Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
groups of properties (eight residential groups and the railroad group), she had one
—
and only one—
property in five of them. At this point in the game, the transactions
needed to start flowing if anyone was to get ahead at all. Because of the variety of
Marci's holdings, she was a rather popular person to approach with deals.
At first, we thought she was taking full advantage of her position and holding
out for better offers. Every different combination of offers was made. “I will give
you A for X. No? How about A for Y? B for X? B for Y?� The solicitations were
flying. However, after numerous turns and an exhaustive list of offers from all of
the other players, it became clear to us that she simply was not selling. We began to
query her as to why she wouldn't trade anything at all to any one of us. Her reason-
ing was, much to our amazement, staggeringly simple. She told us, “I don't want to
give anyone
else
a monopoly.�
Playing Not to Lose
While we conceded that she was certainly doing a bang-up job in that regard, we
tried desperately to reason with her. We pointed out that, by trading someone a
particular property, it wouldn't be giving them the
third
piece necessary to form
a group… only the second. Her answer was that it would allow the
possibility
that
they acquire the third item from someone else. We cajoled her by illustrating that,
unless she traded, she would not be able to acquire a monopoly either—thereby
weakening her own chances. To this she very simply asserted that she didn't care
about winning by getting monopolies—she just didn't want to
lose
by allowing
others to get them. Needless to say, her response elicited some significant confusion
(and no small amount of frustration) in the rest of us.
For those of you who are curious, the game limped along in this fashion. It
turned out that the assets were arranged such that no two people could directly
trade so that each could acquire a monopoly without Marci's help. Likewise, any
three-person deal (again sans-Marci) would have left one of the three severely
wanting, and was therefore nixed. Slowly, there was some forced consolidation,
however. Eventually, people started to gather power while Marci steadfastly held to
her zero-risk strategy. As we had prophesied, with no means of reasonable income,
she gradually bled out financially and succumbed to defeat. Of course, at that point,
her properties were taken over one by one… and the game became the fast-and-
furious trade-fest that it is generally meant to be.
What went wrong for Marci was that she had defined “risk� in a very different
way than had the rest of us. Going back to her words, “I don't want to give anyone
else
a monopoly.� At that, she succeeded, at least for a while. If you put her strategy
aside for the moment and assume that her idea of winning was in line with the
accepted definition of “winning� in the game of Monopoly (i.e., being the last one
standing at the end), we can analyze the decision with all other things being equal.
