What in the pewtered power of Christ is this nonsense

[CountDeMoney]

U.S.
The Failing New York Times
Meet the New Monopoly Tokens: A Rubber Ducky, a T-rex and a Penguin
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
MARCH 17, 2017



Say goodbye to the thimble, the boot and the wheelbarrow, Monopoly fans. There are new tokens in town.

Hasbro, the maker of the real-estate-trading board game, on Friday announced the results of a poll that asked fans in more than 100 countries to choose which tokens will circle the board in the next Monopoly game coming out in the fall.

The Scottie dog, top hat, roadster car, cat, and battleship tokens will return. But the boot got the boot, and so did the wheelbarrow and the thimble.

The three tokens will be replaced with a Tyrannosaurus rex, a rubber ducky and a penguin, the company said. The announcement came just before World Monopoly Day on Sunday.

In a statement, Jonathan Berkowitz, a senior vice president at Hasbro Gaming, said that the "global Monopoly community has spoken."

"The next generation of tokens clearly represents the interests of our fans around the world, and we're proud to have our iconic game impacted by the people that feel most passionate about playing it," he said.

Hasbro had asked fans in January to choose the next generation of tokens from a list of 64 options, which included the current lineup. More than 4.3 million votes were counted.

The most popular token in the voting was the Scottie dog, the stout little pup that has clattered its way past Go countless times on Monopoly boards worldwide since it was introduced in the 1950s. The T-rex was the second most popular option among the voters, followed by the top hat and the racing car, which have both been in circulation since the 1930s, when the game first made its appearance on American living room tables.

The rubber ducky and penguin were the final inductees, joining the cat and the battleship.

Some fans of the game seemed to feel strongly about which of the tokens should stay and which should go.

The competition was fueled by online campaigning from outside forces, Hasbro said. Zipcar, the car-sharing company, advocated for the survival of the car token by asking fans to #SaveTheCar. The New England Aquarium got in the spirit by tweeting photographs of their penguins to #VotePenguin, and hosting a Facebook live event to Monopoly's nearly 11 million Facebook fans.

The company has opened up its revamping of the token lineup in previous polls. In 2013, fans voted to drop the iron.

[Admiral Yi]

The boot, wheelbarrow and thimble were in fact shitty tokens.

[Syt]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/the-forgotten-meaning-of-monopoly-tokens/519996/

How Monopoly's New Tokens Betray Its History

This week, Hasbro announced the results of an online vote on the future of tokens in the board game Monopoly. The results are startling: the boot, wheelbarrow, and thimble have been expunged from the iconic game, replaced by a Tyrannosaurus rex, rubber ducky, and penguin. Voters passed up over 60 other contenders, among them an emoji and a hashtag. It's the latest in a series of efforts to update the game, whose onerous play sessions, old-fashioned iconography, and manual cash-counting have turned some players away.

When today's players play games, digital or tabletop, they identify with their token or avatar. It becomes "them," representing their agency for the game. So it's not surprising that players would want pieces with which they feel affinity. But ironically, affinity and choice in Monopoly token selection undermine part of the history of that game, which juxtaposed capitalist excess in an era of destitution.

Monopoly went through many evolutions. It was first invented as The Landlord's Game, an educational tool published by Lizzie Magie in 1906 to explain and advocate for the Georgist single tax—the opposite take on property ownership that eventually became synonymous with the game (whose design Charles Darrow derived from Magie's original).

By the 1930s, when Monopoly became popular, economic conditions were very different. To reduce costs of production, early sets included only the paper board, money, and cards needed to play. The tokens were provided by players themselves. As Philip E. Orbanes explains in his book Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game and How It Got That Way, Darrow's niece and her friends used bracelet charms and Cracker Jack treats as markers in the game. The sense of choice and identification was still present, to an extent, but the feeling of making do and using things already at hand was more salient. It was the Depression, after all.

When Parker Brothers marketed the complete game that we know today, in the mid-1930s, the company elected to include four of the metal charms direct from the manufacturer that supplied the popular bracelet charms Darrow's niece had adopted, along with another four of new design. Those original tokens—car, iron, lantern, thimble, shoe, tophat, and rocking horse—were joined by the battleship and cannon soon after.

Despite Hasbro's attempts to modernize Monopoly, the game is really a period piece. It hides the victory of personal property ownership and rentier capitalism over the philosophy of shared land value in Georgism. And it juxtaposes the economic calamity of the Great Depression with the rising tide of industrialism and monopolism that allowed the few to influence the fates of the many. To play the game with a thimble—that symbol of domesticity and humility—instead of a T-rex, connects players to that history, both in leisure and in economics. Reinventing the game might appear to make it more "relevant" to younger players. But perhaps what today's Monopoly players really need isn't easy familiarity and identification, but an invitation to connect to a time when the same game bore different meaning, and embraced different experience.

[CountDeMoney]

Yi voted for a severance check token.

[garbon]

I'm fine with those changes.

[CountDeMoney]

Of course you are. Surprised one of them isn't a tablet.

[garbon]

Of course you are. Surprised one of them isn't a tablet.

Probably a bit too soon.

[PDH]

They should market regional tokens.  The Midwest could have a Fentanyl patch and used needle, the West Coast would be a skateboard and a joint.  The East could have a black hoodie and a gun.

[dps]

I liked the wheelbarrow, and the boot was OK, but nobody ever wanted to be the thimble.

[Tonitrus]

They should market regional tokens.  The Midwest could have a Fentanyl patch and used needle, the West Coast would be a skateboard and a joint.  The East could have a black hoodie and a gun.

And the South?

[celedhring]

They should market regional tokens.  The Midwest could have a Fentanyl patch and used needle, the West Coast would be a skateboard and a joint.  The East could have a black hoodie and a gun.

And the South?

Could replace the wheelbarrow with a lynchpin.

[jimmy olsen]

I liked the wheelbarrow, and the boot was OK, but nobody ever wanted to be the thimble.

I liked the thimble.

Tainted

[PDH]

They should market regional tokens.  The Midwest could have a Fentanyl patch and used needle, the West Coast would be a skateboard and a joint.  The East could have a black hoodie and a gun.

And the South?

The South gets nothing - they don't do economics correctly.

[grumbler]

They should market regional tokens.  The Midwest could have a Fentanyl patch and used needle, the West Coast would be a skateboard and a joint.  The East could have a black hoodie and a gun.

And the South?

A noose and a fiddle.

[Josquius]

Is the cat new too? Can't recall that one.
Dog FTW