Foursquare Monopoly Explained

Today Gizmodo carried a slightly confusing item about an “application” called “Foursquare Monopoly,” taken from an interview earlier this month with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley’s brother, Jonathan. Here is a transcript of that part of the interview: “There’s an application I’m planning right now called Foursquare Monopoly. And um because Foursquare’s open and everyone can build applications on top of it, there’s a guy in New York, his name’s Christian Bovine, and he built an application in which — so you take 20 venues that you hang out with, 20 venues that you hang out at, and you take 10 of your friends to compete in this game, and everyone’s given a certain amount of like fake cash, like $3000, so when you check into a venue, that’s part of Foursquare Monopoly. You can buy it, if no one’s checked in there yet….”

Oh go on?

“And when you buy it, you own it like Monopoly. So let’s say I buy this bar that we go to, right? And I own that personally. And the next day you go and you check in and you’re hoping that you can buy it but when you check in you see that I own it and then you pay me rent. So it’s all about like who can get a certain amount of money before everybody else. And then the winner is who can get like $5000 first. I think that’s a really clever way of like taking a classic game like Monopoly and like layering that on to real life hanging out, like in a real social environment in New York City.”

One note on this?

From the CNN profile of Foursquare, all of three weeks ago:

There are no winners and losers in the game of Foursquare.

And that’s intentional.

As Rainert, Foursquare’s product manager, put it: “It’s not about winning; it’s about doing more stuff.”

Crowley put it more bluntly.

“You don’t want to tell people they’re winning at life or they’re not,” he said.