5 ms·

I love how everyone who wins at monopoly acts like a right arse to the other people and it turns out it was just rolls of the dice that decided if they won... I

I love how everyone who wins at monopoly acts like a right arse to the other people and it turns out it was just rolls of the dice that decided if they won... I certainly always feel like I deserve to have won.

rdtsc 7y ago
> it turns out it was just rolls of the dice Often that is how things happen in the real world. When people win they look back and attribute it purely to their own hard work. Some act like assholes, too. So at least in that respect it is a good model :-)
mikestew 7y ago
As the title implies, the game was designed to be a lot like real life, and it sounds like that from your POV it has succeeded.
- epistasis 7y ago
  Reminds me of the story of the lucky coin: > If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too. https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?s=21 https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?...
  - dagav 7y ago
    And the 1,048,576 other coins who never tried to flip, because they knew that getting 10 in a row was just luck, will live lives of quiet desperation.
  - misterbwong 7y ago
    I get your (and parent/grandparent's) points but this line of thinking leads to unnecessarily cynical and pessimistic thinking rather than recognition that success/failure are inherently probabilistic. Yes, plenty is out of our control and luck is often ignored. Yes, some people get really lucky and some people get really unlucky and it sucks. However, this doesn't mean that "skill, faith, guts, & determination" have nothing to do with their success. These behaviors/traits increase your chances at success and positive outcomes, period.
    - lukifer 7y ago
      It's a paint-mixing problem: every success story is some blend of skill, merit, grit, pre-existing resources, and dumb luck; and post-hoc, it's non-trivial to tease out the exact causes and proportions in a success story. From the point of an individual actor, I agree: it's always correct to maximize your agency, knowing full-well that there are factors outside your control that might unfairly sink you (or, unfairly cause someone to out-compete you despite shortcomings). That in no way contradicts the idea that there may be ecosystemic benefits to providing resources to maximize the odds of success. To use a trivial example: if I'm a hardware vendor hosting an app store, the success of each app will be a blend of skill and luck. But if I provide tools like ratings, analytics, and discoverability, I can potentially increase the odds that meritocratic apps succeed. (Take it as read that poor interventions could also make this go the other direction.) One curious quirk is that in the space of game design, this luck/skill dichotomy is flipped on its head, and turned into an explicit goal: that a satisfying game should permit the winner to believe they won on skill, while the loser believes they lost on luck. There's a great talk from MtG creator Richard Garfield on the subject [0]; I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions what inferences we should draw from this in the "game" of market competition. :) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o
  - Natsu 7y ago
    As a counter-point, there's also the tale of the FPS, where the person who has spent 10,000 hours mastering the game will invariably hear that he's a cheating, hacking n00b when he beats the same guy 20 times in a row due to "luck" despite not using any cheats, because the other guy is an idiot with no strategy who can't even aim.
    - dorgo 7y ago
      On the other hand noobs are more likely to score by pure luck. In poker there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_beat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_beat
  - refurb 7y ago
    This is overly black and white thinking. “Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters.” When in reality, it’s luck and effort that matter. You can’t control the luck part, but you can control the effort part. It's similar to health - a great deal of how healthy you are has to do with luck (e.g. genetics). If someone said "the health game is rigged so there is no use in trying to be healthy" we'd think they were nuts.
