Megan Dunn on winning at The Game of Life vs. real life

Megan Dunn is the author of Things I Learned at Art School. Sometimes she talks about art on RNZ’s Saturday Morning with Kim Hill. She plays The Game of Life.

OPINION: Last night Rich won The Game of Life. “Daddy really creamed it tonight,” I say, as Rich counts his wads of orange, cream, purple, and blue paper bank notes. Fearne and I tie for second place. She’s 7, I’m 48, Rich is 46. We are all millionaires. However only one of us owns a home by retirement – Fearne.

“But I’m a doctor,” Rich says, “I should have a house.” Too bad, he never lands on one of the purple house squares. Rich invests in a sports team though and that pays off. I’m a pilot, even though I’m terrified of flying, and Fearne is a politician but only because we talked her into it. “I want to be a model,” she says. “Yeah, but a model only pays $40,000 a year, the politician gets $140,000 as a bonus.”

“Can we play again?” Fearne begs, even though it was past her bedtime.

The most satisfying thing about The Game of Life is the white plastic spinner.

“Mummy can I spin for you?” she asks.

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“Yes,” I say because I know better than to say no. Fearne is a savage player. Competitive, impulsive, temperamental, prone to pouting and going wild when she can’t have everything she wants.

She spins the wheel and it cl-cli-clicks as it turns. I love that sound of it spinning, the feeling of the game in motion, our plastic cars at the start again. The board has changed since my childhood. The little plastic peg people aren’t just pink and blue anymore – there’s also green, purple, red and yellow pegs.

We load our cars up with coloured pets, partners and friends because we can cash each in for $50,000 at the end. I invest in a cricket farm because insects are the protein of the future. Fearne refuses to buy either the ski chalet or the dream villa and selects the cosy cottage, even though it is worthless. “I don’t care!” she says with a humph. A house is a very emotional purchase.

Sadly, Rich and I have not landed on the house square in real life either – we are generation rent, even though we shouldn’t be. “What does money mean to you?” our financial advisor asks during our first meeting.

Rich looks at me. We share a long, befuddled pause. Then Rich says: “Security?” I answer with a true story about how my mother died in late 2019, in a rented room and I had to clear out all her things. “She never had a house,” I say. “So, peace of mind?” the financial adviser replies.

“Yes,” I seize on peace of mind. Who designed The Game of Life? Milton Bradley, then a young American lithographer. In 1860, Bradley printed thousands of lithographs of clean-shaven presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln. But by the time Lincoln won the election, he had grown a beard. Bradley’s portraits didn’t sell, and his business nearly went bankrupt.

Not long afterwards Bradley invented The Checkered Game of Life. It was an instant success. No cash was involved in the game. Instead, there were squares representing suicide, poverty, and ruin. Players were rewarded for making virtuous moral choices, and the winner was the first to reach “happy old age”.

The game also used a teetotum – or spinning top – on purpose. Bradley didn’t want players to use dice, “the devil’s tools”, then associated with gambling.

But in 1960, The Game of Life was completely revamped for the Milton Bradley company’s first centennial. Inventor Reuben Klamer created the post-war Baby boomer board game most of us remember.

He added the plastic station wagons, the highway of life and its topography and also the wheel of fortune – yes, that plastic spinner. The teetotum was replaced by the spinner, forever turning and clicking, in the centre of the board, like a roulette wheel.

“I saw the word life and it inspired me,” Klamer writes. In his memoir, Blitz, Sizzle and Serendipity: My Game of Life, he identifies that the potential market for the game was “literally everyone on earth!”

Indeed. The Game of Life is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian and an inductee to the National Toy Hall of Fame.

“What do you like best about the game?” I ask Fearne.

“That you can get houses,” Fearne says.

We never owned The Game of Life when I was a kid, but I remember playing it at someone else’s house. In the 80s, you could park out front of a dinky plastic white church to get married i.e, add a blue peg to your car. That church has gone now – but you can still get married and have a mid-life crisis.

Thank god. Rich and I agree that it is good Fearne learns how to play The Game of Life now. She needs to know we will never let her grow up to be a vlogger. Or a social media influencer, not for $40,000 a year.