After Ralph Anspach, an economics professor at San Francisco State University, created Anti-Monopoly -which gamified monopoly busting versus monopoly building, and only sent monopoly holders to jail-back in the 1970s, Parker Brothers sued him for trademark infringement. To be totally honest, it didn’t take very much digging or much more than a second thought to realize that the very obvious reason I didn’t know about Anti-Monopoly was that Parker Brothers, the toy and game behemoth behind Monopoly, didn’t want me to. Anti-Monopoly, the game referenced in Plion’s tweet, sold hundreds of thousands of copies (granted, a mere fraction of Monopoly’ s hundreds of millions), but had never seeped into my cultural diet. A game about the ills of corporate monopolies? Sign me up!! But it also stood out because Monopoly is one of those cultural products, like say, Shakespeare and The Beatles, that is so deeply ingrained in the modern collective consciousness that it astounds me to think there was something I didn’t know about it, even if that something exists outside of the officially licensed universe of the game. The tweet caught my eye for obvious reasons: Games? Love ‘em.
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