Does Monopoly's Cash-Free AI Banker Teach the Wrong Lessons? (marketwatch.com) 160
"An updated version of the classic board game Monopoly has done away with cash entirely and now uses a voice-activated AI banker instead," reports MarketWatch, asking whether this teaches game-players the wrong lessons:
This is not the first time Monopoly has reflected today's cashless world. A 2006 edition of the game in the United Kingdom featured Visa-branded credit cards instead of paper play money. Similar versions of the game are also available in the U.S. Last year, Hasbro even released a version called Monopoly for Millennials in which players compete to buy experiences rather than real estate.
The new technology may appeal to kids used to interacting with voice-activated digital assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana. Financial experts, however, remained on the fence about the game's educational value... By removing the physical element of the game, some argue that Monopoly's usefulness as a tool to teach children about money is reduced. "Removing physical Monopoly money reduces the educational benefit of the game by glossing over the important task of learning to manage and count your money," said Nicole Strbich, director of financial planning at Buckingham Advisors in Dayton, Ohio.
In the new version of the game, "The omnipotent talking top hat also will yell, 'YOU'RE BANKRUPT!' at you," reports CNET...
"Hey, Monopoly cheaters. Here's a version that won't let you sneak extra hundreds from the bank or neglect to pay your taxes."
The new technology may appeal to kids used to interacting with voice-activated digital assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana. Financial experts, however, remained on the fence about the game's educational value... By removing the physical element of the game, some argue that Monopoly's usefulness as a tool to teach children about money is reduced. "Removing physical Monopoly money reduces the educational benefit of the game by glossing over the important task of learning to manage and count your money," said Nicole Strbich, director of financial planning at Buckingham Advisors in Dayton, Ohio.
In the new version of the game, "The omnipotent talking top hat also will yell, 'YOU'RE BANKRUPT!' at you," reports CNET...
"Hey, Monopoly cheaters. Here's a version that won't let you sneak extra hundreds from the bank or neglect to pay your taxes."
Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the physical pleasure of waving a large wad of cash at the other players when they have (almost) nothing?
Re:Stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
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I know an owner of a board game store. He surprised me one day by saying he was taking one of his Monopoly games home with him - basically because he had a choice of thousands of other games he could play with his kid
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Not to mention the intimidation factor and some people not being able to actually tally their funds only judging by relative size of stacks etc.
These things, the ability to make ad hoc decisions (like never counting the stupid property tax thing, alternate free parking strategies, etc are what makes the game. I've played computer versions and they are lame.
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Trust in AI (Score:2)
Re:Trust in AI (Score:4, Funny)
Place all your trust in the AI peasant.
If you're going to choose a word to denigrate AI, I don't think "peasant" is quite the right term. It makes you sound like you're wearing a top hat and a monocle.
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I think they dropped a comma. "Place all your trust in the AI, peasant."
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more appropriate use of technology (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well, the game was originally designed to teach how dangerous monopolies are, and it never succeeded at that.
Who decides what is the wrong lesson? (Score:2)
The AI banker is teaching exactly the lesson it was intended to teach.
Re:Who decides what is the wrong lesson? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Who decides what is the wrong lesson? (Score:1)
It does not teach anything at all. It models a bizarre market that basically canâ(TM)t exist. Itâ(TM)s a highly deflationary market that presumes the bank must raise capital and is a motivated seller. The fun of the game is at the start you get a massive amount of cash that allows you to be a JP Morgan type actor who has money they can afford to lose and is interested in a longer view where asset prices eventually recover and money supply starts to expand again, although itâ(TM)s authors m
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You're a hoot at parties, aren't you?
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Yeah.. considering monopoly has already become an icon for teaching the opposite lesson it was intended, I am not sure what baseline these people are talking fromi.
Maybe Monopoly should be treated as a game rather than a "teaching tool". I don't think "spend your money as quick as possible to buy the most expensive things possible in order to gain money back" is the best lesson to "teach" in all but a few examples.
