Monopoly GO and the Time I’ll Never Get Back
This is a story that you’ve probably already lived through. It’s a common occurrence in the era of smart phones and “free” to play games that we all get wrapped up in. I’m not immune to the lure of the small screen in my pocket. I can go through the list of games that I’ve dedicated uncomfortable amounts of time to. Many of them are no longer on my phone. Some of them have been automatically removed by the phone itself. A select few are still there, waiting for me to fall back into. But this story is about the most recent addiction that I’m still trying to shake.
My time with Monopoly GO started as all toxic relationships do. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead of catching up on my daily work, I was scrolling through Facebook. The ad reeled me in because I am fond of the classic board game. Immediately, my mind raced to those old games like Words With Friends, Draw Something, or Classic Chess. Games where you can play with your friends and make your move on your own time. I love these types of games and was thrilled to see that Monopoly had made one of their own. The only problem was, this was not that type of game.
The Premise of Monopoly GO
Almost immediately, I realized that I had not downloaded a classic version of Monopoly where you can play with your friends. This was an entirely different game that used all of the assets of the game we all know. My first mistake was staying on the app upon realizing this. I let the tutorial play itself out and before I knew it, I was on my way.
Monopoly GO is a social game where you can connect your social media accounts and “play” with your friends. You pick your token and Mr. Monopoly explains the rules. You get a certain amount of dice that you can roll, and by roll, I mean push a button and the RNG decides what numbers you get. Your little token goes through the Monopoly board and you get money based on what you land on.
As you gain more cash, you can click on the ‘Landmarks’ button and upgrade them. This is a separate area from the board. You see, when you look at Monopoly GO in the app store, it boasts about having 100+ boards. This was a major draw for me. I felt the nostalgia of playing the Disney board, or the Mario boards with my family back in the day. But in Monopoly GO, the different boards are just different areas where you can buy more Landmarks. You have five different landmarks that you can buy, and you can upgrade each one up to six times. As you get more Landmarks, you get more houses and hotels on your board and level up in the game. Once you buy all of the upgrades for your landmarks, then you can move on to the next board.
Each board has a different theme. Many of them are based on real-world cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas. There are also special themed ones like “The SS Goldwater,” a take on 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, or “Token Factory,” a place where the Monopoly tokens are made, and even “The North Pole.”
Spamming My Dopamine Button
Everything I’ve described above is introduced within the first ten minutes of playing the game. Right off the bat, I realized that I was not playing the actual game of Monopoly. I was playing a spin-off freemium version of the game, and I did not appreciate it. My immediate thought was to back out of the app and delete the game… But it felt nice to see my landmarks get upgraded.
You see, in the early game, they tap into your dopamine reserves, and release just enough to get you into the next section. I finished the first board fast, and it introduced me to the game’s map. My token moved up and I could see the journey of boards ahead. The game rewarded me with 50 new dice, and I was back on my way.
Monopoly GO’s progression system relies on the dice that you restore over time. You can roll one set of dice and move on, or you can activate the multipliers. If you set your dice to x2, then you’ll use twice as many dice, but you’ll get twice the reward. The more dice you have, the higher the multipliers can go. You can get up to x200 dice in this game (possibly more), and my eyes turned into dollar signs seeing that fake money counter go up.
At about five boards in, I knew that there was nothing more that this game had to offer. I knew that it was a lame app designed to draw people in and entice them to spend money. But I didn’t care. I was sold before all of these things hit. I wanted to see what the different landmark animations looked like. I wanted to see what the different boards looked like. I wanted to surpass my friends and vanquish my enemies as I rose to the top.
The “Social” Aspect
Monopoly GO is one of those”play with your friends” games where you never actually play with your friends. You can indeed see that your friends from Facebook are playing, but the game pits you against everyone. When you land on a railroad spot, then a special mini game is activated where you either try to destroy their landmarks, or rob them for all of the cash they have.
