Voice activated gadgets are all the rage with smart devices capable of taking human voice commands as input. The most recent upgrade on an old game is with Monopoly replacing physical money with a talking hat. The reasoning behind this change is to prevent the person playing as the bank from cheating. While the talking hat may very well reduce the potential for underhanded activities it will also remove the learning opportunities Monopoly provides such as the handling of cash and bargaining skills. The first release does not require an internet connection with the smart device powering the hat having sufficient information stored locally to manage game transactions without relying on a third party system.
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New Monopoly Game has Voice-Activated Bank to Prevent Cheating
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(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @02:09AM (2 children)
"...to prevent the person playing as the bank from cheating."
So...to make the game even less like real life.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday June 23 2019, @03:03AM (1 child)
That, and train a new generation of kids for that upcoming cashless society banks so desperately want. Kids should learn that talking hats, not hard cash, is the new normal
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Sunday June 23 2019, @04:53PM
Not only that -- but that it's OK to always be recorded when speaking to force you into being honest even if you had no intention to steal and it never occurred to you to do so, because only criminals cite privacy concerns about always-on surveillance that one cannot opt-out of. What do you do--refuse to play with your friends, or buy an optional accessory of monolopy money that they don't include with the game anymore? Screw that.
A side effect is going to be from here on out, the next generations won't even get the joke about being paid in monopoly money meaning that they got something worthless in exchange for something of value. Maybe they can be told to tell it to the hat instead.
I'm all for modernization and improvements, but games are supposed to present some sort of challenge if there is the expectation someone can win or lose. Being the banker or dealing with someone that doesn't make a good banker... is part of learning how to negotiate and enforce agreed upon rules. This just dumbs it down and.. well. yeah. cashless society that is a consumer panopticon. I wouldn't be surprised if what the hat hears in addition to , it doesn't do the voice processing within the hat itself, and thus sends all conversation to a third party on the internet somewhere. Then whatever is talked about nearby in addition to the game commands ends up as ads on someone's phone, tv, or computer.
(Personally, instead of a hat, I want a hand, so generation AA or whatever is next can learn to speak to the hand from birth... anyone that doesn't and instead uses paper money and proves they can both count and be considered trustworthy will probably will prove to be exceptional in some way compared to people politely waiting for the hand to reply to them)
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday June 23 2019, @02:21AM
The banking monopolies, and the other once that hold all the monies, doesn't want you to learn those skills. They want an all electronic cashless society. After all if you know said cash and bargaining skills you would be less likely to get screwed over by them, not the skills -- the institutions, on a regular basis.
That said as someone that enjoys physical boardgames I won't be getting this version of Monopoly (not that it gets a lot of playtime or anything as is), mostly cause I really quite dislike all the electronic gadgets that come with a lot of boardgames these days. Having a gadget or an app handle the management aspects of the game does take to much away and it appears to be a lazy way to do games. If your game requires an app to run you have done something wrong in the design and development. Not to mention what happens when said app/website/gadget stops working and the game might get broken, some of them appear to be a tad blackbox and doesn't even come with a proper rulebook so you can run it without said app or device.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday June 23 2019, @02:50AM (3 children)
only the copyright holders can cheat? [wikipedia.org]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Touché) by captain normal on Sunday June 23 2019, @04:54AM (2 children)
Is there a pool on how long before the Monopoly electronic bank is hacked?
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 1) by Catalyst on Sunday June 23 2019, @07:24PM (1 child)
I bet if it's voice activated, you can probably send it commands beyond human hearing range. So feel free to cheat while everyone is listening, lol.
(Score: 2) by Chocolate on Friday June 28 2019, @10:58AM
Obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com]
Bit-choco-coin anyone?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @02:54AM
Definitely Gryffindor!
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday June 23 2019, @03:04AM (2 children)
And introduce learning opportunities such as getting used to being spied on, accepting service lock-in, and sucking our retarded-techo-gadget-marketing overlord's dicks.
But, but, but, but, how are they ever going to get their precious "usage metrics" and pump out advertising!?
This must be an oversite that will be fixed soon. Someone is going to lose their job for not getting that in.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Sunday June 23 2019, @04:24AM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @04:55PM
Does it require expensive proprietary batteries?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday June 23 2019, @03:06AM (4 children)
First they come out with monopoly where you're supposed to cheat, now a monopoly to stop cheating.
I'd rather play Catan, spank you very much.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Sunday June 23 2019, @03:23AM (3 children)
My preference is Dominion [wikipedia.org].
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pslytely Psycho on Sunday June 23 2019, @03:45AM (2 children)
When my wife and I first got together in the late '70's, we played this:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/10783/official-dealer-mcdope-dealing-game [boardgamegeek.com]
Theft and dishonesty were all part of the fun.....
If you play it today, substitute 'smoke two joints' with smoke two hits.....Yeah, the weed was pretty shitty back in the day...
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @04:31AM (1 child)
Of the monopoly style games I enjoyed this one. http://www.hotelboardgame.joomlafree.it/ [joomlafree.it]
Monopoly was not very fun as in the end it was just a way to piss everyone off (the moral point of the game).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @02:15PM
Monopoly is a lot more fun if you play add intended following the rules. By which I also mean cheating as well as putting properties up for auction if the player doesn't initially buy them and not waiting to go to once around before buying anything.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday June 23 2019, @03:56AM (7 children)
Poor math skills.