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Which was not the original lesson of the game at all, but rather that rents enriched property owners and impoverished tenants. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Who decides what is the wrong lesson? (Score:5, Informative)
The GP is referring to the fact that the original Monopoly game was specifically created as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies, [wikipedia.org] as understood by some economic models of the time.
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Bankers Stealing (Score:2)
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People who can cheat, will cheat. Machines are honest till the first person learn to hack it
Recent article comments suggest that slashdot no longer understands this.
The other lesson children learned from monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
Handling and counting money and paying for things in cash.
The banks don't want that to continue either...
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Pretty much, yes. Less cash means more control.
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games and education (Score:2)
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It always devolved into who could convince the other players to let them win, or alternatively into an hours long dice spamming session until everyone accidentally bankrupted themselves.
The entire game design is flawed.
Re:games and education (Score:4, Interesting)
You were playing it wrong.
Back in my bachelor days, I lived in a house with 4 other guys and almost every day of the week, 3 or 4 of us would be playing Monopoly at least once per evening. We were ruthless to eachother, and definitely played to win.
We had a few house rules that kept the game going, however. One, if you didn't call "rent" on somebody landing on your property before the next die roll, too bad so sad. You did not have to wait for a rent transaction to finish before taking your own turn, however... and it was the norm for the next person to be rolling and moving their token while the previous player was doing any post move parts of their turn. Two, absolutely all trading and purchases that you intended to carry out must be completed *before* you rolled the dice, and only on your own turn, unless the person whose turn it is has decided to include you in a trade. Unless you rolled doubles and could move again, the dice were fair game for the next player as soon as it was known which square you would land on. This would lead to the owner often calling rent before the token had even been advanced. There was a $50 fine (payable as any fine would be if you landed on chance or community chest) if you called rent on any property that did not belong to you. Three, it was required that you could not immediately buy hotels on a property that had not yet been developed, but you must first have four houses on a property for at least one full turn before upgrading to a hotel there. This meant that if there were housing shortages because there are too many houses being used, then hotel purchases could not be completed by anyone who did not already have enough houses themselves. Four, all money must be kept visible to other players, such that your approximate wealth could always be relatively accurately estimated by any other player. This would greatly impact strategy, as you determine which players are most able to afford to do certain things on their next turn.
We all recognized that having monopolies anywhere on the board was vastly more desirable than having none, and generally once the last property was sold, the player whose turn it was at the time would open the table for trades, because especially if there were four or more of us, it was unlikely that anyone had a monopoly at this time. Trading to let other people get monopolies was not done so much to give other people any greater chance of winning as much as it was done to strategically try and optimize one's own chances of winning by acquiring one's own monopolies through trade, because ultimately, you cannot win the game if you don't have at least one monopoly. Highly different valued monopolies could easily be traded, usually with a cash incentive on one person's part, but sometimes even as a straight trade (dependent highly on the players' liquidity at the time of trade) because of the realization that development is generally faster on the lower valued properties... and if your opponents keep landing on your properties, they will often not have enough cash to upgrade their own monopolies, ideally before they have had a chance to upgrade much themselves. It's a gamble, and it ultimately depends on enough people landing on your property to keep yourself liquidated enough to keep upgrading your property, while hopefully leaving your opponents without enough cash to upgrade theirs. This factored into how much cash would typically be demanded in exchange for a highly desired property at trading time. If anyone acquired a monopoly before this point in the game, there'd usually be a strong bias against that player for the rest of the game, and they would often be excluded from being allowed to trade, or at the very least, demands for trading with them would run pretty high against them, usually requiring a large cash incentive. This trading session would usually only take a minute or two, and the game would resume, becoming a much higher stakes game at that point.
