Extended Monopoly Game
Dr.Kriengsak Chareonwongsak
President
of the Social Science Association of Thailand
Kriengsak@kriengsak.com,
hhtp:www.kriengsak.com
In 1934, during America’s Great Depression,
a game was created by a then unemployed tycoon, Charles B. Darrow, and became a
best seller, drawing on certain strategic business ideas from that period. This
seventy-year-old game is known as “The Monopoly Game.”
In Monopoly, each player’s objective
is to purchase properties and build as many houses and hotels as possible on
them in order to “squeeze” rent payments from any other player landing on their
property squares in the course of play, the goal being to bankrupt such
opponents. A banker, who keep players rule-bound, control the game.
Nowadays, a Thai innovator has developed an
“Extended Monopoly Game” version, having the same objective in mind, to bankrupt
all opponents, but involving shrewder game strategies towards that end.
In the old version of Monopoly, each player
accumulates as much property as possible in order to bankrupt his or her
opponents. In the extended version of Monopoly, a player after bankrupting his
or her opponents can then accrue their property, because in this version of the
game, the player can usurp the “banker’s authority” and change the game’s
rules.
For example, for the player to profit from a
hospital business, then as “banker” he or she can launch a “Thirty baht for all
illnesses” programme, while at the same time allocating very limited budget for
it to government hospitals. With only poor services offered by government
hospital interns, eventually those who can afford it will use a private
hospital, which the player had bought previously.
For the player to seize an aviation
business, then as banker, he or she can command the national airlines to close
profitable flights, in preference for the player’s own low-cost flight
substitutes.
In the old Monopoly Game version, if a
player buys properties and buildings and depletes his or her cash, he or she
must throw the dice until a complete board circuit is made and a $200 salary
secured, along with the right to buy more properties or buildings. However, in
Extended Monopoly, a player need not wait for his round of the board to receive
a salary, but can exchange his or her stock into cash, and then turn it into
capital for new and more profitable business. Moreover, the player can change
as much stock as desired into cash, whether valued at 100 million, 1,000
million or maybe 73,000 million baht, since as game banker he has already
changed the rules to allow foreigner investors to buy stock at a rate not
exceeding 50% (where previously the rate was only up to 25%). Moreover, the
player needs pay no tax on the deal.
With little change to this situation; say,
if no parent forces the game to finish so that the children will do their
homework, then the player’s continued manner of dealing will invade new and
more profitable business interests and in next to no time mean that he
possesses almost every property on the board.
Dear reader, do you know who “the player”
is?
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