CSotD: Uncle Moneybags in “The Shining”
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The family stuck inside is a fairly common comic strip plotline in winter, and the quality of the resulting story arc depends for the most part on how well the cartoonist has established actual individual characters among the cast, as opposed to populating it with bland archetypes. No problem in this case: Sally Forth has transformed Ted into something between the Dad from "Malcolm in the Middle" and a character from "Arrested Development."
Hilary has it right: The soul of Monopoly is the attitude of the players. Back in the Olden Days, when computers first included color graphics and 5 1/4" floppy drives and everyone was rushing to find something to do with them, "Monopoly" was turned into a computer game.
The good thing was, nobody had to play banker. The bad thing was that nobody wanted to cram themselves around the front of a small computer screen and take turns using the keyboard. The layout of a gameboard, two-dimensional in the middle of a table and with a format that makes it equally accessible from any angle, turns out to be ideal for group play.
On the other hand, you could play solo, against computer players, so you could play Monopoly anytime you wanted, without having to gather a group of people eager for hypercompetitiveness and questionable zoning laws. You just rolled the dice, bought and sold property, built houses and hotels and then found out who won. No quarreling, no cheating, no whining, nobody trying to conceal the fact that they are beginning to get pissed off, nobody not even trying to conceal the fact that they are well into the process of becoming pissed off …
In short, no point.
The point of Monopoly, it turned out, was not what happens on the board, but what happens around the board. What happens on the board is a mere accounting function. Monopoly, as a computer game, is about as much fun as TurboTax, and not nearly as suspenseful.
I don't see the comics any sooner than anyone else, and so I rarely know for sure whether a cartoon is a stand-alone or is the first in a full story arc. In this case, I'm not sure what I even want. An entire week of playing Monopoly with Ted Forth could be some real skin-crawling fun, or it might just be that the concept, as expressed today, is enough of a horror that no elaboration can do it justice. We shall see.
Meanwhile, if the President is serious about closing Guantanamo, he should just send Ted Forth down there with a Monopoly board. The confessions would pour out faster than they could be written down.
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