By David Futrelle
From time to time, game company Hasbro gets bored and greedy and decides to perk up sales a little with a novelty version of the game Monopoly.
A couple of weeks ago, the company released Monopoly Socialism, a grim evocation of Soviet-style Communism seemingly designed to delight the Fox News crowd. Last year, they put out a similarly satirical version of Monopoly for Millennials, sans real estate, because “you can’t afford it anyway.”
Now the company has released a kind-of, sort-of feminist edition of the game — and Men’s Rights Redditors are crying “misandry.”
In Ms Monopoly, available for pre-order as of today, men get to see what it’s like to get paid less for the same work: Every time women pass “go” they collect $240, while men collect the standard $200.
Naturally, the inhabitants of the Men’s Rights subreddit — wage gap denialists all — don’t find any of this the slightest bit funny.
“That moment when you are so privileged in society that you need a leg up in a board game,” sniffed someone called Sir_Sux_Alot.
“Show boys that even when the rules are perfectly and objective fair to begin with and nothing is holding them back we still feel the need to give girls privilege over boys,” groused 5th_Law_of_Robotics.
“So they’ve taken a perfectly fair and equal game where everyone has the same chance as each other, and made it in to a sexist shit show,” lamented MrHolte.
“So when’s the new Life game come out?” asked Biff64gc.
Women getting discounted college degrees from female only scholarships and are guarenteed a stem or ceo job that pays more because of female affirmative action and men have a 90% chance of not finishing the game due to death or homlessness.
(Yes, these dudes actually believe that in the real world CEO jobs are handed out to women like candy; never mind that less than 7% of the CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women.)
“Well now I have seen it all,” mgtowjoe sighed.
The sad thing is even with 40$ more then men they will spend that one shoes and whatever other useless items that feed ego and not the common good.
Not to mention they talk about instead of properties it’s inventions that women made……. WI-FI…….. Last I heard that was an idea that was founded and proven by Tesla…..
Uh, no. Many people contributed to the invention of WiFi, including Hedy Lamarr, who is the person the game presumably celebrates.
The other invention listed was chocolate ship cookies….. Promoting the art of fattening foods to slam the idea of “healthy at any size” down our throats like a cock in a crappy porno film.
That’s … some interesting imagery there. I wouldn’t have gone directly from “chocolate ship cookies” to “cock shoved down throat” but I guess it does make for some vivid writing.
“Fuck you get woke go broke,” mgtowjoe concluded.
Someone called Ody_ssey bragged he’d beat the women at their own game.
I can guarantee I can still beat feminists in this game. The next 50% of the game is not about who had more money earlier. It becomes about decision making and probability and you need to make quick money management decisions to increase monopoly. They will complain about the game once men starts winning saying the dice is sexist.
NoButtholeNoGood, meanwhile, made the inevitable transphobic joke.
I’d just identify as female whenever I went to play this.
Hilarious.
No one tell these dudes about chess, in which the queen zooms about the board murdering opponents at will while the king stumbles around like some infomercial doofus.
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Here’s a good takedown of the ridiculously bad “socialism” monopoly.
Oh yeah, can I just say as someone who trained as an Electronic Engineer: can Tesla stans just not? I know what Tesla accomplished (thank you, 3rd Year Electrical Machines and 4th Year Radiation & Propagation courses) and while there is no doubt that he was an extremely gifted man who made immeasurable contributions in the field of power generation– thus making the electrified world we take for granted nowadays possible– the popular portrayal of him as an all-round, all-conquering mad-scientist genius is just flat-out wrong. Many of Tesla’s more outrageous ideas simply never panned out, and he retained a lot of obsolete 19th Century views on physics and electromagnetism right through his life (he never accepted the Theory of Relativity, for example). It doesn’t take away from his achievements as an engineer IMO, but the popular perception of Tesla as the supremely gifted naïf unfit for life in our cynical world, and Edison the showman-grifter is inaccurate, especially when Tesla was more than capable of turning on the showmanship himself and making outrageous claims.
Oh, and if Tesla were still around, you can be sure that these MRAs invoking his name so reverently now would be either hating on him for being an immigrant and/ or laughing and calling him a “cuck” for having been swindled by Edison.
Sorry, personal hobby-horse. I’ll shut up now.
