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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lewpuls" data-source="post: 7727472" data-attributes="member: 30518">Monopoly:People rarely actually remember *Monopoly* fondly, they remember doing something together with their family (often at holidays) when they were kids, where Monopoly happened to be what they were doing. It's the active togetherness, not the game, that counts. I have often discussed this with college students, and they usually agree with this point of view. (Many say they never actually *completed* a game of Monopoly, of course.)Popularity does not equal greatness, both in games and in other entertainments and arts.  Keep in mind, many if not most mass-market games are bought as presents. Monopoly is bought because it's well known, and because the buyer figures that "everyone knows how to play" so they won't have learn the game in order to help the kids learn the game.As a game design, it's pretty bad for adults, though works for younger children. When I teach game design, I use Monopoly on the very first day as a student exercise in how a popular game is a poor design, and how they can improve it, at least from the point of view of thinkers.Enevhar Aldarion: Replayability was, I thought, implied in people playing the game again and again and again."And there has to be an element of chance, like with dice rolling or with random number generators in PC/console games. If a highly skilled player can beat everyone else every time, then a great game quickly becomes boring and not fun to any but the elite few grand master experts."You're saying, then, that Chess and Checkers are not great games - because there's no element of chance? I have to disagree.Of course, different people will have different ideas of what makes a game great.jrowland: " a game where players feel that mastery matters lends itself to greatness. " That's a good point, but so many games today are not about mastery at all, and many games in the past, can we say that these are unlikely to ever be regarded as a great game? Perhaps.Chaochou: "People like to pretend being a 'best seller' matters to validate their choices." Yes, validation of one's preferences (which is meaningless to me, but seems to be very important to many gamers nowadays) is a strong motivation for linking popularity to "great". Thanks for reminding me of that.</blockquote>

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