Moody Studio, in collaboration with earthDECKS, produced the short film Game*Changers, which tells the history of how the game Monopoly flipped to contradict its original inventor’s vision and provides a context to explore how Monopoly’s sequel, World Game, can fulfill its inventor’s vision, evolving into a Big Play to save Spaceship Earth, harnessing mobile computing, crowdsourcing, and collaborative tools.
The story of Monopoly starts with the 1879 best-selling book by Henry George, Progress and Poverty. Lizzie Magie envisaged that she could invent a game to teach the anti-monopolistic principles of Henry George, that his concept that a Single Tax on property could discourage the kind of real estate speculation that led to the mortgage crisis of 2009. Magie invented The Landlord’s Game and secured a US patent on the game in 1904,
She then tried to sell her game to Parker Brothers, who rejected it. Charles B. Darrow stole her idea in the 1930s, patented it and sold it to Parker Brothers, calling it Monopoly and using it to expound exactly the opposite principles from those of Henry George and Lizzie Magie, although the board was copied from hers.
LizzieMagie-1906-Landlords-GameOn advice from Parker Brothers lawyers, after purchasing Darrow’s patent and launching the game we now know as Monopoly in 1935, Magie was approached by Parker Brothers in 1936 to buy her latest 1924 patent, which covered two versions of the game, one to teach Henry George’s principles, the other to show the downside of property ownership. Magie agreed to sell her patent for a mere $500 because she was told that her game would be used as a teaching tool. After buying her off, Parker Brothers buried her game and fabricated a story about how Charles Darrow had invented the game. In the 1970s Parker Brothers sued Ralph Anspach for his game Anti-Monopoly, which revived the original principles of the game and was used as a teaching tool, not only by Professor Anspach at San Francisco State University, but at Wharton School of Finance, Columbia University and elsewhere. Anspach fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won in 1983 (Sawyer 2007) by exposing that the concept for the game had been stolen from the original woman inventor. But did Anspach really win? How many people have heard of Lizzie Magie, or Ralph Anspach, or Anti-Monopoly? Hasbro now owns both the trademark for Monopoly and the trademark for Anti-Monopoly (Anspach 1999).
Collaborative intelligence, and its opposite, dis-intelligence, play out over the sweep of history, as each significant discovery, or innovation, or old piece of information, awaits a new context for its reinterpretation, perhaps an “innovation network” that enables its implementation, making a new interpretation possible. Lizzie Magie’s patents of 1904 and 1924 did not make her wealthy, but they became significant many decades later in the context of a lawsuit that cited her prior art to invalidate the Parker Brothers patent (Wolfe 1976).
Wolfe, B. H. (1976). The Monopolization of Monopoly: Lizzie J. Magie. San Francisco Bay Guardian.