MONOPOLY.

The recent release of Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game (not yet an acquisition, but it's a candidate for this years book challenge) attracts reviews. Reason's Nick Gillespie has a short, generally favorable review.

The author of "The Game Makers" and an executive who worked at Parker Brothers among other game companies, [Philip] Orbanes' narrative is filled with fascinating characters. Elizabeth Magie Phillips, for example, created The Landlord's Game and saw it as a way of winning folks over to the crank ideas of single-tax enthusiast Henry George. Then there's Columbia economist Rexford Guy Tugwell, who used Phillips' game as a teaching tool and who, as a member of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal "Brains Trust" pushed "for a full state-administered economy" during the Depression. And the unemployed plumber and "ordinary American" Charles B. Darrow who created - and wisely patented - Monopoly in the form we've all come to know and love.

Financier J.P. Morgan is in the tale, too: He provided the model for the game's mascot, originally known as Rich Uncle Moneybags and later dubbed "Mr. Monopoly."

He includes the obligatory praise of plentitude.

Today, Monopoly is going as strong as ever, partly because it continues to evolve in response to - and anticipation of - consumer demand. There are now versions that range far beyond the familiar streets of Atlantic City, from The Simpsons' mythical Springfield to those on the computer screen.

"Capitalism," writes Orbanes, "has many virtues, and one of the most notable is choice. For Monopoly and its maker [now Hasbro], choice has become a passion." As important, he notes, the game "is a bountiful giver of enjoyment." No wonder, then, that its future looks as rich as its past.

There certainly are lots of versions of Monopoly available today. A longer review by The American Interest's David Parlett calls out some of the limitations of corporate-sponsored product histories.

Modern board games, in contrast, arise not through evolution but by a known originator’s act of invention, a one-off product of “intelligent design” in a relatively brief period of time. They are published and subject to trade protection such as copyright. Although abstract games are still produced, they are a minority taste; modern board games are mostly thematic, overtly representational, even theatrical. Johan Huizinga, in his classic 1938 study Homo Ludens, defines play as either a contest for something, as in the play of a game, or a representation of something, as in the performance of a play. In this latter case, there is a natural tendency for much if not most of the play to take place above the board in the form of transactions and agreements with other players. Such games involve more talking, and are naturally regarded as more sociable.

From a creative point of view the most remarkable feature of Monopoly is that it actually falls into both categories, something Huizinga did not anticipate. It is now well known to have originated in a precursor called The Landlord’s Game, which sprang apparently fully-formed from the brain of a Maryland Quaker called Lizzie Magie and was patented by her in 1904. Well known, that is, to all but the compilers of Hasbro’s Monopoly web page. That page still insists on crediting Monopoly to an out-of-work heating engineer named Charles Darrow, and on dating its origin to the years of the Depression immediately preceding Monopoly’s first publication under that name by Parker Brothers in 1935.

This leaves an explanatory gap of some three decades, which, in the first century of mass communication, probably equates to about three centuries of traditional game evolution. During that period several versions of the game were published under different titles and by different nominal “inventors”, including Lizzie Magie herself. But the real point of interest lies in the fact that most of the game’s development over that time took place in colleges and private dwellings, by players using homemade boards, transmitting the game’s essential rules by word of mouth, and modifying components and elements of play as the fancy took or inspiration seized them.

Ah yes, unanticipated and unintended consequences, even in a product originally conceived (a la Social Justice Legos?) as an instrument of social transformation.

To understand why, we need to note that our inventive Quaker, far from devoting a game to the praise of Mammon, actually devised it as a moral tale showing how unfair rents could be charged by unscrupulous landlords, for which, if there is any justice in the world, they will—in the game world, at least—rightly fetch up in jail. The object of the game, as she stated in her renewed patent of 1924,

is not only to afford amusement to the players, but to illustrate to them how under the present or prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprises and how the single tax would discourage land speculation.

In this she was not merely following, but purposefully promoting, the tenets of economist Henry George, creator of the single-tax theory, who was convinced that property speculation formed the basis of society’s economic and social problems.

Although as she developed her concept, she unwittingly created a model of competitive capitalism that illustrates the difficulty of creating a monopoly.

I believe the answer lies in the complete originality of Lizzie’s mechanisms of play. The distinguishing mark of her prowess at game design lay in a technical invention that far outweighed her ability to appeal to a mass audience or desire to gratify popular taste.

Taxonomically, Monopoly classifies as a race game, belonging therefore to the same broad category as backgammon and Parcheesi, as distinct (for example) from the war-game category of chess and checkers. Abstract race games go back to deep antiquity; examples found in ancient Egyptian tombs are older even than backgammon. Thematic race games are historically younger, though still pretty old. They include, for example, the Chinese game of Mandarin Promotions (Tang Dynasty) and the Royal Game of Goose from 16th-century Europe. As Orbanes points out, the vast majority of “early modern” (19th-century) board games follow the Game of Goose pattern in being race games with some sort of pictorial theme, be it fox and hounds, or treasure islands, or the Game of Life itself (Milton Bradley, 1861).

What Lizzie Magie came up with were at least two ideas for which I know no antecedents. The first, as Orbanes points out, was the transformation of a linear track running from start to home into a continuous loop. You might expect to win such a race by being the first to complete a given number of laps or circuits, which of course still amounts to being the first to reach Home. In Landlord 1909, however, you win by having accumulated the most resources after a given number of laps, and in Landlord 1924 and Monopoly you do so by being the last player left when everyone else has dropped out through exhaustion—of financial resources, that is.

Second, and more significant, was the unparalleled novelty of being able to own a space in such a way as to extract resources from any other player who lands on it. In traditional race games a piece that lands on a space occupied by an adversary sends the current occupant back to start, or, in the case of Goose, to that just quitted by the interloper. In these games, occupancy of a space always ran the risk of being ousted by an incoming opponent. In Landlord/Monopoly, however, the reverse is the case. Two pieces can occupy the same space without interaction. But this clever new rule enables you to buy a space and, acting as an absentee landlord, extract resources from any opponent who subsequently lands on it. This is a totally new concept in the evolution of race games.

That the game does not have to have an end raises the possibility that many games will not end. So, also, can it be with business competition, whether as taught in the textbook or as observed in industries without strong scale economies or network externalities. With sufficiently many players, the pattern of initial ownership of railroads, utilities, and properties can be one in which no player acquires a monopoly in the first few trips around the board, and no proposed trades of properties (Boardwalk for Kentucky, Mediterranean, and $100) are mutually satisfactory. The resulting infinite loop is loosely a competitive equilibrium, although the game loses realism in that no housing gets built.