Recently, I was going on about how game designers might have something to learn from designers in other realms. I probably should have gone so far as to suggest that “game designer” has more in common with, say, “interaction designer,” “web designer,” or “industrial designer” than with “game distributor,” “game store clerk,” or maybe even “game player.” (But not “game master.” Going that far would be plain wrong.) In closing, I encouraged game designers to keep abreast of developments in other fields of design, suggesting a series of blogs in particular that I thought were good reading.
Bare days later, over the transom at Daring Fireball came a link to a graphic designer’s re-envisioning of the hairy old Monopoly board that’s seen so much abuse at the hands of every university, sports team, and lifestyle brand in the whole entire world.
Check out Helvetica Revival Monopoly. It’s gorgeous: it’s different, it’s clean, and it looks like money looks to me.
I don’t know the story behind this design, if there is one; I can’t find any text at all to accompany it.
Love or hate Monopoly as a game (and you can chalk me up in the latter camp on most days), it’s hard to deny that this is a really, really interesting merger of a classic game with a graphic design style that’s rarely—if ever—seen in the hardcore gaming world, but which is nevertheless very well-respected in the mainstream design world. (For certain values of “mainstream” and “design,” naturally.) What would happen if this design aesthetic were applied to a traditional hobby game? Imagine, that is, the cover of something like Helvetica Revival Dungeons & Dragons.
I’m interested in your reaction to Helvetica Revival Monopoly. Love it? Hate it Why?
This is a gorgeous design. It’s so clean and attractive it really makes me want to play Monopoly, which isn’t generally an impulse I feel. So, I love it. I like it when people reexamine old classics.
It’s kind of cute, but it doesn’t look like something I’d want to actually *play*. The spaces aren’t demarked, making it unclear which property the houses go with; the names are gone, making the game lose the majority of its theme–landing on ‘$4,000 dark blue’ just isn’t the same as landing on ‘Boardwalk’; the C in a box is just mysterious; the game in general looks like some sort of bidding game instead of a building game. The design could work with some other game, but it doesn’t look to me like Monopoly would be very fun/playable on it. This could be a fair amount of nostalgia talking, of course.
While it is a beautiful artefact, it is rather typical of modern design in that it is all form and no function.
I agree with Lucian. One of the (few) strengths of traditional Monopoly is its theme. By stripping the “Streets of London” (or wherever) fantasy away, all that is left is an abstract game – and a poor one at that.
Hi Jeff,
I agree with Malcolm and Lucian. It’s a beautiful design, but it’s emphasis on design seems to seriously detract from its purpose.
While it might be cool for *a* game, I don’t think it works for Monopoly (for many of the reasons cited by both Lucian and Malcolm).
I agree that a “Helvetica Revised D&D” cover would be interesting. Would it useful or desirable? Not so much.
Take Care,
Lou
I’m sympathetic to arguments about usability, and was prepared to acknowledge that it was a legit concern for this board after reading the last three comments, but going back to the image and checking it out again, it looks to me like the spaces are labelled with property names, it’s pretty clear to me from the placement of the houses that you cross a line to enter a space, and that the “C” cubes represent Community Chest. It’s all there; I can’t see any reason it wouldn’t play identically to the original.
And maybe it’s just a Monopoly-hater hating on Monopoly, but I’ve got to disagree that one of Monopoly‘s strengths is its theme. If that were true, would it be so easy to make a new version for every city, school, and lifestyle brand with a half-ounce of consumer awareness? Wouldn’t a strongly themed game fall apart under such abuse? NASCAR Runebound? Iowa Hawkeyes Magic: The Gathering?
I would say that Monopoly is easy to *re*theme, but it falls apart if you *un*theme it. M:tG could be re-themed for football (perhaps), but I don’t think it’d be as fun if you simply removed the art and the flavor text, leaving only rules. Yes, it would play the same as the original. But it would lose a lot of its charm.
I could try to defend the specific reasons I listed above (my issue with the spaces is that it’s hard to tell at a glance whether any given white space goes with the label above or below it, for example), but mostly they’re me trying to come up with specifics why I looked at the picture and immediately thought, “It’s Monopoly without the Monopoly. How boring.”
My sense is that different people are wired differently for this sort of thing. Abstract games have never particularly been my cup of tea; I need some sort of theme to hang the mechanics on to enjoy the game more fully.