Monopoly

There seems to be a new trend in town: games that found a way to deal with all that nasty, unpredictable human intervention in games – they do away with it.

There is Cory Arcangel at the Barbican, letting bowling games play themselves. (Nothing new, really, there has been a Lego Mindstorm robot playing Wii Bowling on its own for quite some time now).

Then there is the Figurine Mode of Super Street Fighter IV on the Nintendo 3DS, where you collect virtual figurines, and they will battle those of other players. All without the player doing anything – the fight actually happens while the Nintendo 3DS is in sleep mode.¹

And finally, there is a new edition of Monopoly, where a computer tells you what you have to do. The reason why Hasbro chose to do so are rather hazy. Maybe American players are too dull to grasp the rules? Jesper Juul should be pleased – finally someone put an end to all that discussions about rules and inventing house rules and stuff that makes games so un-gamey ...

But seriously – Hasbro is clearly doing anything to take the player out of the equation. The game is played by the weird thingy[^batman] in the middle of the board, and the player is degraded to moving the pieces, because it's just a a computer chip, without attached robot limbs. Humans are better at moving small finicky things for their robot overlords anyway.

Some people are still waiting for the singularity.