What I learned from running my own Squid Game

Spectator

6 days ago

You know how this story goes. The cameras are rolling. The audience is cruel. You're trapped in the game and the game is death and the game is going out live from the heart of the state of nature where empathy is weakness and you kill each other off until there's only one left. What will you do to survive? Who will you become if you do?
This is the plot of Squid Game, Netflix's Korean mega-hit that just drew to its gory conclusion. It is also the plot of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, The Running Man, Chain-Gang All-Stars and The Long Walk. We have spent several decades watching desperate people slaughter each other for survival to entertain the rich and stupid. Future generations will probably have thoughts about why we kept returning to this particular trope with the bloodthirsty voyeurism we associate with Ancient Rome.
Obviously, these stories are meant to say something about human nature, and the depraved things desperate people can be made to do to each other; they're meant to say something about exploitation, and how easy it is to derive pleasure from someone else's pain. Squid Game says these things while shovelling its doomed characters through a lurid nightmare playground where they die in cruel and creative ways. After each deadly game, blood-spattered contestants are offered a chance to vote on whether to carry on playing. It's a simple referendum: if a majority votes to stay, they're all trapped in the death-match murder circus with only themselves to blame. If they object, a masked guard will accuse them of interrupting the free and fair elections and shoot them in the face. This is everything Squid Game has to say about representative democracy.
'I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society,' said director Hwang Dong-hyuk, just in case you didn't get the message. The whole thing is as subtle as a shopping-mall shooter. I'm reliably informed that the English-language translations strip away a degree of nuance, which probably helps audiences in parts of the Anglosphere where irony is an unaffordable foreign luxury and the experience of everyday economic humiliation feels a lot like being hit over the head with a huge blunt analogy.
Squid Game does not want you confused about who the baddies are. There's a bored cabal of cartoon billionaires drinking scotch and throwing tantrums while they watch our heroes shove each other off cliffs. They smoke cigars and say things like 'I am a very hard man to please'. We never get to find out who they are or what their plan is, because it doesn't matter. How could it possibly matter? How could anything matter in a fake hotel lobby where all the furniture is naked ladies? This is how people who want to be rich think people who are rich ought to talk: like insurance salesmen cosplaying sexual villainy in a kink club for tourists. Nobody is supposed to be able to relate to the Squid Game villains. As it turns out, though, I can.
There's an innocent explanation for how I came to run my own Reality Show of Death Game. Well, mostly innocent. I happen to have a secret other life as an immersive game designer. It's what I did instead of drugs during my divorce, after discovering that here, finally, was a hobby that would let me be a pretentious art wanker and a huge nerd at the same time.
The games are intense – like escape rooms you have to solve with emotions. Many of them revolve around some species of social experiment – the kind that actual researchers can't do any more because it's inhumane. Famously, the 1971 Stanford prison experiment had to be shut down early after students who were cast as guards got far too excited about abusing their prisoners. The sort of people who pay actual money to play this kind of game are expecting to be made to feel things. They're expecting high stakes and horrible choices and wildly dramatic twists. The Death Game trope is an easy way to deliver all of that. Mine forced players to pick one of their friends to 'murder on live television'. It's a five-hour nightmare about social scapegoating with a pounding techno soundtrack. I had a lot going on at the time.
I swotted up on Hobbes and Hayek. I took notes on Squid Game and its infinite derivatives. I gave the players character archetypes to choose from – the Diva, the Flirt, the Party Animal – and got them to imagine themselves in Big Brother if it were produced by actual George Orwell. I wrote and rewrote the script to make sure players wouldn't be able to opt out of picking one person to bully to death. I thought that it would be easy.
Instead, I learned two surprising things. The first was that it's harder than you'd think to design a scenario where ordinary people plausibly hunt each other to death. Every time, my players tried their very hardest not to hurt each other, even when given every alibi to be evil. I created a whole rule system to punish acts of altruism, spent ages greasing the hinges on the beautiful hellbox I'd built for them, and still the ungrateful bastards kept trying to sacrifice themselves for one another. Even the ones who were explicitly cast as villains. Even when it was against the rules.
It takes a lot of fiddly world-building to make violent self-interest feel reasonable. It takes a baroque notional dystopia and a guaranteed protection from social punishment. What you get is a manicured, hothouse-grown garden masquerading as a human jungle – an astroturfed Hobbesian state of nature where the cruelty is cultivated to make viewers feel comfortable in complicity.
The story of these games scrapes the same nerves as the ritual reporting about shopping-mall riots on Black Friday – the ones that lasciviously describe working-class people walloping each other for a £100 discount on a dishwasher. The message is that people who have little are worse than people who have more. This is a wealthy person's nightmare of how poor people behave. The rich, of course, are rarely subject to this sort of moral voyeurism.
But that story isn't true. In the real-life Lord of the Flies, the children actually worked together very successfully. In the real-life Stanford prison experiment, the guards had to be coached into cruelty. Real poverty, as sociologists like Rutger Bregman keep on telling us, is actually an inverse predictor of selfish behaviour. Not because poor people are more virtuous than anyone else, but because the rich and powerful can afford not to be. The rest of us, eventually, have to trust each other.
The fantasy of these games is about freedom from social responsibility. In the Death Games, nobody has to make complex and demeaning ethical choices as an adult person in an inhumane economy. In the Death Games, it makes sense to light your integrity on fire to survive. But if we did, actually, live in a perfectly ruthless market economy where competition was the essence of survival, none of us would survive past puberty. The Death Games don't actually tell us anything about how life is. They show us how life feels.
The second surprising thing I learned while running my own Squid Game is that nothing feels better than running Squid Game. If you need a rush, I highly recommend building a complicated social machine to make other people hurt each other, picking out a fun hyperpop soundtrack and then standing behind a production desk for five hours jerking their strings and cackling until they cry. People apparently like my game. It has run in multiple countries. And every time, it took me days to come down from the filthy dopamine high.
It turns out that I love power. This was an ugly thing to discover, and there's an ugly feeling about watching a show like Squid Game – which is, to be clear, wildly entertaining. Voyeurism is participation, and the compulsive thrill of watching human beings hurt each other for money creates its own complicity. The audience is not innocent. Sit too close to the barrier at the beast show and you risk getting splashed with moral hazard.