 1935.
2-8 players | 60-180 mins | Age 8+
Monopoly is a game that sees players take the role of land owners who buy and develop land, growing their property portfolios and financially ruining their rivals in an often bitter battle of financial domination. Its rules are fairly simple, seeing players take turns rolling two dice, moving their playing pieces around the board (variously representations of international cities) and electing where to invest their funds to best extract money from their opponents.
Monopoly, on the surface at least, is not ostensibly ‘about’ the environment. It joins this ludography as a popular example of a group of games which place their focus elsewhere while being absolutely implicated by environmental concerns. Monopoly is about building, about national infrastructures (rail, energy), about money, and about governments (taxes for example). Where, players might ask, do the building materials come from? What is the impact of building so rapidly? What fuels the various modes of transport (which include cars, boats, and, in later editions planes)? Who is staying in all those hotels? And just how many towels are they using? In being about these things, and yet not raising these questions, the game is an example of what Patricia Yaeger identifies as the ‘energy unconscious’ (2011: 306) and this awareness (or lack of awareness) makes games which may not explicitly address the climate crisis or representations of nature equally important in terms of the games that participants might elect to play. Other examples of games in this mode include Ticket to Ride (Days of Wonder, 2004), Tokyo Highway (itten 2016). In such games the consumption of energy is implicit in the expanding of built infrastructure that shape the games’ lusory goals while being largely, if not entirely, absent from the constitutive and operational rules.
Content written by Seth Etchells, Charlotte Gislam, Lucy Roberts, Chloé Wake, Paul Wake and Jack Warren. Adapted from the Ecogame Ludography.
References
Yaeger, P. 2011. ’Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.’ PMLA 126, no. 2.