But I feel like if we can't get the story of Monopoly right. And I remember often, when you tell people you're doing a book about board games, they think you're totally nuts. Wall Street, with politics, with foreign affairs, the job is to get it right. I think that my main business is as a news person. On why she thinks she obsessed over the Monopoly story Your purchase helps support NPR programming. So he creates this game called Anti-Monopoly and it isn't long before he hears from Parker Bros.' lawyers, who said, you know, you need to stop making this game.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Monopolists Author Mary Pilon And at the time the OPEC oil cartels were really big news there was a lot of cynicism because of Watergate. He felt like Monopoly the game was teaching people things that were bad in real life. He was living in Berkeley, he had two young boys and he had played Monopoly, of course, and thought that the world needed a more philosophically pleasing version of the game. was a professor at San Francisco State University. On the Monopoly lawsuit that helped resurface Magie's story And at the time she put her patent application in, fewer than 1 percent of patents in the United States came from women. And I was very surprised: I thought, you know, female game designers, they're getting more traction today but it's still unusual. And at the time that she patented her game, it was before women had the right to vote. She was an outspoken feminist, she had acted, she had done some performing, she had written some poetry and she was a game designer. Lizzie Magie was a pretty astonishing woman. ![]() In 1936, Magie spoke out against the Darrow creation story in the pages of the Washington Evening Star. Darrow got his hands on the game through a Quaker friend - and then sold it to Parker Bros. Her game spread around the country, including to the Quakers of Atlantic City, N.J., who added all their city's street names (Atlantic Avenue, Kentucky Avenue, Park Place). In 1904, Magie patented something called the Landlord's Game, which was, in some great irony, an argument against the concentration of wealth. ![]() The true story of Monopoly begins a few decades before Darrow rolled the dice, with a Washington, D.C., woman named Lizzie Magie. And I actually think the true story is more interesting." I can't even tell you how many times in the last few years people say, 'Oh right! You're doing a book about Monopoly! It was invented in the Great Depression, right?' I mean this thing has stuck like nobody's business. "Who doesn't want to believe that they can go into their basement in one of the nation's darkest hours and create something that will change, you know, their own fate and make everybody rich and make you beloved? I mean, I think that's a great story. "I think the Darrow story, from a publicity standpoint, is a beautiful story," Pilon says. Lizzie Magie's Landlord's Game was an argument against the concentration of wealth.
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