    - epistasis 7y ago
      > Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters. I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion from the story, it's setting up a situation that is pure luck, and asserting that people will take credit for their luck. It's not saying that everything in the real world is actually luck.
- vsareto 7y ago
  Give everyone 10x the bank's cash as inheritance and you'll also learn a lot of real life lessons from it.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    A more realistic solution would be to have one player start with half of the bank and already owning most of the properties. Two other players start with the regular starting cash. Everybody else starts with nothing. Then they must praise the first player for being such a stunning businessman if he wins.
    - vsareto 7y ago
      A bunch of rich people competing with one another even though they have everything they'll ever need is pretty realistic too.
mdszy 7y ago
Just like capitalism!
nck4222 7y ago
Believe it or not there is an element of strategy in Monopoly (or can be, if you take the time to learn it). Not all spaces are landed on equally, and not all properties have the same return on investment. Playing with common house rules tends to remove elements of strategy.
- lisper 7y ago
  That is true, but the rolls of the dice still have vastly more influence on the outcome than the very limited decisions that players can make. In order to decide whether or not to buy Park Place you have to land on it first. Not unlike real life.
  - nck4222 7y ago
    >Park Place you have to land on it first. Not necessarily. The games rules include an auction that is frequently removed in house rules. What's supposed to happen is if the player who lands on the space (Player A) doesn't buy it from the bank, the property is auctioned to all players. Maybe no one owns Boardwalk yet, and Player A doesn't want to try and get the Park Place/Boardwalk monopoly. Or maybe Boardwalk is owned by Player B but Player B doesn't have any cash, so Player A thinks they can block the monopoly while paying less to the bank. Or maybe Player B does have the cash but Player A knows that B is desperate for the monopoly, so they want to drive the price up and force them to pay more. There's more to than just rolling dice and landing on spaces.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      Usually people don't pass up the chance to buy property though. It's not that there's a house rule against the auction, it just never comes up unless you have someone who is already losing badly that lands on a space that has somehow not already been snapped up.
      - nck4222 7y ago
        Right, that goes back to my original comment: >there is an element of strategy in Monopoly (or can be, if you take the time to learn it). Buying every property you land on immediately from the bank for listed price is not an optimal strategy.
koheripbal 7y ago
Then you aren't playing correctly. The way to win monopoly is in trading cards to gain monopolies. The winner is almost always the person who makes the most deals. A player can win the game simple by making the most deals with other players, even if they are a loser in every single one of those deals. It's far more a lesson on negotiations and trading - ie. business lessons, not capitalism lessons.
travisoneill1 7y ago
It's all about negotiating better property trades. The dice have little to do with it.
- dkonofalski 7y ago
  That's not true at all. If you roll dice and only land on empty properties and corners, you'll have nothing to negotiate with. Negotiation only works if both parties have something of value and the dice determine whether players have something of value.
  - aeternum 7y ago
    If you land on nothing, you have a large amount of cash compared to other players which you can leverage for negotiation. The game isn't just who can get a monopoly first, but who can also improve it the fastest. In my experience, players often overvalue the expensive properties due to maximum rent but don't take into account the capital and therefore time required to improve them.

