0:01 [SPEAKER_00]: Most people see the game of monopoly, as a harmless bit of fun. 0:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Others view it as a crash course in the dark side of the American dream. 0:10 [SPEAKER_00]: You start the game with the same amount of money as everyone else. 0:13 [SPEAKER_00]: For your goals overlap, and you begin taking things from one another, exploiting one another in your times of need, and one by one you fall into bankruptcy at the hands of your rivals. 0:25 [SPEAKER_00]: There's no mercy in Monopoly, and a little bit of bad luck at the wrong time can ruin you. 0:32 [SPEAKER_00]: I love board games and growing up I played a lot of Monopoly, to this day it's the only game I've ever flipped, table and all, and that's happened more than once. 0:43 [SPEAKER_00]: Monopoly has a way of making you crazy, and that's kind of the point of it. 0:48 [SPEAKER_00]: It sets you at each other's throats, and it's sudden, random swings of fortune can make the calmest people lose their temperors. 0:56 [SPEAKER_00]: In that sense, it's a lot like real life, skill matters, but not as much as luck, or your willingness to rip off the next guy. 1:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Like most of those classic games that dominated the table top landscape before the board game Renaissance of the early 2000s, like risk and battleship, you win monopoly through very confrontation or gameplay, where you advance by taking things directly from other players, or by wiping them off the board, you learn a kind of uninhibited exploitation and the virtues of ruthless dominance. 1:31 [SPEAKER_00]: At the end of the game, one guy is left standing in possession of everything. 1:36 [SPEAKER_00]: The other is driven to a state of fictional, cardboard, and plastic despair. 1:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Lately, games like Carcasson and settlers of Qatar have brought more nuisance and skill to board gaming, where you win through competing projects that allow all players some degree of ongoing success. 1:54 [SPEAKER_00]: And today, I'm suggesting you add another game to your collections, out of principle. 2:06 [SPEAKER_00]: It looks like monopoly, but it's anti-monopoly. 2:10 [SPEAKER_00]: More accurately, it's the original monopoly. 2:13 [SPEAKER_00]: That was renamed and repackaged in 1906, and one of the great intellectual property thefts of the 20th century. 2:22 [SPEAKER_00]: It was invented by a woman, and stolen by a group of businessmen, who refused to credit the game's real inventor. 2:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Elizabeth Maggie, the true creator of the Landlord's game, hated real-life monopolies and invented this board game in order to criticize them. 2:39 [SPEAKER_00]: She designed a game where fortunes changed suddenly, and pointlessly, and where getting a head and life was only possible through cruel and predatory behaviors. 2:50 [SPEAKER_00]: Lizzy was an early feminist who insisted on equal pay and equal rights at a time when those ideas had little traction. 2:57 [SPEAKER_00]: She ran her own business and owned her own home with several adjoining acres. 3:03 [SPEAKER_00]: She was born in Illinois in 1866 to an abolitionist newspaperman who had incidentally traveled with Abraham Lincoln during his campaign for governor of Illinois. 3:14 [SPEAKER_00]: In her fight against injustice, Lizzie became obsessed with the ideas of an economist named Henry George, who believed that land should be taxed rather than income and that the remainder of these land taxes should be redistributed among those who needed it most. 3:31 [SPEAKER_00]: She designed the Landlord's game to illustrate the evils of monopolies and also as an object lesson for Georgia's theories to demonstrate the effectiveness of the land attacks for fixing the American system. 3:46 [SPEAKER_00]: There were two different setups for her game, one for each part of her project. 3:51 [SPEAKER_00]: The first version represented unfettered capitalism, the point was simply to gobble up properties 4:00 [SPEAKER_00]: This so-called Monopoly version of the Landlord's game was in Lizzie's view, the boring version. 4:07 [SPEAKER_00]: After all, what's the fun of Boeing others relentlessly on the way to victory? 4:12 [SPEAKER_00]: The second version showed the effectiveness of George's single-tax theory in real time, by adding restrictions to the capitalist free for all of the Monopoly version. 4:24 [SPEAKER_00]: In the official rules to her game, she says of the first version, 4:28 [SPEAKER_01]: The landlord's game is based on present prevailing business methods by this simple method, one can satisfy himself of the truth of the assertion that the land, monopolist, is monarch of the world. 