Written by Debbie Smit Sunday, 13 September 2009 00:00
On Wednesday this week, Google teamed up with games company Hasbro to launch an online version of Monopoly that uses Google Maps to allow users to buy up real estate all over the world. While the online version is just as mercenary as the board game that we all know as an orgy of capitalist one-upmanship, the original version, patented in 1904, was very different. When Charles Darrow patented the now familiar version of Monopoly in 1935, the instructions read: "The idea of the game is to buy and rent or sell property so profitably that one becomes the wealthiest player and eventually monopolist... The game is one of shrewd and amusing trading and excitement." Considering the origins of the game, it is deeply ironic that it should have morphed into an exercise in Schadenfreude, each player delighting in the misfortunes of the other.
The board game that Monopoly was modelled on had a very different purpose. A Quaker woman called Elizabeth Magie, intent on unbundling for ordinary people the evils of land ownership, created "The Landlord's Game" to expose the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. Magie was a Georgist who subscribed to the teachings of Henry George, who preached that economic rent of land and the unearned increase in land values benefitted a few individuals rather than the majority of the people, on whose existence, as tenants, land values depended. George advocated a single tax, to be exacted on land owners, believing that this would be enough to cover all government's costs and, in turn, would remove the power of monopolies to suppress competition and nurture equal opportunity.
Lizzie Magie's design bears a striking resemblance to the one now labeled "Monopoly", but a closer look reveals that its blocks are labelled with scenarios that the rich are mostly immune to. The properties are rental only except for "Lord Blueblood's Estate" which earns players a ticket to the familiar corner jail block for trespassing. Other blocks are marked Coal and Bread Taxes, Poor House, Water and Light Franchise and Absolute Necessity – clothing, food and shelter. The occasional windfall comes in the form of a small Legacy.
Magie's description reads: "The object of this game is not only to afford amusement to players, but to illustrate to them how, under the present or prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprisers, and also how the single tax would discourage speculation."
PICTURE: Elizabeth Magie's Patent certificate for The Landlord's Game. US Patent Office, 1904
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