Slashdot Mirror
In-Game Advertising Comes to Board Games
Grooves writes "Monopoly is getting rid of paper money in favor of credit cards. From the article: 'The new card, which resembles a debit card, is inserted into a small plastic reader/writer that can display and update the balance on the card. Traditional money is gone altogether, though purists can still purchase the original version.' Does this mean the end of complex Monopoly games where I charge grandma interest to borrow money?"
The way we played, there were no rules outside the banker. Pickpocketing, bribes, free trade, all tricks allowed. Shuffle that house two fields away onto your area and claim it's yours, or put the dice down, 6-up and claim you just threw them. Bring your own monopoly money from home. Nobody got desperate enough to trade the in-game cash for real money, but that would be perfectly legal too.
The "dirty" version of the game was fun. Electronics will most likely kill this kind of gameplay.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
No one in their right mind, who doesn't have a FICO in the 400s, uses a debit card. No anonymity and it's YOUR money that's gone temporarily if there's an error. Credit cards don't have anonymity, but if there's a screw-up, you've got anywhere from 10 to 40 days to fix it before you every have to consider shelling out a cent. Plus, if there's a royal fuck up, you don't end up bouncing your mortage payment and every other bill that month. Let the CC company float that cash and take the brunt of the errors.
If you need anonymity, do what Sen. Bob Dole does - have your assitant take $10k out of the bank every couple weeks and pay for everything with cash. When asked why he does this, his answer was simple: there no way to trace it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
- Credit cards are a toy.
- Credit cards are the same as cash.
- Money on credit cards represents an asset instead of a liability.
There is nothing responsible about what this game teaches kids about credit cards.If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I can't imagine that this game will be popular, even with a computer-literate set. For one thing, ideas like this credit-based Monopoly ignore the very real fact that a symbol is not the same as the thing symbolized, either conceptually or in emotional terms.
Now, I'm a woman, so my perspective may not be shared by the estrogen-challenged among us, but for me part of the satisfaction of board games (as well as of many other hobbies) is the opportunity to interact with and manipulate real objects-- to see a stack of money grow, move around a little iron doggie, build wooden roads in Settlers, construct fields of color in Blockus, etc. It's not especially smart, I know, but it is a very visceral and very real component of my enjoyment of the game. For children, exploration of the objects involved may constitute most or all of the pleasure they take in gameplay, and rightly so, since that kind of play is needed to build spatial relations and motor skills.
Even for adults, though, I can't help feeling as though interactions with concrete physical objects are necessary to keep in touch with our environment and maintain a sense of control and comfort in our world. We evolved from monkeys, after all-- manipulating objects is what we do best. Abstract thinking is useful and necessary, too, of course, but I can't help feeling as though the ongoing virtualization of everyday life is going to result in increased stress and poor decision-making for our recently-ex-hunter/gatherer selves.
That said, I do hope the social scientists mount some comparative studies of virtual-Monopoly vs. real-Monopoly gameplay. What a great opportunity to examine the psychology of credit!
The traditional Monopoly game helps teach kids how to understand folding money. Now it's just a video game where the kid can say "here's my card!" instead of having to learn count the bills. This is a sad day.
It's a sad day, but it's a sad day because it appears to be reducing the flexibility of a classic game, not because it's no longer teaching kids an obsolete skill that is only relevant in technologically-backwards societies. Monopoly is great because it's fun, not because it's educational.
Seriously, I've never had more than two or three banknotes in my wallet at a time in the last decade or so, and I expect the number of transactions I use cash for to fall to zero as soon as someone comes up with a decent micropayment scheme. How exactly is knowing how to count out primitive tokens going to be useful to my kids, who I expect to grow up in a fully-electronic society where even carrying a set of cards around seems clumsy and archaic?
So, teaching kids that cash is a toy is better?
And they are technically "Debit Cards", so the money IS an asset instead of a liability. (And for that matter, having a net positive balance on your credit card is an asset as well..)
And last, money in your bank account, or spent on a credit card, is pretty much the same as cash. i.e. having it in the bank is the same as having cash. Spending it by using your credit card is the same as spending cash.
If you're using a "charge card" or a "debit card", instead of a "credit card", there's nothing wrong using plastic. It's only borrowing money at absurd rates for trivial purchases that's a problem.
I'm really not that keen on the "updates" that have been made to Monopoly, or even the "localized" editions. I guess that in the U.K., purchasing property named for places in London makes a lot more sense than keeping the Atlantic City, NJ names, but as an American, I've never been to Atlantic City, either, and I've always wondered if Mediterranean Ave. was the dump the game portrays it to be.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
The thing that keeps a Monopoly game mildly interesting is all of the under-the-table and back-room (or bathroom) wheeling and dealing going on. It makes it more about the people, and the players' interactions.
Take that away, and you get mind-numbing tedium. Wasn't that what computers and microeletronics were supposed to save us from?
I learnt from Monopoly the same thing that I've learnt during my adulthood -- landlords are evil and should be killed en masse. Viva la revolution!