Keeping up with the Simses: from Monopoly to cyberspace

Commonweal, Feb 28, 2003 by Richard Alleva

Prior to the Christmas season of 1934, board and card games had two great glories: they injected a little artificial drama into ordinary lives, and they were not life. To put it another way, games are warfare without blood. The plodding pawns die for their masters while the ambidextrous queens maneuver and strike for their spouses until one of the kings is hemmed in and slain. Bridge calls for the sort of secret diplomacy (those warning kicks under the table) that kept nineteenth-century Europe relatively stable, but it doesn't entail chauvinism or espionage. Poker exalts hypocrisy without messing with ethics. And so forth.

Imitating human struggle but dispensing with human agony (unless we've gambled away our savings), a good game marches inevitably, economically, excitingly to one powerful climax. The cards show their faces, the king is checkmated, the backgammon stones arrive home. The End. Having cheered, groaned, smirked, or grimaced your way through the game, you and your friends put away the board or the card table and get on with the earnest, interesting problems of real life.

Of course, such sanity was too good to last. Along came Monopoly.

The game's inventor, George Darrow, reputedly concocted it (out of linoleum, cardboard, and paint samples) strictly to wile away empty hours after his firm fell victim to the Great Depression. But when friends and the friends of friends requested copies, Darrow began charging them $4 a set. Since the orders kept coming in and Darrow didn't feel up to forming a company of his own, he took his invention to Parker Brothers who gave it the fish eye. Only after Darrow gave successful demonstrations at FAO Schwarz in New York and several stores in Philadelphia did Parker Brothers consent to sell off the remainder of his stock. By Christmas, 1934, all the sets were sold and the firm felt relieved. Throughout January, demand kept increasing and relief gave way to astonishment. Within a few more months, George Darrow, former victim of the Depression, had a generous contract and embarked on a comfortable retirement.

This is, of course, the old story of the visionary whose instincts win out against the old fogeyism of the moneymen, but I would like to point out that though the Parker Brothers were wrong, they were not soundly, logically wrong in their specific objections.

Nine pages of instructions for a mere game?! It must have seemed Darrow was introducing the player to a new job instead of a pastime. If war is the paradigm for chess, Monopoly is more like a day in the office. Except (and this was another Parker complaint) that it can consume more time than an eight-hour workday (one game, played in Danville, California, took 820 hours). And surely the Parker executives must have noted the flaccid way every Monopoly game ends--not with a dramatic slapping down of cards or the toppling of a king, but with the toting up of cash and property values. So much for high drama.

I think Monopoly succeeded for two reasons. First, though Americans are supposed to be sadly adept at forgetting the past, what we actually like to do with catastrophic milestones is to stroke them, fetishize them, and finally turn them into some kind of pop entertainment. I shrink from contemplating what future Americans will make of 9/11, but look at Civil War reenactors, or the jungle of conspiracy theories that cropped up about the Kennedy assassination. Likewise, in the depths of the Depression, when capitalism was taking the worst battering it had ever received, a game allowing players to become fantasy capitalists flourished. (Why didn't the American Communist Party take note of this and instantly disband?)

Second, banality put under a spotlight can become fascinating, as Andy Warhol soup cans testify. In Monopoly, the banality of business transactions becomes part of the mystique of the game. The pace of play is so plodding that it becomes comforting. At the very moment in American history when families were losing their savings and some their homes, George Darrow introduced a game in which capitalism not only works (despite all the "Go Directly to Jail" cards) but works mildly. Monopoly was a return to normalcy on cardboard.

Now, skip ahead seventy years and what do we find vast numbers of Americans playing? A computer game called The Sims or, if you care to interact with a lot of people all over the country, The Sims Online. As in Monopoly, the goal is to acquire and expand. Yet, whereas in the old game the players pretend to be powerful capitalists, Sims players pretend to be ... well, what they probably are in real life: homeowners or apartment renters, partygoers and partygivers, bachelors or family heads, shoppers and sellers. You can create on your monitor a pixeled avatar representing yourself trying to get your kids off to school on time, or yourself as a bachelor (or bachelorette) trying to lure members of the opposite sex into a hot tub. You make certain decisions at your keyboard and face the consequences installed into the game by Will Wright and his co-creators.