(PS When I was refreshing my brain about Tesla on Wikipedia, I ran across a rather appalling episode from the early 20th Century that peripherally involved him. The architect of Tesla’s famous laboratory at Wardenclyffe was designed by a Stanford White who was later murdered by a wealthy industrialist called Harry Kendall Thaw. The details of this affair and how it played out– the sensationalist “yellow journalism” that pushed it as the “Trial of the Century”, Thaw’s family using their wealth to get Thaw off, the treatment of Thaw’s wife, Evelyn Nesbit as the alleged trigger for the murder– just reminded me how little anything has changed in the past century. Thaw could be cut from the same cloth as Trump, Epstein, Weinstein and every other scumbag who thinks their wealth elevates them above the law)
@Cat Mara
The MRAs have had a bit of an obsession with Tesla in the past. My guess is that this is mostly because he was a man and he never got married, so the MGTOWs and incels can claim that he was one of theirs while other misogynists can say that he was a man as if that is an argument.
Why am I not surprised Hasbro is pulling this shit? They have been known to try to sneak in horribly outdated critiques and jabs at socialism, and every other subversive movement in general, in almost all their products, shows for children included.
I can only hope they’ll get boycotted to hell by Gen Z and be driven to bankruptcy in the near future, although it’s not likely given that they seem to be doing well at the moment.
@ Dali
You’ve clearly never dropped a Commodore PET on your foot.
@Diego
My guess is that Hasbro realized that time is limited for board games and so they’re trying to appeal to the cranky grandpa market. This is meant to be something for if you’re a misogynistic old man with a feminist daughter who is raising your grandchildren and you want to make them mad.
I would boycott Hasbro, but then I’d have to give up Scrabble.
@Naglfar:
From Ye Pffft of All Knowledge:
OK, so they might be onto something here…
lol pwned MRAssholes ?
Ah, so one of those “pedestal sexists” then (also, “reverent worship”? Sounds a bit “supreme gentleman” to me). Disappointing, but hardly unusual for his times… but also hardly an ally of the MRA viewpoint either.
@Alan:
(Remembers what the Commodore PET was like, shudders)
Seriously, if you’ve never seen a PET check out this video from the 8-Bit Guy. The damn thing’s chassis was all-metal– it even hinged open like the bonnet of a car!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHbhH7ISL_Y
I once dropped a mid-90s-era IBM 486 machine that I had resurrected as a Linux server on my toe. That was unpleasant, let me tell you: most of the PC industry had gotten the memo by this point that machines didn’t have to be built like they were going to be installed in a 1950s Cold War nuclear bomber, but not IBM. The toenail turned black and fell off in short order.
Kids monopoly is the only version of the game I ever played and enjoyed. It goes for 45 minutes, IIRC. Been many, many years since I have played it (since I was a kid) but I could never play any other version.
I remember playing risk with some friends, it was an overnight affair. It basically went like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNdTLrM8HzA
(UNDERGRAAADS) (now you know how many years it’s been hahaha)
Anyway, I played it once, and learned that my limit on board games is pretty much an hour and a half-two hours, unless I really like the game.
Like the farming game. A eurogame before that was a thing, it’s sort of like monopoly played against the board and not the other players. I quite like that one! Wonder if they have an app version I could buy…
@Rhuu
Ahh risk! The game that is perfectly set up to end friendships and wreak havoc to an otherwise perfect evening.
Yes, I remember trying to instigate people to fight one another whenever someone was about to consolidate presence on a powerful continent, while I turtled and amassed forces in Australia.
It ended with my bestie getting resentful, fucking up my strategy in a straight up kamikaze move, out of pure fucking spite, and staying mad at me for the remainder of the next day.
His brother also won the game, which made things worse for everyone, because he had no strategy whatsoever and deserved it the least.
I wonder who runs the department in Hasbro that comes up with these.
I mean, I don’t wonder, but I do wonder.
@Dali:
Heh. My father cussed out his chess-playing computer on more than one occasion.
I wonder how much computing power it had, compared to an iPhone. Sadly, it’s probably now residing in a landfill somewhere.
RE: Old electronics. I remember how hideously noisy those old Epsom printers were. And Multimate, an old word-processing program. I’d have enjoyed hand-to-hand combat with that monstrosity.
Completely OT, but I saw an adorable caterpillar that looks just like this
I was kind of surprised because it’s nearly fall and in MN. I was thinking it was a butterfly and those typically are larvae in the spring. But nope, the Minnesota DNR page tells me it’s a tiger moth larva and it’s trying to find shelter for the winter, after which it will become this in the spring
Silly thing, but I feel like I’m still learning new things about nature all the time. I’ve never even seen a fall caterpillar before and didn’t know moths stayed caterpillars through the fall and winter.