Seriously. People have been complaining about the decline of mental math since the emergence of the pocket calculator, but I think anyone who has pulled out a dime at the last minute of a transaction to help avoid getting too much change for a price ending in $.07 or something in the past decade or two understands the reason for the change in Monopoly. If the cashier is young and they've already hit the button for the $20 bill you handed them, they often stare at you in confusion. In such cases, I almost inevitably am either given the wrong change or waste time while they have to void a transaction or something so the machine can tell them what to do.
Monopoly isn't a fantastic game, but it used to be great in teaching young kids how to do math. When my son was maybe 6 or so, he loved playing the game and quickly worked up to being banker when he turned 7 or so. We got to practice making change and mental math. Basic addition and subtraction are all over, and the occasional street repairs card would present an opportunity for multiplication. Paying back mortgages combined taking 10% with addition; monopolies without houses teach doubling for rent. My son really enjoyed the mental challenge of a full tally of assets at the game's conclusion (or when taking 10% for income tax).
But this is all too hard for people these days, it seems. I mean, I saw the writing on the wall a decade or more ago when they removed the 10% option for income tax in the game. It was always a bit of a stupid rule that would slow the game (and anyone who thought for a second knew it was useless after three runs around the board or so), but I suspected it was deleted because of the difficulty of tallying assets and taking 10%. (Mortgages also require 10%, but apparently online polls show that most people don't even know that rule exists, let alone follow it.). I swear I saw some of the Chance or Community Chest cards change values to more round numbers too.
The next stage was the "credit card" version of the game that came out several years ago. You still needed to enter amounts for the transactions, but the math was done and the tally kept by electronic devices. Now we see the next stage of evolution as you just talk to the device -- can you just say aloud "I landed on Park Place with three houses and need to mortgage Pennsylvania Ave., but unmortgage my railroad while you're at it..." and let the "hat" sort it out? If not, I assume that's coming in a few years.
I'm not anti-calculator, by the way. I'm not saying one needs to perform crazy feats of arithmetic in one's head. But there's something to be said for basic number sense in monetary transactions, so you know how much you should be paying, how things break down, what modifications to the transactions will do, and perhaps most importantly -- that you're not being cheated.
Ironically, the game makers are claiming they are introducing this to curb cheating in the game, but in reality it's more likely to lead to people being cheated on real life when they can't keep track of money or transactions, or somehow don't notice when other people are taking advantage of the system and weirdly end up with excess cash. Seriously -- what's so hard about preventing cheating in Monopoly with the bank, as long as people are paying even minimal attention to other players?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 23 2019, @05:02AM (4 children)
Everyone will use a phone to pay for everything. Tap and done.
For all other forms of math, consult your brain implant.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday June 23 2019, @07:35AM (3 children)
So if they really wanted it to take off, they would have made the hat Samsung-pay or Apple-pay enabled.
(Score: 2) by Chocolate on Sunday June 23 2019, @11:46AM (2 children)
Please stop giving them ideas.
Now the next version will have an app where each player tracks their properties, pays via a banking screen, has their cash total, etcetc fully Internet enabled
Bit-choco-coin anyone?
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday June 23 2019, @11:09PM (1 child)
Don't forget creating fake accounts [cnn.com] and foreclosing on random houses [go.com].
(Score: 2) by Chocolate on Tuesday June 25 2019, @02:58PM
I cannot recall how old I was when I started to catch on to the fact that some properties were being sold without being paid for, and other dirty tricks. All part of growing up. Then there are people who change the rules on the fly to suit themselves.
Bit-choco-coin anyone?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Sunday June 23 2019, @07:56AM
Considering the plasticity of a child's brain, I'd think handling physical cash would develop multiple parts of it:
Just off the top of my head, this seems like it involves (albeit *very* low-level) object identification and recognition, color distinction, tactile engagement, physical exchange of items, irregular-quantity arithmetic, and memory. Even cheating when using paper money and objects involves multiple of these processes, and adds ethics and decision-making exercises in early life.
I'm guessing using multiple parts of the brain like this as part of a single higher-level concept of a 'transaction' encourages those functions to complement/supplement each other, and eventually push them from conscious effort into lower-level skills, allowing more complex skill development to use them as a foundation. A talking hat offloads all of this and starts sounding more like the manager in your ear [marshallbrain.com] mental process. It also has a spooky parallel to one element of the recent mortgage crisis [cnbc.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 24 2019, @12:03AM
Well I dunno, maybe if we stopped defunding education.
But it's easier to blame our failures on the millennials so haw haw millennial incels! i've got mine, fuck you!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @08:00AM (1 child)
I wanted to say to fire the product manager responsible for this "innovation", but I won't. Board games are dead now, and we haven't had a successful toy-movie tie-in for years now.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday June 24 2019, @01:41PM
Currently, Monopoly ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1406/monopoly [boardgamegeek.com] ) is ranked 17246 which implies there are 17245 games better than it. You couldn't play that many games in your life. There are probably some crap games in that 17245 but take the top 10% of that and 1700 good games are surely there. In recent years good "welcome to the world of real boardgames" lists might include Pandemic, Ticket to ride, 7 Wonders, and Dominion. Catan is good if you like larger or more complicated rulesets.
Go to a shop that specializes in games and they will steer you right. Or go to barnes & noble because in general they filter out the real crappy ones. Except the obligatory monopoly remixes.
When was the last time we had a good boardgame tie in movie anyway?
(Score: 2) by RedIsNotGreen on Monday June 24 2019, @01:40AM
Instead of plain old theft, this game encourages theft with conspiracy. Everyone has to urinate at some point. unless they're wearing Monopoly Diapers to be included with next game, which teaches about high-frequency trading.
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Monday June 24 2019, @03:08AM
just play with your shitcoins in place of monopoly money.