Can a Board Game Change a Culture? Or has the Culture Changed the Game?

If you have ever played a Hasbro game called “The Game of Life” you may or may not have played one distributed in 2007.  I played this one with my 8-year-old granddaughter.  We didn’t bother to read the rules, but I was wondering about this game and it’s teaching of moral values, when I landed on a square that said I could have children.  There was no mention of getting married.  Then I landed on a square, which said that I could sue somebody to get money from him or her in order share the wealth.  Huh?  This sounded like what Malcolm Muggeridge talked about in his piece about the “Great Liberal Death Wish.” Here is an excerpt:

”It was from that moment that I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I'd supposed it to be - a creative movement which would shape the future - but rather a sort of death wish. How otherwise could you explain how people, in their own country ardent for equality, bitter opponents of capital punishment and all for more humane treatment of people in prison, supporters, in fact, of every good cause, should in the USSR prostrate themselves before a regime ruled over brutal-ly and oppressively and arbitrarily by a privileged party oligarchy? I still ponder over the mystery of how men displaying critical intelligence in other fields could be so astonishingly deluded.” 

And then he said this:

 “I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant. I never got over that; it always remained in my mind as something that could never be erased. I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media's prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still. That's when I began to think seriously about the great liberal death wish.”

 Would other people feel the same way about this game that I did?  I checked out  the reviews on Amazon.com.  It looked to me that few liked the update of this  game.  Of the reviews I read all were negative.  Apparently the older version of the game was much better.  Here is the link to the Amazon page. http://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-4000-Game-of-Life/dp/B00000IWD7/ref=sr_1_1?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1377365469&sr=1-1&keywords=the+game+of+life

Hmmm, I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone.