Magie designed the Landlord’s Game to illustrate George’s ideas, and believed that as children played it, they would “see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system.” The Landlord’s Game was similar to Monopoly in many ways: Like Monopoly, it had a square board with properties, and like Monopoly, if you made a bad roll you could go to jail. But Magie released her game with two sets of rules. In one, the goal—like contemporary Monopoly—was to impoverish your opponents and acquire land monopolies. In the other set of rules, “all were rewarded when wealth was created,” as Pilon put it. One set of rules showcased how rent systems enriched landlords while keeping tenants poor, leading to capital over time concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. The other set sought to suggest a better way—in which wealth generated by the many was shared by the many.
* * *
The monopolist rules for the Landlord’s Game proved more popular, and as college students learned the game and played handmade versions of it, they expanded and changed rules to make it even more similar to the Monopoly we know today. An Indianapolis version, called the Fascinating Game of Finance, was released in 1932, and it was in Indianapolis that a woman named Ruth Hoskins learned the game. She soon moved to Atlantic City, and adapted the game to her new hometown. Hoskins taught the game to many people, including a couple who later moved to Philadelphia, where they taught the Fascinating Game of Finance to a guy named Charles Todd, who in turn taught it to Charles Darrow. Darrow then asked for a copy of the rules, altered some of the design, patented the game, and became a millionaire.
Here’s how much Charles Darrow did not invent Monopoly: Marven Gardens is a neighborhood near Atlantic City. In Charles Todd’s version of the game, which he learned by way of Ruth Hoskins, the neighborhood is misspelled as Marvin Gardens. That misspelling is repeated in Darrow’s version of the game, because Charles Darrow didn’t invent Monopoly.
So the story we hear of an individual rightly rewarded for his genius turns out to be a far more complicated story of a woman who created a game that thousands of collaborators then improved by playing it. A story of capitalism working turns out to be a story of capitalism failing. So many people got robbed by Darrow’s monopolism, but Elizabeth Magie’s loss is especially galling, because it wasn’t only her game that got buried by Monopoly but also the ideals she worked so hard to share. Magie’s rebuke of unregulated extractive capitalism was transformed into a celebration of getting rich by making others poor.
In the game of Monopoly, power and resources get unjustly distributed until one individual ends up with everything, and only in that sense is it Charles Darrow’s game. Still, more than a hundred years after Magie first debuted the Landlord’s Game, Hasbro continues to credit Charles Darrow as the inventor of Monopoly, and will say of Elizabeth Magie only, “There have been a number of popular property trading games throughout history. Elizabeth Magie—a writer, inventor, and feminist—was one of the pioneers of land-grabbing games.” In short, Hasbro still refuses to acknowledge that the land they grabbed was never theirs for the taking.
I give Monopoly one and a half stars.
SUPER MARIO KART
SUPER MARIO KART IS A RACING GAME, first released in 1992 for the Super Nintendo, in which characters from the Mario universe squat atop go-karts, rather like I do when trying to ride my daughter’s tricycle. It was initially slated to be a game with Formula One–style cars, but technical constraints forced the designers to build tightly woven tracks that folded in on themselves, the kind that only go-karts can navigate. The game was co-created by Super Mario Brothers lead designer and video game legend Shigeru Miyamoto, who would later say, “We set out to make a game where we could display the game screen for two players at the same time.” This split-screen mode is part of what made the first Super Mario Kart game so thrilling.
In the Super Nintendo game, players can choose from among eight characters in the Mario universe—including Princess Peach, Mario, Luigi, and Donkey Kong, Jr. Each character has particular strengths and weaknesses. Bowser, for instance, is strong and travels at a high top speed but accelerates very slowly. Toad, on the other hand, is quick and handles well, but has a lower top speed. Once you choose a character （I recommend Luigi）， you’re pitted against the seven other drivers in a series of increasingly surreal tracks. You might navigate a regular pavement go-kart track, or a ship of ghosts, or a castle, or the famed Rainbow Road, which has a many-splendored driving surface and no guardrails to prevent you from falling into the abyss below.
I was in tenth grade when Super Mario Kart was released, and as far as my friends and I were concerned, it was the greatest video game ever. We spent hundreds of hours playing it. The game was so interwoven into our high school experience that, even now, the soundtrack takes me back to a linoleum-floored dorm room that smelled like sweat and Gatorade. I can feel myself sitting on a golden microfiber couch that had been handed down through generations of students, trying to out-turn my friends Chip and Sean on the final race of the Mushroom Cup.
We almost never talked about the game while playing it—we were always talking over each other about our flailing attempts at romance or the ways we were oppressed by this or that teacher or the endless gossip that churns around insular communities like boarding schools. We didn’t need to talk about Mario Kart, but we needed Mario Kart to have an excuse to be together—three or four of us squeezed on that couch, hip to hip. What I remember most was the incredible—and for me, novel—joy of being included.
Like the rest of us, Mario Kart has changed a lot since I was in high school. In the recently released Mario Kart 8, you can fly and go underwater and drive upside down; you can now choose from among dozens of playable characters and vehicles. But at its core, the game hasn’t changed much. Mostly, you win contemporary Mario Kart games in the same way you won them in 1992, by driving in the straightest possible line and cornering well. There is a measure of skill involved—you can carry speed better through corners by drifting, for instance, and there’s some strategy to passing. But Mario Kart is almost ridiculously straightforward.
Except, that is, for the question boxes, which make Mario Kart either a brilliant game or a problematic one, depending on what you think games should do. As you navigate a track in Mario Kart, you may pass over or through question boxes, at which point you receive one of several tools. You might get a mushroom, which you can use to get a one-time speed boost. Or you may get a red turtle shell, a kind of heat-seeking missile that will go looking for the kart in front of you and hit it from behind, causing that kart to spin out. Or you might get the coveted lightning bolt, which makes all your opponents miniaturized and slow for a bit, while you remain as big and fast as ever. In the newer editions of Mario Kart, your question box might even provide you with the chance to transform for a few seconds into Bullet Bill, a speeding bullet that corners amazingly and destroys every kart in its path.
Once, I was playing Mario Kart 8 with my son, and because I am in my twenty-sixth year of regular Mario Kart play, I was leading the game comfortably. But then on the last lap he got Bullet Bill from a question box and proceeded to blow right past me, winning the race and destroying my kart in the process. I ended up finishing fourth.