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Lizzie Magie, The Landlord’s Game, 1904 https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-landlords-game/ Lizzie Magie created The Landlord’s Game to expose how land monopolies fuel inequality. Inspired by Henry George’s ideas, she designed two rule sets: one rewarding cooperation, the other encouraging monopolies. The latter evolved into Monopoly. Magie was a game designer— + she was a feminist, inventor, and anti-monopolist using play as protest.
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Ironic that Monopoly is now owned and mass-marketed by Hasbro, one of the world’s largest toy corporations, considering its original purpose was to criticize capitalism, not glorify it. Lizzie Magie designed The Landlord’s Game to teach children and adults about the dangers of wealth accumulation and land speculation. Today, Monopoly is sold as a family-friendly game where the goal is to crush your opponents financially—exactly the opposite of what Magie intended. A perfect example of how capitalism absorbs and commercializes even its sharpest critiques: the absurd fact that the cooperative version of the game was buried, and Lizzie Magie’s name was mostly erased from the narrative.
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