The grim We're Using Up The Earth And Nobody Cares But Us crowd is setting its sights on board games. This is the 75th anniversary of Monopoly, which provides an opportunity to remind us that, though we have the "bleakest economic climate since the 1930s" when the game was introduced, it's really even worse than that:
Then again, though its vocabulary is depressingly current, the game is in other ways completely inappropriate today. Instead, the great board game of this era is The Settlers of Catan. That game, which came out in Germany in 1995, is not a household name like Monopoly, and given that electronic games have eclipsed board games, it may never be. But it presents a world in which resources are limited and fortunes are intertwined, and serves as a model for solving contemporary problems such as trade imbalances, nuclear proliferation, and climate change. If we are reaching the end of a period of American supremacy, a winner-take-all game such as Monopoly teaches bad habits.
We can't even have our harmless little diversions to take our minds off real life occasionally. Even when playing board games, we have to be aware of our limited resources and intertwined fortunes, and understand that such New Age enlightenment will never be possible if we cling to bad, bad games such as Mionopoly with its winner-take-all denial of the end of American supremacy. Bet it's a barrel of fun to play Settlers of Catan at a party, with its "lesson in a world where resources are finite and unevenly distributed."
