McOpoly
It’s no longer topical, but when has that ever stopped me before? Ame likes to play the “no purchase necessary” McDonald’s Monopoly sweepstakes when it comes around, and this last season was no exception. We have McDonald’s a couple times a week as it is, so this game is really just an opportunity to collect little colored Atlantic City properties and hope for a match or instant win.
The odds of winning any prize is about 1 in 3 or 4, but “any prize” really sucks like a small frosty with purchase of a large drink. Right on. The big money is in the property matches, and, just like Monopoly, the shitty properties are the shitty prizes, but matching Boardwalk and Park Place is where the real action is. Don’t get me wrong, matching even the dark purples, Baltic and Mediterranean (yes, I’ve practically memorized the game board of Monopoly), the lowest property in the game, would still be awesome because winning is awesome.
If I recall correctly, the odds of winning the Texas State Lottery is something like 1 in 65,000,000. At those levels, it really is no real appreciable difference mathematically in buying a ticket or not. Not quite a less-than-zero percent chance, but why bother? It reminds me of a goofy and kind of insightful comment I saw at Slashdot.
“…you can have a negative percent chance of succeeding in a task. For example, if you have a -5% chance of succeeding, not only will you fail every time you make an attempt, you will also fail 1 in 20 times that you don’t even try.”
So whenever the McOpoly game comes around again, I just roll my eyes and hand all my miniature Monopoly properties over to Ame whereupon she hoards them with glee like some sort of paper-token miser.
Goddammit! Park Place again!?
- Ame