I don’t really like playing games of any kind, on or offline, but I love Google Maps so this one caught my attention. Monopoly City Streets is an online, multiplayer version of Monopoly that is played on Google Maps, and it’s a joint project of Google and Hasbro, the makers of Monopoly. Instead of the traditional Monopoly gameboard, you can buy and sell property almost anywhere in the world through Google Maps. The preview site describe it this way: “A live worldwide game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence.”

I immediately set up an account and bought Columbus Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I lived from the age of 10 to 19, and put a house on the spot where my mother’s house was. And then I went and the street where I live now, and several other places where I have lived. I was able to buy almost every street I have lived on (Boulevard East in West New York, New Jersey being the exception) but in all cases I was surprised by how many streets nearby were already owned and covered with a random assortment of buildings, mostly ugly skyscrapers and towers.

The game had a rocky launch on September 9, with the servers quickly becoming overloaded and inaccessible. When these problems were resolved, many users complained about the unfairness the limited access had created, and it was announced that the game would be reset, probably some time this week. Things seem to be stable now, and of course there are already many fan resources for the game on Twitter, Facebook, Ning, YouTube, etc.

Monopoly City Streets was designed as a promotion for Hasbro’s new board game, Monopoly City Edition, and is scheduled to end on January 31, 2010.

As the narrator says, “Yes, it’s swell teamwork on the part of everyone that gets speedy, accurate information for modern roadmaps!”

This film was produced by the Jam Handy Organization, known for its stylish and imaginative training and promotional films produced for the armed forces, the automotive industry and other industrial clients. Caught Mapping was sponsored by Chevrolet, and not surprisingly there are lots of great shots of modern, reliable automobiles handling all sorts of road conditions, and running smoothly enough to allow the passenger to be taking legible notes. There are also a few shots near the beginning of the motoring public consulting road maps. I particularly like the two young women wearing their glamorous hats, one of which looks like a big feather was shot straight through it.

The film runs a little less than ten minutes and is an interesting and informative look at the ways street maps were maintained in the days before GIS, GPS, satellite imagery, Google Maps and Google Earth! I wonder if fifty years from now, people will be looking back at the primitive processes Google is using to gather the imagery for Streetview, which is not unlike the road warriors driving around to personally check every inch of road.

Caught Mapping — View the video on the Internet Archive site, with more information and different video formats to download.