The notification timeline in the game is always there to let you know exactly who robbed you and for how much, or who destroyed your landmark. When you go to destroy a landmark, the game automatically chooses who you’re going to attack. About a week or two into playing, I discovered a little button at the bottom of the screen where I could pick someone else to target. This is where things started to heat up.
There are two tabs in this options menu. One is for revenge, as it shows everyone who recently targeted you. The other tab, the one that I exclusively used, was for friends you’ve added. It displays all of your friends in the order that they’ve targeted you, AND it shows how many times they’ve targeted you.
Declaring War In the World of Monopoly
It always starts out as innocent fun. You feel it escalating, but you’re still having fun. Before you know it, it’s an all out war. You’ve made it your personal mission to take down so and so, and you know that they have the same mission against you. This is the social environment I experienced in Monopoly GO.
You can protect your landmarks with shields. You have a little shield meter at the top of the screen. When someone targets you, it uses up a shield. The only way to refill your shields is to land on a spot with shields, and they are random. If you target someone who has shields, then you’re not going to get as much money. If you manage to find someone with depleted shields, then you’re in for a nice payday.
One day after I realized that I could choose who I target, I got the idea of targeting the same person over and over again until I broke all of their shields. That way, I was guaranteed some kind of good payday. I scrolled through my friends list and picked someone with a profile picture whom I’d remember. Let’s call her Sue.
I had nothing against this person. It was just a face that I could remember to click on. Every time I had the option to choose, I’d visit her board and attack her. Sometimes I’d be on a roll and hit her multiple times in one sitting. Other times I’d only get one hit in but she had her shields activated.
Monopoly GO rewards you for getting bigger hits in. You don’t just get money for participating. There are daily competitions where you are placed on a leaderboard. The only way to score on this leaderboard is to land on railroads, and steal from other people. So every time I finally took all of Sue’s shields out, it was like opening the dopamine floodgates and letting it rush through my whole system as my in-game cash pile, AND my position on the leaderboard rose.
Eventually, Sue caught on to what was happening. She retaliated, and for a period of time, I’d log on to find that she destroyed all of my landmarks and drained my bank account. I would retaliate myself and target her back. It was back and forth like this for weeks. It was a war.
Sue wasn’t the only person I’d find myself going to war with. There were others whom I’d discover had depleted shields, and I’d bring their little city to ash and rubble. One guy in particular got on my bad side.
There was a special event in the game where you actually had to work with other players. You got to team up with four different players, and bake cakes in the game. This was done by landing on random spaces where you got the ingredients, and then you’d contrubute to the cake. If you baked all four cakes, then you’d get a giant prize.
It was down to the final day of the event, and I had baked three cakes. I just needed one more, and I saw that the gentlemen I partnered up with hadn’t done a single thing to contribute to our cake. The event passed, and I missed the mark by one cake, because this other guy either didn’t log in, or didn’t care to contribute. I responded by declaring war.
For the next week or so, he was my default target anytime I got to pick who I was going after. He must have gotten other people mad, because his shields were always down. I picked every last one of his landmarks off every chance I got. And then one day, his landmarks were still down. The next week, he still hadn’t logged on. Whether it was my doing or not, the man quit the game. This is when I started to wonder if I had a problem.
A Prisoner In My Own Dopamine Cell
Imagine a jail where nobody was actually locked up. Everyone is there because they just happened upon it, but now they can’t leave because the jailers keep giving them things that make them feel good. These things aren’t good for them, nor are they necessarily bad for them, but it is good enough to keep them there indefinitely until they stop receiving it. Most of the prisoners actually want to leave. But they just like receiving their vice of choice, so they stay. This is the hell Monopoly GO trapped me in several times.
The only way to progress in the game is to roll your dice and land on spots that make you more money. But when you run out of dice, then you’re stuck until you get more. Your dice will refill a certain amount once every hour, and the game is sure to send you a notification once your rolls are full. But there are other ways of getting dice.
