Social Class Simulation Paper

In this sociology game simulation, many players played it all in good fun, making jokes and accepting their fate based on their financial status. If this was the real world however, those players wouldn't have been making too many jokes. Social inequality occurs when opportunities and rewards are not the same for everyone within a group or society. Social structure can be described as the make up of societal institutions and social practices that form a society, which creates and organizes limits on how people act within that society. Social stratification is the ranking of larger social groups based on their authority over basic resources. During the game, everyone in my group seemed to be having fun and making jokes about their financial …show more content…
You were “born into” the amount of money you began the game with just like in real life. Also people who were higher-class were treated better than people who were lower-class, which can contrast with real life. The game was different from real life in the way the money was distributed. In real life you aren't given more or less money depending on when your birthday is. In someways this game did simulate how social class works in the United States such as how white-collar crime is treated compared to crime from the lower class. The game also simulated how people with more money have more opportunities. This simulation suggests the American Dream is achieved mostly by people with money, which comes more opportunity. The American Dream is hard to reach when you are lower-class. If we wanted to make the game more fair, we could have played with the original rules by having everyone start out with the same amount of money and no one would have properties until landed on and paid for. In the real world this would be called socialism or communism. The game reflected more towards the real world than the original rules of monopoly would reflect. This simulation was a helpful tool on giving me a better understanding of the aspects of social inequality, social structure, and social stratification. If we could play Monopoly every class period I would not