Monopoly as a Game is Terrible
Monopoly is the 5th best selling board game of all time … and it’s awful. It’s a non-collaborative game that favors the frontrunner and doesn’t provide for alternative strategies for victory. Monopoly’s “roll-and-go” design leaves people as passive observers throughout most of the game, while others are making their moves. As a result, the game drags, particularly if things aren’t going well for you. Consequently, most game players consider Monopoly one of the worst games of all time.
Monopoly as a Teaching Tool is Worse
As a games-based educator, I loathe Monopoly for other reasons. Games are powerful teaching tools. As we reflect and process the events of games, we look for ways to apply the lessons to our lives. In terms of learning, Monopoly teaches false and crippling lessons.
As alluded to above, it teaches personal futility, dysfunctional competition, and fixed mindset. Terrible as those lessons are, the real tragedy of these lessons emerges from the reality that Monopoly is often the first exposure to business ideas that most young people run across. Through this game, from an early age, young people are imbued with pathological beliefs about business. Here are several of the lessons people may draw from the Game of Monopoly:
- Everyone else around me is trying to take from me. I should never trust anyone in business.
- There is only $20,580 in the box ($15,140 prior to 2008). Wealth can’t be created.
- If you don’t get an early lead, it becomes impossible to win late.
The Effects of Bad Lessons
Young people internalize these lessons and arrive in adulthood reluctant to collaborate, unmotivated to create value, and uninspired. Since wealth creation doesn’t exist, wealth can only be taken from others through coercive means. Wealth as evidence of virtue does not exist in the world of Monopoly. In short, Monopoly robs people of potential partners, one’s growth mindset, and an individual’s ambition.
Opportunities abound, but you can’t be a cog in the system. You must work hard, and you have to use your head. However, you won’t work hard and you won’t think if you’ve already been convinced that you’ve lost the game.
We reside in the Information Age — a time when success is driven by rapid communication, flat organizations, collaboration, and free trade. Monopoly is a relic of the industrial age — based on mercantilism, sclerotic bureaucratic organization, and brutal colonial exploitation.
I tell my kids how much I hate Monopoly and usually refuse to play the game with them. When I do, I make a point to reinforce how little the game represents real life. Success in business requires collaboration, a desire to create, and (above all) hope—as hope empowers motivation.
Life is not a game of attrition. Let’s never play the game as such.
Next time I will discuss alternative rules to transform the Monopoly experience into one that generates much more positive and prosocial takeaways.