While I know it's not part of the ac
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An interesting read. Thanks for sharing! Of course I've always played with the "Free parking lottery" house rule. My other house rules included trades could be very creative: "I'll sell you this orange property to give you a monopoly, if I never owe rent on the orange for the entire rest of the game, even if you later sell the properties." That quote didn't start out that long, but grew as we learned to just swap monopolies to clear any previous no-rent agreements, and had to then make the no-rent clauses a
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No you.
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Re: games and education (Score:2)
Totally agree. Since when was Monopoly an educational game? If anything it's a lesson on the dangers of monopolies and unrestricted capitalism.
Re: games and education (Score:5, Insightful)
If anything it's a lesson on the dangers of monopolies and unrestricted capitalism.
Yep. Those are the lessons Monopoly was always intended to teach [smithsonianmag.com].
Since when was Monopoly an educational game?
If something teaches a lesson, it's educational. You even recognized the lesson it was intended to teach, so why would you question whether it's an educational game?
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If something teaches a lesson, it's educational. You even recognized the lesson it was intended to teach, so why would you question whether it's an educational game?
It may have been intended to be, but that's not why most people purchase it or play it.
It also sucks at education. Even by the standards of a board game it's basically nothing like how the economy or business world really works.
Also, only with welfare do you get $200 just for passing Go ...
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Always took shortcuts (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm way into the hundreds, probably over a thousand (I hate the game).
All fees to Free Parking FTW!
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We played with the fees to free parking as well :)
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Playing according to the rules actually makes Monopoly shorter and somewhat less mindnumbingly boring (still mindnumbingly boring, only slightly less so).
The best way to play Monopoly is to throw it in the trash and play any other game.
Like Wargames, the only way to win at Monopoly is not to play.
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Modern alternate rules (Score:2)
Choose a ruleset according to your politics . . .
Trump Monopoly: Other players lend you money to build hotels. You default, yet they lend to you again the next time.
Elizabeth Warren Monopoly: railroads replaced with Indian reservations--but you suddenly lose them 30 minutes into the game!
AOC monopoly: like, you just print more money when you need it; the new monetary economics is *REAL*, you white bigot!
Kamal Harris Monopoly: build your monopolies, but once a double-five is followed by a double-six, yo
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we had neighbors up the road who won the lottery ... The wife had a thing for cop cars and she bought her husband a rolls Royce and painted it blue so she could be driven around in it.
I mean... this is obviously a made up story but what the hell are you smoking that makes you think cops roll around in Rolls Royces?
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t teaches you nothing. What do first person shooters teach you?
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t teaches you nothing. What do first person shooters teach you?
To shoot everyone else before they have a chance to shoot you.
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The true lesson of Monopooly: (Score:2)
Then another round of the exact same thing next week.
Boring game (Score:5, Insightful)
Monopoly is such a boring game. The game mechanics make plays very long, and the final part of the game is agonizing, because in most plays the winner is clear a long time before finishing the game. I know the game is called "Monopoly", and eventually one player gets it all, but the game is boring. It is amazing they managed to make so many variants and sell so many units.
In the boardgamegeek site, it ranks 17,246 [boardgamegeek.com] out of 17,254 ranked board games [boardgamegeek.com], with an average rating of only 4.4 by more than 24K people. The variant with the best ranking is the Mario Bros version [boardgamegeek.com] launched in 2017, with a 6.6. I doubt that adding voice controls and AI will make it any funnier.
You're not actually playing by the rules. (Score:1)
Nearly nobody plays by the actual rules. People even refuse to play.that way, because they think it is "wrong".
A game, by the real rules, does not take long, and doesn't suck.
It teaches you, however, that capitalism and monopolies are evil, and why. And that is, of course, nit something Americans are said to ever accept. (Cue the downmods.)
Re:You're not actually playing by the rules. (Score:5, Informative)
It teaches you, however, that capitalism and monopolies are evil, and why. And that is, of course, nit something Americans are said to ever accept. (Cue the downmods.)
No true capitalist would waste a finite resource like a mod point on an Anonymous Coward post.
