Day 223: Monopoly and good/bad game design

This week my writing for games class will have, as their homework, the task of re-envisioning the narrative of Monopoly so that it is a better game.

Monopoly is polarizing. Some (a small select few anymore, but some) people view it as a fantastic game. Others view it as nearly impossible to finish with four players, a frustrating and in ways inevitable game where the end is usually determined early but plays out slowly.

That should make sense to anyone who knows the game’s origins. It actually started as something called The Landlord Game and was created to be a commentary on capitalism and, basically, slumlords. If you don’t gain the best assets during the asset building part of Monopoly, you suffer until the end comes for you, usually at the hands of the people who did better.

Knowing how polarizing it is, Monopoly became a sort of challenge for me to present to my writing students. We know that Monopoly is popular but is very few people’s favorite (or even in their top list of favorites) game. But I have always wondered if that is because the game itself is badly designed or because the narrative equates it to a reality that is too familiar and hence becomes boring, overbearing, or outright uncomfortable.

So the assignment I’m giving them–which I gave once before but received only so-so responses to, I think because I rushed them– is this: without changing the mechanics and rules of Monopoly (other than renaming them), turn it into a different game with a different narrative.

That means the following things must be true:

1. Each player must begin the game with 1500 of some sort of consumable/spendable item
2. Each player must roll a d6 to determine order of participation
3. Each player then, in their turn order, rolls 2d6 and advances that number of spaces around the board.
4. The squares on the board must do, mechanically, what they do (you get 200 of the consumable for passing the start again, certain pieces can be purchased by landing on them, certain squares are color coded into sets (getting a full set will allow you to add piece to that, upping the currency value), certain pieces trigger drawing a card, etc. The rules are all here.
5. the new narrative that the student creates cannot specifically be “you buy property” and they are encouraged to move as far from that as creatively possible.

My hope is that the activity will allow for the students to see the value of the game’s mechanics, and it also serves as an example of how writing for games on a team would work in the real world. Often a writer will receive a set of mechanics and a basic concept and have to do the heavy writing. But the writer on most games doesn’t change the engine, or the overall rule system. That’s what the designer is responsible for.

To attempt to make this easier for my students, I’m going to do a quick version of what I want them to do myself. I’m not going to flesh it all the way out, because that’s a two-week long homework assignment for my class and this is just one of my blog posts for a single day, but I’m hoping this will give them a sense of what I mean. I’m even going to make a little image to go with mine.

The name of my game is World of Wrestling. WoW, right?

Here’s the premise. You are a young creative type with an eye for wrestling talent and the desire to “book” a promotion. To be part of the creative team for a show, you have to trade in your “good brother” points– essentially your work experience– to buy a piece of a program’s card. If you get all of the pieces of a card, you become the head booker and you can draft specific high-caliber talent (the houses) and eventually set a barn-burning feud (the hotels). You gain good brother points (money) by people watching your segments on your show (landing on it).

So the board would look like this:

The rules of the game would change in the following ways:

1. Each of the colored spaces is a one-hour segment of TV programming in a given week.
2. If a person gains the right to book (write) all of the spaces of a specific color, that person can use points to lure in special performers, up to five per hour block. Once the fifth is obtained, the booker can add a main-event caliber feud to the hour.
3. People who land on your booked hours must pay you in good brother points (in this case they’re ratings)
4. The non-color spaces have different values
   1. The question marks require you to draw a card, one of three types: shoot cards which mean that one of your employees has broken the script, talent draft cards which mean that someone has changed from one show to another, and backstage segment cards, which indicate that a specific event has happened on your show.
   2. There are two small promotions that cannot gain talent due to having only one hour of TV. One is WWE’s cruiserweight show 205 Live! and ECW’s One Night Only. A person landing on them still gets you good brother points, but that’s maxed out upon getting that job.
   3. There are “do the job” spaces where you lose points
   4. There are spaces that are community value adds (I missed one on the left side– it’s the blank space). These are places where you (and others, potentially) can gain more viewership due to unforeseen events.
   5. The center of each side is a major faction that existed on more-than-one show. Gaining them gains you the fandom and clout of that brand, but you cannot add talent to their ranks.
   6. You can hit a wellness violation and get sent to rehab/suspended
   7. You can pause to read the internet dirt sheets, which loses and gains you nothing.
   8. If you pass the quarterly review, you gain 200 good brother points for continuing your career
5. Your goal is to build so much booking influence that you can merge show rosters (by booking all of more than one show) and eventually subjugate the other three potential bookers to working under you or leaving the business.

If I were going to turn this into something I’d submit to my class, I would then personalize the roles of the bookers (the token pieces), would create talent standees (for the houses) and feud standees (for the hotels). I’d generate all the cards with flavor text that is consistent with their respective themes. And I’d develop a way of denoting Good Brother points, perhaps with Chad 2Badd and Tex Ferguson heads.

The goal of reworking this narrative would be that the players would approach it in a different way. Notice that I still didn’t change the mechanics. Having done this little exercise, I can think of ways to change the mechanics (and I almost want to make this into a wrestling game now), but the hopes would be that if you had four fans playing this game, their conversations and motivations would be shaped by this narrative and the game would hence be fun. There is, mechanically, no differences other than numerical values in the colored squares, but a fan of a particular show might want that show, or a fan of a particular style or faction (or historical period).

This is how you rework an engine.

We’ll have to think hard about whether or not it’s a better game than Monopoly, but the story is absolutely different, even if the goal, in the end, isn’t.