You can complete challenges in the game and get more dice, or, you can fork over your hard earned real money to get more. I am ashamed to say, but there were several moments where I bought into the daily deals to get a small boost. It was always just enough to boost myself to number one on the leaderboard, or earn enough to buy one more landmark.
Sometimes, what I planned to be a quick session would turn into an hour or more. The game would just keep rewarding me with more and more dice. I’d be on my final roll, and something would happen where I’m rewarded with 1000 more rolls. Or I’d win a random challenge. Or collect a whole set of stickers. There was always something to keep me playing.
I would start to get anxious because I wanted to put the game down and attend to real life things. But it kept giving me more dice. In my mind, I couldn’t leave because if I have dice to play, then I’m wasting idle time. It makes more sense to use all of my dice and let them refill when I’m not playing, than to leave unplayed dice and earn nothing while I’m away. It was a brilliant trap, and I fell right into it.
I knew that this couldn’t last forever though. The game didn’t actually give me anything. Even when you move to a new board, it’s the exact same game, just in a different setting. There’s no story. There’s no added gameplay. I decided that there had to be something at the end. At that time, there were only 119 boards. I figured that if I got to the very end and completed the final board, then there had to be something special. That was my goal.
Nothing At The End of the Rabbit Hole
It was a slow Saturday morning. I opened the app to find that my rolls were full and decided to go at it. A random hot streak started and I went from board 114 to 115. 115 to 116. I was so close to the end. The anticipation built within me. The hot streak died off but I just bought more rolls and kept going. And then on board 118 I looked at the map.
There were more boards…
But there was something different about these new boards that had appeared so suddenly. They seemed familiar. Antarctica. Las Vegas. Egypt. I had already played through those boards. I had to be mistaken, so I scrolled back down the map and scanned every area that I had already visited. All of these familiar places were there.
I beat the 119th board and moved on to the next one. It was exactly as I remembered it. There was no reward for making it to the end. There was no end. It was just extending itself by repeating itself. All of those hours, and all of that labor led to just more maps of where you’ve already been. My first inclination was to quit immediately and delete the app. But the same force that prevented me from doing so in the beginning took its hold.
I played on.
I went on into the 120s. By now it was just a habit. It also didn’t help that the game kept rewarding me with dice upon more dice. Sue kept attacking my landmarks. Everything went on in the game as it always had, but my spirit was broken.
I continued to get a small rush of dopamine every time I moved to another board, but it didn’t feel the same. Before I thought that I was making progress. I thought that I was moving onto something new. Now I was starting to see it for what it was. What I knew it was from the very beginning. A waste of my time.
What Did I Learn From This Experience?
The short answer is nothing. I knew from the very beginning that the game’s only objective was to squeeze micro transactions out of me. I’ve been down this rabbit hole before with Candy Crush, Angry Birds, Pokemon GO, and so many more.
These are games designed to be endless. If one million people are purchasing one $2 microtransactions per month, then the game company is doing very well. If there are 999,999 more people like me who played Monopoly GO in the last two months, then Hasbro just made off with around $20-$25 million.
I feel used. The worst part for me is that even if I were to delete the game right now and never play it again, there are a million more people downloading the app. They’re getting ready to go on the journey that I just went on. One million more people who will fork over at least one dollar.
I’m not trying to condemn Monopoly GO or demonize it in any way. The app store is filled with many games just like it. The game told me exactly what I was going to get from the very beginning. The point of all of this is simply to reflect on time I could have spent better. I could have done something that would have given me more value.
Perhaps you’re in a toxic relationship with an app right now. Take it from me: there’s nothing at the end of the rabbit hole. Sometimes the lesson is, and was before, and will continue to be, don’t do it again.
If you’re itching to play the real deal, then click on this link to grab a copy of the real Monopoly game. In the end, it’s much better and more rewarding than the app.