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It teaches you that in capitalism, one person will end up with all the money (mostly by just waiting in jail) while the rest of society crumbles into bankrupcy.
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Hipster community hates on game that has sold 250+ million copies. News at 11.
Funny how seemingly every well-known, mass-market game ranks in the 17000s. That says something, but it's not the message that you think that it is.
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It teaches you that most people aren't into board games and only buy them for occasions like Christmas. Monopoly is objectively a poor game. You know who's going to win fairly early on but it still takes ages to finish everybody else off.
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Ah, the stereotypical ignorant masses counterargument.
You missed this part: "Funny how seemingly every well-known, mass-market game ranks in the 17000s."
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Here [imgur.com] is a good way of dealing with it.
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Playing by the published rules make it near certain that once one player has enough of a monopoly they will then dominate the game and very quickly win ... ...no-one plays by these rules and all the rules they change/add make the game fairer and more balanced .... i.e. they take away the advantages of getting a monopoly which is the point of the game
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I played a reworked version of Monopoly that was intended to be much more mathematically balanced. That is, getting property later came with advantages that balanced out the lost opportunities of getting property early, so it wasn't quite so "up to the die roll" to see who won. It split you into two groups, landlords and renters if I remember right, you chose which group you were at the start of the game.
It was awful. 100x worse than Monopoly. Everyone's odds were so even that nobody could get an advantage
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Monopoly isn't boring because it's long, it's boring because it imitates life. If I want to experience life, I go live it. Nobody would play SimCity if they had to do an EIR before they could place a zone, or if you couldn't place roads because of the three-assed salamander, or if you couldn't place wind turbines because of nimbyism.
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I know what your sating but the three-ass salamander sounds like something from South Park.
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I know what your sating but the three-ass salamander sounds like something from South Park.
And now for something completely different, a salamander with three buttocks.
Re: Boring game (Score:2)
Problem is audience (Score:2)
In the boardgamegeek site, it ranks 17,246 out of 17,254 ranked board games, with an average rating of only 4.4 by more than 24K people
That is obviously because, no offense, the rating is from a group of shall we say, rule adherents.
Most of the people I know who play Monopoly have many rule variations that make the game more fun, and quicker, to play.
Also who said you have to play until the game reaches the defined end state? You know we can usually all see very quickly which way the wind is blowing and de
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In my experience, the most common reason for the game playing long is because the people playing don't actually follow the rules - the biggest one being that if you land on a square and don't buy it, it should go up immediately for auction.
The other one is the odd rule about putting fines on "free parking" and th
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Playing by the actual rules makes it less slow, but it is still slow, just not unbearably so.
When my family played, my Dad - who loathes Monopoly with a passion - always insisted on the auction rule. At the time, I thought it was a rule he invented to make the game quicker, because nobody else I knew played the game that way.
I'd much rather play a couple of rounds of Exploding Kittens. That's educational too. It taught me that my twelve year old angelic nephew could be a devious bastard when motivated.
Missed opportunities (Score:5, Funny)
They could have made the game even more modern and realistic.
1. Every turn 2% of your money goes to the Bank to pay for your account.
2. Random chance that another player hacks you and cleans your account out.
3. Random chance the bank invests in crappy Credit Default Swaps and needs to be rescued, at your expense.
4. Random chance the bank will refuse to mortgage or buy back improvements.
5. It should come with an App that mines your mobile for private information, bonus points if it correctly finds your nudes, and blackmails you with it for monopoly money or it will send the information to the other players. If you pay, the other players will know you did.
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Whoever modded this funny must have been busy blowing his lottery money in Tijuana for the last decade or two :D.
It depends (Score:2)
The old system taught kids that the banker steals from his clients and tries to get their money 24/7.
That prepared the kids for jobs at Wells Fargo or one of the other crooks.
