Does art reflect culture or does culture reflect art? It’s a chicken or the egg level conundrum but Hasbro’s classic board game Monopoly is letting their fans decide. A new website is making it possible, and even fun, to help them choose the next series of tokens or game pieces for their game. They have over fifty options and the run the gamut from the classic thimble and battleship to new, tech inspired tokens like a hashtag or wink emoji.
Monopoly has been around for a long time and they always seem to be updating to encourage you to upgrade your version of the game. They’ve added credit cards in the past, they have make different versions for different age groups or interest types, now they are letting fans of the game be involved in the design process. The site is even fun to use. It’s set up like a house and you click your way through different rooms that feature different tokens. When you click on one you like you see it more close up and see the name they call it. You can chose to vote for it there on that popup or you can click an arrow to see the next on the list already in that zoomed in mode. It’s easy to use and fun to look around seeing what they’ve come up with.
The new version of the game with the winning designs will be available this summer and for the purists like myself, (I HAVE to be the battleship!) a “Token Madness” edition will be available that will include the classic tokens as well as the newest, fan selected, versions. You can vote until January 31 so head on over and chime in.
When Tech Bleeds Into the Board Game
My family loves to play board games. My wife and I even spend the majority of our date nights playing a two-player version of some tabletop game. You will often see the digital world work it’s way to the analog products we enjoy. It’s obviously a way to try and stay relevant and attract buyers. I remember seeing “Words with Friends” the board game in Target and my wife and I laughing at each other…”Isn’t that scrabble???” Maybe, as parents of digital natives, we can use this as an advantage. Use an offline version of a mobile game like “Words with Friends” to encourage a few hours of family time. Maybe some emoji tokens in Monopoly will provide a bit of delight that will cause your 16 and 12 year olds to want to sit down with you and play for a while. Try it out sometime soon. But first, go vote on the new Monopoly Tokens.
More and more employers look at a potential hire’s social media accounts when deciding if they’ll employ them. Your teen needs to know that what they post online, that song lyric that makes them sound depressed all the time, the nasty comments about the boss at their last job, or even the pics from that night “out” last weekend can come into play when they’re looking for a job. This also applies while they’re trying to keep their job.
The Houseparty app uses your contact list to automatically log you in with up to eight friends who are online when you open the app. You don’t set up or invite people to conversations, it just puts you in a room to hangout with whoever is on. So using your contacts list ensures that you’re hopefully only chatting with friends. You may, however, have the contacts of some folks you aren’t interested in chatting with. There is a “stranger danger” feature that will alert the user if someone joins the chat that isn’t on their contact list. This is a pretty good feature.
