In a recent memoir, the actor Matthew Perry, of “Friends,” reveals that his parents spent the hours before his birth playing the board game Monopoly. It was an unhappy marriage, Perry writes, and they divorced when he was a baby. Monopoly probably wasn’t responsible, but it can’t have helped. Most aficionados agree that Monopoly, if not a bad game, is at the very least designed to embitter its players.
The rules are straightforward. Players take turns moving their respective token around a square board. Each tile represents a major street or district in a real-world city. The first player to land on a property tile has the option to buy the land, on which he can then build houses and hotels, and charge visitors rent. Move by move, territory is lost to competing landlords, who work to bankrupt their rivals, acquire their assets, and establish a monopoly. By the end of the game, all but one player sit, frowning, indebted to the friend or family member who has negotiated, through an infuriating combination of luck and avarice, domination of the board.
Most games invite players to best their opponents; few require such total humiliation as Monopoly. But in “Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History,” a new PBS documentary, we learn that this wasn’t always the case. The game was originally designed in 1903, by Lizzie Magie, a charismatic feminist, actor, and poet. At the time, most board games, like most novels for children, were viewed as vessels for moral instruction. Magie called her creation the Landlord’s Game, basing it on the theories of Henry George, an influential economist who argued that the value of land should be shared by the people rather than extracted by property owners. The game, which was meant to depict the evil of such owners, spread like a folktale, adopted by communities who tweaked the rules to suit their tastes and circumstances.
One variant emerged in Atlantic City, where a group of Quakers renamed the tiles after local landmarks—Oriental Avenue, Park Place, Boardwalk—that made them feel tailored to their home. In the nineteen-thirties, a Quaker couple invited a friend, a heater repairman named Charles Darrow, to play. Darrow was struggling through the Depression, and he asked his hosts to jot down the rules. Later, he hired an artist to create a new design for the board, using the clean lines and block colors that are now familiar across the world. Then he began to hand-produce sets, which he sold to a local department store. Monopoly, as he called it, became a hit.
Darrow was stingy with the game’s backstory. In 1935, when he sold his version to the toy manufacturer Parker Brothers, he assured them, in writing, that it was entirely his invention. When company executives discovered that the game already existed in the public domain, they appealed to the legal system. The U.S. Patent Office granted Darrow a patent for his version of the game; to appease Magie, and to secure the rights to the Landlord’s Game, Parker Brothers promised to publish two of her other designs. Magie died in 1948. The documentary’s bleakest revelation is that, in the census, she recorded her vocation as “maker of games” and her annual income as “$0.”
This history remained largely unknown until the nineteen-seventies, when Ralph Anspach, an economics professor who had fled Nazi Europe, became embroiled in a legal battle with General Mills, which owned Parker Brothers. Anspach had created a riff on Darrow’s game called Anti-Monopoly, which critiqued oil cartels and other capitalist monopolies. The game became popular in San Francisco, where Anspach lived, but he soon received a cease-and-desist letter, demanding he stop production. He began running advertisements in newspapers across the country, hoping to prove that Monopoly’s design predated Darrow’s interpretation.
Anspach’s mission nearly brought him to the brink of bankruptcy: he took out three mortgages on his house to pay legal costs, and turned down a settlement of more than half a million dollars from Parker Brothers. But, in 1983, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, refusing the company’s trademark claim over his game. He released a book about the experience, “The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle,” in 1998; one of its readers was Stephen Ives, a documentarian based in New York. In the early two-thousands, Ives invited Anspach to the city and filmed an interview. The project stalled, but the footage was revived for the PBS film, which Ives directed. (Anspach died last year, at ninety-six, and never saw the final cut.)
Ives, like many parents, was once eager to introduce his children to Monopoly. “It’s like the early Beatles or Disneyland or something,” he told me. “When are they going to be ready? What you don’t really realize is that you’re performing this ritualistic introduction to raw, unbridled American-style capitalism. You’re saying, ‘This is how society works. This is how you have fun, and crush other people.’ ”
There have now been more than a thousand versions of Monopoly, based not only on different cities but on properties such as “The Big Bang Theory,” “The Powerpuff Girls,” and M&M’s. The message, though, remains the same. Games are systems, and, as Magie recognized, a shrewd designer can steer players toward a particular viewpoint through their experience of that system. Monopoly, which began as a critique of landlords, came to promote the naked pursuit of wealth, whether the assets involve New York real estate or a chocolate river.
It’s no surprise that American capitalism both subverted Magie’s critique and destroyed her legacy. “Ruthless” is a warm, attentive film, and it helps honor the woman responsible for creating one of the most popular games in the world. But we don’t need a documentary to illustrate the ironies of Monopoly. Its politics are transparent; each player starts with the same amount of cash and opportunities, even though, in real life, race, class, gender, and a range of other factors inflect a person’s chance of success. The game disguises luck as skill, misrepresents the American Dream, and promises wealth and power at the expense of others. Only in its final moments do we see the victor’s most enduring reward: isolation. ♦
