Why do all Monopoly video games suck?

For one of the best board games ever, Monopoly has gotten poor treatment in the digital realm.

The board game

I am a very big fan of a game of Monopoly on a plain, unadorned board. There is nothing like the joy of starting a Monopoly game with your family or best friends. If you want to have some unpredictability, you'll need more than two people. On the other hand, because so much of the game is spent on players planning their moves, six or more players is unwieldy. With three to five players, you've got a fun game going.

One of the most charming factors about Monopoly is its accessibility. There are metal tokens for player characters, there are title deed cards, there is money, and there are houses, hotels, chance cards, and community chest cards. But none of this clutter adversely affects the ability to start a game and play it. While firmly outside of the realm of real life, all of the mechanics of the game are sensible.

The single most endearing factor about Monopoly is clearly its customizability. With all of these game elements in play, and several ambiguous board locations (Free Parking?) there are many opportunities for players to experiment with new rules, and keep those that tend to speed gameplay or make it more exciting.

Probably all of my readers have played to the end of a Monopoly game at least once. But if the money supply is kept stagnant except for GO money, the following problems arise:

1. Each player starts with $1500 and can only get it from other players or from passing GO and obtaining $200 each lap of the board. This puts a firm brake on the supply of money needed to buy property and trade.
2. The only other way to obtain money is through the pittances available on Chance and Community Chest. But what these cards giveth with one hand, they taketh away with the other: street repairs, school tax, as well as the income tax and luxury tax squares, will have the bank eating up more money than it would yield from the second place beauty contest opportunities.
3. When in Jail, according to the traditional rules, you can still obtain money from your properties. It makes Jail a cushy place to be.
4. Free Parking is simply a blank square. It is begging for more meaning.

We can solve all of these problems with the addition of very common "house rules":

1. Free Parking Jackpot: Start with $500 under Free Parking. All monies taken from players on Luxury Tax, Income Tax, Chance, or Community Chest go straight into the Free Parking pool. Basically, whenever the bank is owed money, it goes into the Free Parking pool instead. Whoever lands on Free Parking gets the jackpot. After the jackpot is won, it's started off again with $500 from the bank.
2. No rent can be collected from players in Jail. In the late stages of the game, Jail is a luxury because players inside don't have to go around the board for three turns unless they roll doubles. Players should have a disincentive to go to Jail, and this can be enforced by not paying them for their own property usage while incarcerated.
3. Random bargaining. For example, if a creditor asks a debtor to pay only half because that would prevent his or her bankruptcy, it is allowed. Whatever satisfies the creditor is OK.

The video game version

Why shouldn't Monopoly prove to be a decent video game? I know it would have to be priced lower than most modern video games, since a Monopoly board, if not in your closet already, can certainly be found for under $20. With the game mechanics already so well-known, it sounds like development should be quick and painless, and correspondingly cheap. A video game version of Monopoly should exist, because it would solve the biggest problems with the game as it currently exists.

• Length. Some rounds take hours and hours to conclude, and it would be nice to save the current state of the game and get back to it at a later time, without leaving the board and all of its cards and doodads sitting on the kitchen table.
• Cheating. If the banker is a computer, and the dice rolls are truly randomized, cheating is practically impossible. If you like playing with your cousin Frank but you know he's a cheater, this could let him get in on the game.
• More variations. People shell out decent money to buy countless specialty versions of Monopoly. There is almost no cost associated with porting different "skins" to the digital board and pieces. Why hasn't it been done? Why can't we have a choice of various game modes?

We should start with a list of some of the attempts that were made before sorted by console, with the year of release, and a review score following. This is by no means an exhaustive list; there are well over a dozen unique Monopoly games.

Sega Genesis, 1992, 60/100 (Sega-16)
Nintendo 64, 2000, 50/100 (X64)
Playstation, 1997, 42/100 (Gamespot)
Nintendo Entertainment System, 1991, 6.25/10 (Electronic Gaming Monthly)
Windows, 1995, 60/100 (PC Games)
Windows, 1997, 3/5 (High Score)

Current version for sale

The Playstation port of Monopoly suffered from other even worse reviews, but I've given the most median score I could find. Generally they are rated poor-to-middling. The most recent EA version, released in 2008 for PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360, is not generally considered a classic either, scoring 54% for PS3 and 56% for Xbox on Metacritic.

