perfidy

Er, Monopoly. New adventures in Monopoly.

It's America's favorite socially acceptable expression of raw capitalism, made manifest in cardboard and psychedelic currency. No other single gaming product better teaches the lesson that it is good to be a have, and that, by definition, the have-nots are losers.

Everyone has a copy somewhere, and most of you probably know where it is- closet, basement, attic- maybe even still set up from the night before on the big spool table in your living room. Maybe you still have the bits from your old set pressed into new missions: board to cover broken window; plain ol' "dice" turned into 2D6 and working for a Gary Gygax product; desperately gripping the racecar token- your final tangible asset since you sold off your last duplicative organ for real money- and used the last of the game money to kindle your hobo cooking fire and reflect on how you lost at life just as you lost every game of Monopoly you ever played...

Sssooooo.... yeah.

Hasbro is soliciting votes here for new spaces on an updated gameboard. And let's face it, we're due. However boring the gameplay is going to be, having Depression-era landmarks and cultural cues have not helped keep it fresh and interesting. And shit I've never even BEEN to Atlantic City. Matter of fact, the last time I went that far down the Garden State Parkway I wound up at the no-diamond-rated, non-luxury accomodations of the Department of Defense, a guest at Fort Dix' training barracks and the 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry. Not in a hurry to get back, thanks.

So. Among some of the changes are updated Chance and Community Chest cards to make them more relevant to our place and time. Maybe they replace "won $10 in a beauty contest" with "finalist on American Idol" or something. Gone are the railroads, in favor of airports like O'Hare and Hartsfield-Jackson.

What I don't get though are whether the sites that Hasbro is asking participants to vote on are the ones that will be bought and sold. I mean, you can't very well build a house on Hoover Dam, or sell Beacon Hill. I doubt there's enough raw currency in circulation on the planet to buy Beacon Hill, anyway. So if that's the plan, I don't like it. I respect efforts to modernize the look and feel of the game, but can't get behind the landmarks thing.

I think it would be better for each purchasable property on the board to represent an entire, actual city. So instead of just Atlantic Ave on the classic board, on the new board you'd buy Atlantic City. Keep it going: the purple spaces would be, say, Newark and Detroit; Hartford and DC would fit right about where Connecticut Ave is now, maybe closer to Baltic. Er, Detroit. Updated utilities might include Comcast or other high speed cable/ISP. Boston...hmmm...I'd say somewhere in the high yellow, into green properties. Maybe L.A. for Park Place, NYC for Boardwalk? Jail could still be jail, I guess; maybe zazz it up by making it Pelican Bay. Well, except then you'd probably never get out. Maybe instead of jail, it might be "debt", so that as long as you're "in debt" you pay the bank 27.99999999% interest on all your holdings? Then again, I don't want to work that hard computing interest to play a game.

Come to think of it, I've already worked too hard thinking about this game which I'm never going to play anyway.

If you care, go vote. If you don't care, you're a well-adjusted adult who outgrew Monopoly decades ago and I don't blame you. Or you're a communist, and hate the game anyway on principle.