Moscow Doesn’t Make it into International Monopoly!!
Shockingly, and inexplicably, Moscow didn’t make it into the new international version of Monopoly. Kiev, Riga, and Belgrade made the cut:
Hasbro held a contest earlier in the year:
The most valuable real estate will be on blue spots, for instance (normally occupied by Broadway and Park Place), and then green, yellow and so on. There is currently a vote going on that is open to anyone in the world with a computer, and you can vote once a day for up to ten cities. The top vote getters will be on Broadway and Park Place, and the rest will be apportioned to the remainder of the real estate.
According to the woman at Hasbro I spoke to, the website where the voting is going on–www.monopoly.com–is getting 10,000 votes a day. That’s not all that much. A concerted web effort can turn this around.
So, the whole thing was determined by voting. How did the Russian livejournal community not get a hold of this and flood it? I would have expected to see Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, and maybe even a few others on the final version. ЖЖ, you have let me and your country down! I’d say the same about America, but our web presence is far more disjointed, and, truth be told, we don’t have the same sort of nationalistic fervor that the Russian net can at times have.
Instead, we have an absurdly high representation by smaller Eastern European cities. I mean Gdynia? Really? At first I thought that was an alternative spelling of Gdansk? How did all these cities get on, but not Prague? This is truly a bizarre outcome.
Democracy in action, my friend. Those who don’t vote, don’t get represented.
Comment by http://ukraineblogg.blogspot.com/ — August 28, 2008 @ 4:24 am
By the way, Taipei and Gdynia got in by a separate voting process. The two bottom cities, the cheapest real estate of the game, was determined through a separate vote on a “random city”, in which you could submit any city and vote on it separately. Taipei and Gdynia made it to the top of that list. So, that’s how you see a much larger Warsaw being displaced by tiny Gdynia. Warsaw didn’t make it into the top 20, but Gdynia made it to #2 on the separate vote.
Comment by Aleks — August 28, 2008 @ 4:38 am
oooh. I have to drop by your blog way more often. I voted in this but never saw the outcome. I voted for Beijing, Vienna, Sydney and Singapore (well, the latter wasn’t really a good choice, but I tried to show some solidarity). No Vienna
And I agree, so weird that there’s no Moscow, St. Petersburg or Prague, but Belgrade or Riga. (well, let alone Gdynia of course, the “part of a conurbation with the spa town of Sopot, the city of Gdańsk and suburban communities,..”
Comment by Lucia — September 8, 2008 @ 12:07 pm
Yes, you do need to stop by more often
And let me know about stuff like this! How’d you find out about the voting? Yeah, no Vienna, or Innsbruck!!!
Comment by Owen — September 8, 2008 @ 9:50 pm
Will do on both counts!
I think it was in the news back then. Good marketing coup from Hasbro’s side
(then again, I’m surprised you never heard about it, maybe not so well done after all!)
Comment by Lucia — September 9, 2008 @ 2:03 am
Russia blog roundup - September…
A bumper roundup of the best blog posts about Russia from the past month. Plus news of new blogs.
……
Trackback by Siberian Light: The Russia Blog — September 11, 2008 @ 3:04 pm