My friend Viga is still trying to raise money for college. You can get art for helping! Details here, donation site here.
There's some deep poetic appropriateness to the enduring high sales of Monopoly being a clear example of market failure.
(You want the rant below the comic, not the comic.)
I've never liked Monopoly - I find it boring and tedious. However, I did play a very odd combination of Monopoly and Life and real life at a friend's house a couple of months ago that had an odd appeal - The Farming Game (http://www.farmgame.com). Unlike Monopoly, where you randomly lose money for no apparent reason, you lose money in the Farming Game for realistic reasons, like a hail storm knocked out all of your crops or all of your crops got sick. The incredible difficulty of winning, which is making enough money to farm full-time, is kind of depressing, being that it reflects a real situation for a lot of people.
ReplyDeleteMonopoly wasn't supposed to be fun. It was designed to critique capitalism.
DeleteBut it's supposed to make you hate rent-seeking monopolistic behavior, not games, so I'll grant it's still not quite working as intended. =P
Sort of? Landlord was a critique of capitalism, but by the time Parker Bros. got ahold of it... well, I'm pretty sure they were fans of capitalism.
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