There's been a few of my old essays where I've used Monopoly as a go to example, such as here or here. I use this as an example because Monopoly is so well known, and because a lot of the bad attitudes that gamers have (especially in terms of RPGs) are contained in how they play Monopoly. But then I realized two things: First, people may not fully realize how Monopoly is meant to be played, and second, that there's enough going on with Monopoly that it's worth doing a deep dive into that by itself.
Let's start with how people learn the game. Unless you never played board games as a kid, or you grew up in a foreign country where Monopoly is not well known, you learned it the same way as everyone else. That is to say, you did not open up the rulebook and learn the rules, as you might have for games you learned later like Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, Arkham Horror, etc. Instead you were told how to play the game by your group of friends, which meant that you learned several house rules as if they were the actual rules. Since you never saw the rulebook, there was no way for you to know the difference between a house rule and the actual rules to begin with.
Monopoly is not the only game this happens with. Many people play UNO without realizing that the Wild Draw Four card is a bluff card. (Specifically you can only "safely" play it if you lack the correct color to play normally. If you do have the right color, you can still play it, but can be challenged by the next player.) Many "classic" games have overlooked rules like this. But in most cases they do not have a huge effect on the gameplay. However, the house rules in Monopoly drastically twist the game.
Here are some common ways that people ignore the rules, and how the game suffers:
Using these house rules effectively turns Monopoly into a different game. Monopoly is a game about trading, auctions, cuthroat manuerving, and is relatively fast paced. (Games should never take longer than two hours and are often done in less than forty minutes.) The house rules make a game almost entirely ruled by chance, which goes on forever. Victory due to skill is no longer an option, meaning that the point is more the "social experience" of having pepole play a game while only somewhat paying attention. It is essentially a different game. Imagine that someone used the Monopoly board and pieces to play a wargame, where the player pieces were generals and the houses/hotels represented armies. The spaces were territories, etc. You could make a game like this, and it might even be quite fun, but it woudln't be "Monopoly" anymore. This would be true even if you tried to use as much of the information on the board as possible (perhaps the prices for each "territory" would be the income it gives you each year, for exmaple.) In the same way, the house rule version of Monopoly has changed so much from the original that it is a different game that happens to use the same components. We will call it "Folk Monopoly" to distinguish it from Monopoly.
Now that we know what "Folk Monopoly" is, we need to consider what the "Folk Monopoly Mindset" might be. In short, it is what convinces people to play Folk Monopoly rather than actual Monopoly. The first thing to note about the mindset is that it convinces people that "Folk Monopoly" is Monopoly. If you insist on not getting money for Free Parking, then you are playing Monopoly wrong, despite the fact that you are provably following the actual rules and that playing in this way leads to a better experience. What's especially weird about this is how people with the Folk Monopoly Mindset will admit that they are using house rules, but insist that "this is the way everyone plays" or "if you play without the house rules the game is boring (not that I've done that.)" This is how they dodge the observation that they are not playing by the rules: they claim it doesn't matter. You can always adjust the rules as you like, after all. But in that case, it's just as equally true that you could choose to not have money on Free Parking, have auctions, etc. as part of your "personal house rules." Yet, this still doesn't count, as that takes you away from "Folk Monopoly." Folk Monopoly players will disparage Monopoly as a flawed game, even though their complaints generally are the fault of their house rules. If you point this out, they will generally say that their house rules are just fixing a flawed game, and that playing without their house rules would result in an even worse experience.
This essay is in the RPG section and I've used the Monopoly analogy before when discussing RPGs (particularly D&D.) While my observations do apply to actual Monopoly players, at the same time I am drawing parallels to how people play these RPGs. Just like there is a "Folk Monopoly" there is also a "Folk Dungeons and Dragons." "Folk Dungeons and Dragons" does not appear in any rulebook, but instead is transmitted by an oral tradition telling people "how everyone else plays" or "what you have to do to make the game fun." Just like Folk Monopoly, people who play Folk Dungeons and Dragons probably are in the majority, and they almost always have never played the real game. However, just like Folk Monopoly players, Folk Dungeons and Dragons players feel justified in attacking the game as a whole by claiming that their nonstandard method of play is necessary to fix a game which would otherwise be broken. In Dungeons and Dragons the problem is compounded because players can dismiss game features as irrelevant mistakes from previous editions. For example, during first edition, Folk Dungeons and Dragons players would ignore training rules as boring, unrealistic, cost prohibitive, etc. If training rules were still in the game, they wouldn't use them. However, since they disappeard after first edition (except apparently as an optional feature in fifth) they can now say that training is obviously incompatible with Dungeons and Dragons, and that's why the official rules got rid of it. But you shouldn't be confused. It's not like 2nd edition players badmouthed the features dropped from 1st edition and diligently followed the 2nd edition rules. They still ignored most of what 2nd edition said as well.