Better teaching. (Score:2)
Teaching kids how to count and manage physical money is the wrong lesson these days. This is often typified here on /. Where people often talk about the benefits of cash because they can control their spending.
How about we instead teach people to control spending without something physical, it's a far more important lesson for the future.
But still flip the table tough.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: The original lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
What is it about monopoly that makes kids play it for hours on end?
Because, they don't follow the true rules of the game. They play by mom-rules. If one follows the rules, then the game only lasts about an hour. It is, in fact, a very cut-throat game. But, this leads to hurt feelings for kids so the parents remove some of the rules. One of the first rules to go is the one where if a player lands on an unowned property and doesn't buy it, then it goes up for auction to the highest bidder.
We aren't going to do the auctions anymore because Tommy wasn't able to buy the last property to make a set and he started crying"
Anti-monopoly (Score:1)
For a board game pir8ed from a Quaker women where it was originally meant to teach about greed its already been twisted and turned around so nothing new here.
That is not what monopoly teaches (Score:2)
When played by the mom-rules, it teaches patience, planning,how rules can effect outcome, and how government regulation can be detrimental
best version of monopoly (Score:5, Interesting)
realism (Score:2)
Does the bank support apartheid? Does it open accounts in your name without permission? Does the bank charge hold deposits for a trip around the board, but process withdrawals immediately, then charge you for overdrafting? Is the bank closed one out of seven trips around the board? It seems like some real educational opportunities are being missed here.
Much left out (Score:2)
Sure it teaches the wrong lessons. They completely left out bribing the housing inspectors who tie you up with red tape.
They also completely left out bribing congressmen who drool at the prospect of bribe enrichment as they contemplate still more expensive housing regulations that may or may not pass.
Paradox! (Score:2)
Betteridge's law of headlines says "No"
This is Slashdot where everything is bad, so that says "yes".
Monopoly reform now! (Score:2)
I went through a phase of being totally crazy about the game when I was little. At the time we lived in a cold climate with long snowbound winters, so the family played games that went on for days. I became the only eight-year-old Republican in town. But it’s time to update the old game, so I have some suggestions.
1. Today’s Monopoly money is Bitcoin. After every dice throw on your turn, you have to multiply the total money you have by a positive or negative volatility factor to find its value i
Built-in Obsolescence (Score:2)
Pretty sure half the reason is so the battery will die and you'll have to buy the game all over again. People need to stop buying stuff with batteries that don't need batteries.
Really does not reflect real life (Score:2)
Financial experts, however, remained on the fence about the game's educational value... "Hey, Monopoly cheaters. Here's a version that won't let you sneak extra hundreds from the bank or neglect to pay your taxes."
See, exactly, the new Monopoly is totally not reflecting real life use of money.
Yes, teach how to manage money with current tools! (Score:2)
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Yes but..... (Score:2)
"Hey, Monopoly cheaters. Here's a version that won't let you sneak extra hundreds from the bank or neglect to pay your taxes."
Yes, but it also won't allow you to trade properties (which a lot of people like to do) or strike side deals, which can make the game much more interesting and playable.
This is another case of "Let's do it because we can, not because it makes anything better."
Or maybe, "Let's use some whiz-bang tech even though there's no need to and makes the user experience worse."
'Cashless': just another form of surveillance (Score:2)
Defeats the whole purpose of the game (Score:2)
Alexa, Siri, Cortana? (Score:2)
The new technology may appeal to kids used to interacting with voice-activated digital assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana.
You can hear someone at Google say "Ouch!"
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Obey monocle wearing rich guys, as they are your masters.
More so for some people [blogspot.com]
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You've failed to give a reason why deterioration of mental math skills is a negative in the age of calculators and computers.
IMO, this is a natural and reasonable result of progress. People literally have a full scientific calculator in their pocket everywhere they go. It is becoming the norm in the service industry for things like tips to be calculated for you on the ticket or point-of-sale console. Most people pay in credit, rather than cash, so counting money is significantly less important than recogniz