rdtsc 7y ago

> it turns out it was just rolls of the dice Often that is how things happen in the real world. When people win they look back and attribute it purely to their own hard work. Some act like assholes, too. So at least in that respect it is a good model :-)

mikestew 7y ago

As the title implies, the game was designed to be a lot like real life, and it sounds like that from your POV it has succeeded.

epistasis 7y ago
Reminds me of the story of the lucky coin: > If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too. https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?s=21 https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?...
- dagav 7y ago
  And the 1,048,576 other coins who never tried to flip, because they knew that getting 10 in a row was just luck, will live lives of quiet desperation.
- misterbwong 7y ago
  I get your (and parent/grandparent's) points but this line of thinking leads to unnecessarily cynical and pessimistic thinking rather than recognition that success/failure are inherently probabilistic. Yes, plenty is out of our control and luck is often ignored. Yes, some people get really lucky and some people get really unlucky and it sucks. However, this doesn't mean that "skill, faith, guts, & determination" have nothing to do with their success. These behaviors/traits increase your chances at success and positive outcomes, period.
  - lukifer 7y ago
    It's a paint-mixing problem: every success story is some blend of skill, merit, grit, pre-existing resources, and dumb luck; and post-hoc, it's non-trivial to tease out the exact causes and proportions in a success story. From the point of an individual actor, I agree: it's always correct to maximize your agency, knowing full-well that there are factors outside your control that might unfairly sink you (or, unfairly cause someone to out-compete you despite shortcomings). That in no way contradicts the idea that there may be ecosystemic benefits to providing resources to maximize the odds of success. To use a trivial example: if I'm a hardware vendor hosting an app store, the success of each app will be a blend of skill and luck. But if I provide tools like ratings, analytics, and discoverability, I can potentially increase the odds that meritocratic apps succeed. (Take it as read that poor interventions could also make this go the other direction.) One curious quirk is that in the space of game design, this luck/skill dichotomy is flipped on its head, and turned into an explicit goal: that a satisfying game should permit the winner to believe they won on skill, while the loser believes they lost on luck. There's a great talk from MtG creator Richard Garfield on the subject [0]; I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions what inferences we should draw from this in the "game" of market competition. :) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o
- Natsu 7y ago
  As a counter-point, there's also the tale of the FPS, where the person who has spent 10,000 hours mastering the game will invariably hear that he's a cheating, hacking n00b when he beats the same guy 20 times in a row due to "luck" despite not using any cheats, because the other guy is an idiot with no strategy who can't even aim.
  - dorgo 7y ago
    On the other hand noobs are more likely to score by pure luck. In poker there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_beat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_beat
- refurb 7y ago
  This is overly black and white thinking. “Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters.” When in reality, it’s luck and effort that matter. You can’t control the luck part, but you can control the effort part. It's similar to health - a great deal of how healthy you are has to do with luck (e.g. genetics). If someone said "the health game is rigged so there is no use in trying to be healthy" we'd think they were nuts.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    > Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters. I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion from the story, it's setting up a situation that is pure luck, and asserting that people will take credit for their luck. It's not saying that everything in the real world is actually luck.
vsareto 7y ago
Give everyone 10x the bank's cash as inheritance and you'll also learn a lot of real life lessons from it.
- jandrese 7y ago
  A more realistic solution would be to have one player start with half of the bank and already owning most of the properties. Two other players start with the regular starting cash. Everybody else starts with nothing. Then they must praise the first player for being such a stunning businessman if he wins.
  - vsareto 7y ago
    A bunch of rich people competing with one another even though they have everything they'll ever need is pretty realistic too.

mdszy 7y ago

Just like capitalism!

nck4222 7y ago

Believe it or not there is an element of strategy in Monopoly (or can be, if you take the time to learn it). Not all spaces are landed on equally, and not all properties have the same return on investment. Playing with common house rules tends to remove elements of strategy.

lisper 7y ago
That is true, but the rolls of the dice still have vastly more influence on the outcome than the very limited decisions that players can make. In order to decide whether or not to buy Park Place you have to land on it first. Not unlike real life.
- nck4222 7y ago
  >Park Place you have to land on it first. Not necessarily. The games rules include an auction that is frequently removed in house rules. What's supposed to happen is if the player who lands on the space (Player A) doesn't buy it from the bank, the property is auctioned to all players. Maybe no one owns Boardwalk yet, and Player A doesn't want to try and get the Park Place/Boardwalk monopoly. Or maybe Boardwalk is owned by Player B but Player B doesn't have any cash, so Player A thinks they can block the monopoly while paying less to the bank. Or maybe Player B does have the cash but Player A knows that B is desperate for the monopoly, so they want to drive the price up and force them to pay more. There's more to than just rolling dice and landing on spaces.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Usually people don't pass up the chance to buy property though. It's not that there's a house rule against the auction, it just never comes up unless you have someone who is already losing badly that lands on a space that has somehow not already been snapped up.
    - nck4222 7y ago
      Right, that goes back to my original comment: >there is an element of strategy in Monopoly (or can be, if you take the time to learn it). Buying every property you land on immediately from the bank for listed price is not an optimal strategy.

koheripbal 7y ago

Then you aren't playing correctly. The way to win monopoly is in trading cards to gain monopolies. The winner is almost always the person who makes the most deals. A player can win the game simple by making the most deals with other players, even if they are a loser in every single one of those deals. It's far more a lesson on negotiations and trading - ie. business lessons, not capitalism lessons.

travisoneill1 7y ago

It's all about negotiating better property trades. The dice have little to do with it.

dkonofalski 7y ago
That's not true at all. If you roll dice and only land on empty properties and corners, you'll have nothing to negotiate with. Negotiation only works if both parties have something of value and the dice determine whether players have something of value.
- aeternum 7y ago
  If you land on nothing, you have a large amount of cash compared to other players which you can leverage for negotiation. The game isn't just who can get a monopoly first, but who can also improve it the fastest. In my experience, players often overvalue the expensive properties due to maximum rent but don't take into account the capital and therefore time required to improve them.