Folk D&D players tend to go a bit further, by completely bypassing game mechanics. For example, declaring that no even though the players rushed into a battle with a group of goblins that proceeded to gank them, that they just won't die because that would be "undramatic." Sometimes this is done behind the scenes by the DM. "Oh no, it's totally legitimate that the first nine times you were hit the monsters only did 1 HP of damage, that once you droppped down to 1 HP they missed ten times in a row, and when you complained about the battle taking so long you instantly had a series of one hit kill critical hit attacks. No dice fudging here." Othertimes the players agree to it. Oftentimes you get a polite fiction: the DM "secretly" fudges the dice, but the players know exactly the situations where the DM will fudge the dice, so no one is really fooled. Folk Monopoly players generally will not fudge the dice rolls. However, Folk Monopoly players will end up doing many of the same things through mercy rules. For example, suppose someone lands on a fully decked out Boardwalk and thus goes bankrupt. The owner of Boardwalk might say "oh, you only have to pay me ten bucks, since it would be lame for you to get knocked out at this point." Or someone losing to a board space, like one of the taxes, might get an instant "loan" from another player, or even a loan from the bank (which is explicitly forbidden by the rules.) Similarly if someone gets out of jail and immediately rolls three doubles (hence triggering the "speeding" rules to get sent back to jail) players might say that this time the cops don't pull them over, since it would be cruel to go to jail back to back. All of this is supposed to make the game more fun by making it more "dramatic." But just like Folk D&D play, all it really does is stress that there is no challenge, just a desired narrative with some minimal variation. That is, there is no game, or at least no good game.
Another big problem with the mindset is that it causes people to view the "folk" game as the real game, which must be defended at all costs. As much as people hate Monopoly for being long and boring, it is deeply ingrained in their minds that this long and boring game is what Monopoly is. When you play by the real rules, to them this is making up your own game. This is not allowed, you must keep the "folk" version or nothing. Things get even more absurd with role playing games. The customs surrounding "Folk D&D Play" outweigh anything in the rulebooks. However, this can cause an issue, since you can easily play a role playing game with no rulebook at all. It's not like Monopoly where you need a board and other components, in rpgs all you need is dice and paper. The folk D&D mindset is really a lifestyle, which makes this impossible.
In fact, there are lifestyle aspects to folk monopoly as well. Think of all the hundreds (thousands?) of variations of Monopooly that you've seen. You might perhaps one of these to actually play the game. I liked Star Wars as a kid, our old Monopoly board get torn, so I replaced it with a Star Wars Monopoly that I've used for games since then. Similarly someone might use a Pokemon, NFL, Catopoly, etc. board for such a purpose. But if you buy one for Pokemon, one for Zelda, one for Mario, one for Sonic, one for Dragonball Z, etc. the only motivation is to display a bunch of Monopoly boxes on your shelves. Similarly, folk D&D players are generally part of a lifestyle that values merch, and one of the biggest flexes is to show bookshelves full of sourcebooks. However, Monopoly variants at least have neat artwork and pieces and so forth. Rulebooks are only good for rules. Thus the folk D&D player must pretend that he values the rules in the rulebooks he buys, while at the same time Folk D&D tells him that many of the rulebooks should be ignored. How to resolve this contradiction? Simple: find a "Rule Zero" in the books which says that the DM can overrule any rule at whim. This is explicitly stated in most modern sourcebooks, and the Folk D&D player will have no trouble in "finding" it in older books. Now he has the license to say that all of his folk practices are valid.
One of the most interesting things about this mindset is that its practicioners will often demand obedience to folk customs, while justifying these customs by saying that you can do whatever you want. What is meant in practice is that you can do whatever you want, as long as you are ignoring the real rules and following the folk customs. In Monopoly it is suspicious to not throw five hundred dollars in the middle for free parking. Even the rules say you shouldn't do this, the folk customs say to do this, and they are justified because people house rule games all the time. But suppose you instead decide to start the game with a secret auction on every property. This isn't in the rules either, but with the justifications used for the customs this should be valid. Yet you will find a great deal of resistance from people who support the usual Monopoly house rules. That house rule is not allowed, since it doesn't fit into the "unwritten rules" that everyone uses. Same thing in RPGs. Even many modern RPG sourcebooks don't talk about a "Session Zero" where you not only make characters but also talk about expectations for the campaign, both in terms of fantasy content and in terms of gameplay. Older sourcebooks never mention such a thing, and many of them stress how it is important to make characters quickly and start playing almost immediately. Yet you will encounter resistance to not doing this in the modern RPG community. Sure, the rules don't say you have to, but you can do whatever you want because of Rule Zero, and it makes it more fun for everyone? (Let's just ignore the people who don't want to waste a full three hour session not actually playing the game.) On the other hand, if you suggest adding explicit wargame mechanics into an RPG (even one that has used them like D&D) and you'll get complaints like "this is a roleplaying game, not a wargame" or "you shouldn't add things that will make the game less fun" etc. Suddenly Rule Zero doesn't apply. But this is because Rule Zero really means "the written rules of the book don't matter, because you must follow the unwritten rules of the folk culture."
September 2, 2023