Monopoly

It is interesting to see a shopping-mall promotion of the all-time educational game of "monopoly", no doubt meant for stimulating impulse purchases on the spot. It is indeed very seldom to find goods which can command any attraction anywhere near to the iPhone's during the initial launch, and a promotion or two is often required at different stages of the product life cycle to push sales.

But there is a certain nostalgia about this conventional game during the prevalent economic downturn of credit crunch. It advocates and touts capitalism, in particular, the ownership of property in its simplest form. Each player aims to accumlate property deeds, hence houses and hotels, other than the ownership of utilities' supplies (water and electricity) and railway stations to get close to (if not really achieve) the holy-grail status of monopoly. Financial transactions are faciliated with an endless supply of money from the central bank without any concern for inflation. But stocks or bonds have no part in the game, let alone all the complications of derivatives, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps in our contemporary defunct financial world.

Even in this simple world on the square cardboard, however, profligacy can be severely punished, as each house and hotel owned may be heavily taxed as invoked by an undesirable card in the deck of "community chest". As in real life, damage from an excess of greed can be shocking.