@Dormousing_it
Though I can’t say for sure without knowing the model of computer, probably far less powerful. Middle of the range computers built even just 10 years ago were somewhat less powerful than a modern iPhone.
@WWTH
Where I live, we call those “wooly bear caterpillars” and they’re fairly common (though I haven’t seen any this season). When I was a kid, I took one and tried to keep it as a pet (in a plastic box filled with leaves), but it died within days due to 6-year-old me’s ineptness at caterpillar habitat construction.
@Naglfar: To put the difference in power between modern processors and those of the 1970s and 1980s in context, Apple alumnus Chris Espinosa recently tweeted:
The Apple II (in various models) was in production between 1977 and 1993, and Apple sold somewhere between 5 and 6 million of them…
Naglfar,
They’re apparently common here too, but I’ve never seen one I don’t think!
I really love caterpillars in general, and I haven’t seen one in ages. I used to find ones that look like the wooly bears, but with a white stripe as well, and I can’t even figure out what they were now. We assumed they were monarch caterpillars as kids, but they weren’t.
@Simon
The first two answers to that takedown are two guys who brag about “buying two right away before the left pulls it”.
Erm… since when can we do that? And are they really bragging about wasting money on a bad game to “own the libs”. Have we devolved that fa- oh, who am I kidding?
-_-
These are the fuzzy caterpillars I remember from when I was a kid!
Wiki page on them. They are called
though we always just called the caterpillars ‘fuzzy caterpillars’ haha.
ETA: @Diego Duarte – never lost friends over it, but I think that’s because I only played the once. XD
I used to find the ones pictured by WWTH and Rhuu, plus this one:
@WWTH:
They’re called wooly bears in the NE US. I see them every fall. It may be too early so far this year, because I haven’t seen any yet.
@Naglfar; Cat Mara:
I’ve read that the unmanned spacecrafts Voyager 1 & 2 had computers with much, much less capacity than iPhones. Simply amazing.
@Katamount:
Good lord, I actually remember that Careers game.
We also had a Mad Magazine board game that was deliberately something of an anti-Monopoly in that you won by losing all your money.
In more modern times, I and my friends have a fair number of board games, though we tend to focus on things like Settlers of Catan, Power Grid, or Puerto Rico. We have Pandemic for the co-operative mode, but one of my friends isn’t fond of it because the game can end up with one person trying to steer everybody else’s turns to maximize everything.
@Dalillama:
I once heard a comedy skit just after Deep Blue had beaten Kasparov that basically spun on the fact that Deep Blue was only good at Chess, and if, say, an earthquake hit the area, Kasparov could still get away.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Ahhh, the Commodore PET. One of the few computers that you could actually destroy just by typing in commands on the keyboard.
(Not joking, look up the ‘killer poke’ some time. Part of the video circuitry was configured by software to handle the multiple possible motherboards, and on at least one of the motherboards if you changed a setting in the video generator by pushing the wrong value into a specific memory location you could overload the controller for the CRT. This was found because that particular memory location could be used on a previous version of the motherboard to disable video output and let the program run faster.)
@Cat Mara, regarding iPhone transistor count vs. Apple ][:
Sounds about right. And the ARM processor used in pretty much every phone was originally deliberately designed for a low transistor count to reduce power usage. Of course, ‘low’ compared to, say, the Intel x86 processors of the time isn’t exactly difficult.
But, yeah, back when I first attended the University of Waterloo in 1986, in one of the tours we were shown the ‘Red Room’. The Red Room was the centrepiece of the Math building built in 1967, and was literally built to house an IBM mainframe that at the time was the largest computer in Canada. Even in 1986 it was noted that there were now desktop computers that were more powerful than the machine that had previously filled this entire room with its own climate control systems.
@Dormousing_It
Voyager 1 & 2 combined have less processing power than the graphing calculator I had in 1990. An iPhone could emulate them more easily than it plays a song.
@Katamount
I had that exact same Star Wars monopoly set!
We also had a tape-based board game that sounds vaguely like Nightmare, which, rather uncreatively, was called
Star Wars: The Interactive Video Board Game. Me and my sister used to play that a lot for the span of a few years. I think my parent’s still have it boxed up somewhere.
I remember that episode of “undergrads”