They are sometimes rated higher in retrospect, after prices plummet and you can find an old-gen Monopoly game for spare change. But if the low expectations engendered by depreciation actually affect how good a game is, then surely we would all be ignoring the new franchises out today and spending our time on carts from Second Time Around. Come to think of it, that actually sounds appealing to me, since the cost of a new video game console and $50-60 games is a bit perilous to me. But I'm not everyone.

The problems

Let me take an archetypal example of the problem with Monopoly video games: Monopoly for SNES, a game that I owned and never liked. Why was it bad?

1. Transactions should be natural and quick in Monopoly. Instead, with the necessity of switching between menus and submenus to find the right property and select the correct amount of money in your deal, dealing becomes a hassle and something you'd rather avoid. At its heart, Monopoly is a board game with many different actions that are done most comfortably with human hands, and it is hard to apply the same level of choices to a video game with just a handful of buttons.
2. Turn-based video games don't allow continuous communications between players. Table-talk is essential or any board game would be stiflingly dull.
3. The rules of the game cannot be adjusted infinitely. There was no ability to change the rules, which means it proceeded at a rate that I found dull.
4. It's hard to graphically improve the real world. We're all used to playing Monopoly in board game form. Video games can hardly make haptic tasks like rolling dice and handling money any better than the real thing. The makers like to incorporate sound bites and animations as well, and while these might be funny the first game you play, it's annoying to hear the same one-liner again after the one hundredth time you've been released from Jail.
5. Computers are not your friends. Monopoly is not like chess. We do not play Monopoly or most other board games to become masters with the highest ranking. We play because the experience is fun with our friends and family. Computers are stiff bargainers and utterly joyless in deal mongering.

Despite all these problems, Monopoly remains a perennial remake for each subsequent video game console generation. The general lackluster feel of each video game seems to have no effect on the popularity of the board game itself. Some board games are less popular than they were before, but Monopoly is the flagship of the huge Hasbro enterprise, and it still sells in significant quantities and earns considerable revenue for Hasbro, helped no doubt by the presence of nearly 100 specialty versions.

Can any board games translate well to video games?

Definitely. Chess is almost better in digital form than physical form. Chess is an art form with no random chance whatsoever, where there is such a huge continuum of expertise that poor players will never defeat superior players. This factor is a bit of a barrier to entry for those who are not prepared to learn how to improve, and a point of embarrassment for many poor players (me included). Playing against a decent chess AI will usually also end in defeat, but at least chess experience can be gained this way without congratulating a human being for beating you.

Chess's seriousness is part of the essence of it. Nobody expects a chess AI to be a wordsmith. And that's worked for the entirety of video games during the 20th century, which could only support the logic involved in predicting how to win the game, not how to entertain you.

The future

A board game like Monopoly is fun in its original form because it involves human beings who are playing a game. The table talk, bickering, random gags, haggling, and even cheating are elements of human interaction that add in intangible ways to the gameplay, but haven't yet been emulated by computers.

Robust human-computer interaction is predicted by most experts for the coming years. Researchers for companies and universities have been trying to make robots more lifelike, with more advanced mannerisms and gestures. This is an extremely ambitious task that will no doubt take decades to complete. However, the task of believable computer personalities simply in the digital realm (using inputs from a user's keyboard and returning text or even voice responses) is more readily achievable and I think that it will start to appear in user interfaces and video games long before physical robots start to do so. Robotics will be expensive for a very long time to come, but computing power is still expanding with Moore's Law, and a purely software-based human simulation will be more sooner developed, and more readily available, than a human simulation which incorporates a physical body.

I am not myopically worried about making a good Monopoly video game. What I suggest is not so much a proposal that adding intelligent human-like AI to Monopoly would make it a good game, as a proposal that we can use the mechanics of Monopoly and an observation of the social behavior involved, in order to improve the state of human-computer interaction. When computers become decent social companions in a game, they are one step closer to being decent companions in the real world.

As far as this one game is concerned, I think that there will always be a role for Monopoly on a home video game system. It's just such a shame that it never translates as well as it should. The ingredients for a classic Monopoly video game shouldn't be hard to isolate. I think you should start with:

1. A user interface that lets you see your own properties, and those of your others, with relative ease, so even though you can't blow on the dice and whisper your demand, at least you know right off the bat what you don't want to roll to stay alive.
2. A huge variability in rules changes. They have been getting better at this in more recent versions.
3. Computers which are unpredictable and entertaining. Let's throw in the option of making your opponents gullible 8-year-olds, or by plying everyone at the table with booze.