4:40 [SPEAKER_00]: The remedy is the single tax. 4:45 [SPEAKER_01]: If the players wish to prove how the application of the single tax would benefit everybody by equalizing opportunities and raising wages, they may at any time during the game put the single tax into operation by a vote of at least two of the players. 5:00 [SPEAKER_00]: Guess which version people actually liked to play? 5:04 [SPEAKER_00]: The all-out competition, a friendly annihilation, or the object, a lesson, and obscure tax reforms? 5:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Lizzie shared the game with family and friends, and they played it constantly. 5:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Convince she had a hit on her hands, she applied for a patent in 1903. 5:20 [SPEAKER_00]: In a 1904, she received US patent 748 comma 626, for her game on January 5, 1904. 5:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Primitive versions of the game spread quickly up and down the geese coast, and it became popular on college campuses. 5:38 [SPEAKER_00]: But two years later, Charles Darrow, a domestic heater salesman from Philadelphia, quote, invented a new game in his basement. 5:47 [SPEAKER_00]: The game was called Monopoly, and he was basically an updated version of the Landlord's game that located her gameplay in Atlantic City. 5:56 [SPEAKER_00]: It skipped the idea of the land tax and focused solely on financial domination. 6:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Not as an illustration of a sick economy, but as a business ideal, 6:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Having seen Daro's version, Parker Brothers reached out to Lizzie and offered to buy her patents for $500, with the understanding that they would publish the Landlord game and promote it around the country. 6:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Not only would this help spread her political ideas, but it would bring in huge royalties as the game's popularity grew, but Parker Brothers had something else in mind. 6:33 [SPEAKER_00]: They only wanted to buy her game. 6:35 [SPEAKER_00]: in order to prevent the possibility of lawsuits. 6:38 [SPEAKER_00]: They had already committed to publishing and promoting Dara's version, instead and wanted to protect themselves from a lawsuit. 6:46 [SPEAKER_00]: In order to trick Maggie into selling them her patents, Parker Brothers mailed her a prototype of the landlord game. 6:52 [SPEAKER_00]: She was giddy with excitement. 6:54 [SPEAKER_00]: She said she felt, quote, a song in my heart at the side of it, quote, 7:02 [SPEAKER_00]: she said to a member of the company, quote but I don't think any one of them will be as much trouble to you or as important to me as this one. 7:11 [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure I wouldn't make so much fuss over them. 7:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Once they had countered into a deal, Parker Brothers released Darrow's monopoly and it was a smashing success. 7:22 [SPEAKER_00]: In the years that followed he would become the first ever millionaire game designer. 7:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Maggie's earnings ended with that initial $500 and she died in 1948 at age 81 in relative anonymity. 7:37 [SPEAKER_00]: It is only recently that Lizzy has received some of the attention she deserved. 7:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Her original version of the game is now available online, and if you're interested, you might grab a copy, and let us know what you think. 7:49 [SPEAKER_00]: You might also find adapted versions of the Leonardo game, like one called Anti-Monopoly. 7:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever you think of Georgian economics, we should all appreciate Lizzy Maggie as an American pioneer and innovator whose critique of America's doggy dog economy played out so compellingly in her own life. 8:10 [SPEAKER_00]: She never had any real political power and was exploited by Darro and Parker Brothers. 8:15 [SPEAKER_00]: and their Darwinian economic world views. 8:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Monopoly made all of them filthy rich, like rich, Uncle Pennybag's rich, and beyond the initial 500, she never saw a dime. 8:27 [SPEAKER_00]: So as a matter of principle, I'm buying the landlord game. 8:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Even though it frankly sounds like a pretty boring, far too educational game for my tastes, and I'm probably done with Monopoly, not out of principle, but because I finally have proved that this game was designed to enrage me.
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