The Mansion of Happiness Read Online Free PDF

want to buy life insurance? would you like to invest in the stock market?—but these, and the piles of paper and the cars full of babies, serve mainly as a distraction from the play’s passivity. Like the Mansion of Happiness, Life is a journey along a fixed path, where only one thing matters. At Life’s “Day of Reckoning,” you count your cash, not your good deeds. Like all earlier spiral race games of life, Life is about fate—not whether you’re fated to become an Immortal Man, but whether you’re fated to retire to Millionaire Acres. By 1960, the mansion of happiness was a five-thousand-square-foot house in a swank retirement community.
    The 1960 Game of Life was a smash. Children liked it because it’s like playing dress-up; you get to pretend to be a grown-up. One speaks, of course, only for oneself, but this game is just for kids—unless you’re eight, it’s a drag. And, as the years passed, it drew criticism: it is, after all, relentlessly amoral and shamelessly cash-conscious. In the Wall Street 1990s, a team of designers charged with updating it gave up; whenever they tried to make the game less about having the most money, it made no sense. All they could come up with was to add “life tiles,” which allowed players to do good deeds. But the only way to be rewarded for your virtue was in the game’s sole currency: cash. Save an endangered species: collect $200,000. Solution to pollution: $250,000. 47
    In 2007, just before a global financial meltdown involving securities fraud, subprime mortgages, and bad debt,Hasbro introduced a wholly reimagined game: the Game of Life: Twists and Turns. In this version, life is … aimless. There’s a place to begin, but it’s called Start, not Infancy or High School Graduation. There’s no place on the board called Happy Old Age and no Millionaire Acres, either. Plainly, the Gate to Heaven is out of the question. The game board is divided into four squares—Learn It, Live It,Love It, and Earn It—through each of which a colored path snakes its way. (The game is a mishmash of a square board and a spiral one.) You decide how you want to spend your time: go to school, have kids, hang out, travel the world. Whatever. You begin using a tiny plastic skateboard as a game piece; if you want, you can convert it to a car. You can buy a house, from “Modest,” for $200,000, to “Mansion,” for $1,000,000. You pay 10 percent a year on your mortgage. The rules advise: “Because houses increase in value by 6% a year, higher-priced homes earn more over time than lower-priced homes. Just be sure to offset these earnings by any debt you carry.” How players (ages nine and up) would do that is unclear. This game is paperless. Instead of cash, each player gets a Visa-brand credit card—made out in Milton Bradley’s name—to swipe in the game’s electronic Life Pod. Only the computer—a battery-powered mechanical deity—knows how much money you have. 48 Accused of wantonly advertising credit cards to kids through the Hasbro-Visa deal, a Visa spokesman insisted, “We are not marketing to kids. We are helping to educate kids. It’s never too early.” 49 Suffice it to say, Twists and Turns has a remarkably forgiving attitude toward the highly leveraged player. “If you’re in debt inMonopoly,”George Burtch, vice president of Hasbro’s games division, told me, “you’re watching. But in this game, you can be hugely in debt but you’re still playing, and no one knows it!” 50 In the Mansion of Happiness, there’s a square for that kind of thing. It’s called the Road to Folly.
    What is the meaning of life? In Twists and Turns, whoever ends up with the most “Life Points” wins, although, technically, the object of the game is to “experience all that LIFE has to offer!” With Milton Bradley’s Visa card in hand, you can do whatever the hell you want. “A THOUSAND WAYS TO LIVE YOUR LIFE!” the game box screams. “YOU CHOOSE!” No one dies; no one