Short Thought: Beast Games, Mr Beast, and a Dark Mirror

Some ranting and raving about reality television trying to recreate Squid Game.

There’s a black humour joke that is often applied to the tech industry, concerning clueless startups/tech companies’ proclivity for creating things that are unintentional references to dystopian fiction. Once you start looking for it, you realise that the market really is an endless well when it comes to “torment nexuses”. Does Palantir realise that the surveillance company is named after the scrying devices of the dark lord Sauron? Probably.

In almost all of these cases, the company or creator in question doesn’t actually believe they’re recreating the dystopian device or system, they’re just oblivious to the wider ramifications or concepts behind the respective torment nexus. This frequently happens in commercial applications of eye-tracking technology combined with advertising, where almost everything collapses into Minority Report.

But when it comes to the Korean mega-hit TV show Squid Game, society seems to have suffered collective head trauma.

Presumably as a result of its immense popularity, more and more reality TV has started to reflect its design sensibilities and overall philosophy. Mr Beast is the most obvious and pressing example of the phenomenon, with his “games” being some of the most watched (if not THE most watched) videos on YouTube, and now a full series on Amazon Prime Video.

These are shows where contestants compete in mostly physical or “will” challenges for massive life-changing prizes (large sums of money, cars, etc), with the through-line to Squid Game being the focus on eliminations and interpersonal conflict. There is also normally only one winner.

Source: 2,000 People Fight for $5,000,000

The defence to what I’m about to say is going to be fairly obvious. Sure, nobody is getting killed at Beast Games; Mr Beast does not have armed guards that execute the losers, the challenges do not risk mortal peril, and torture is reserved for individual challenges in other videos.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think that Squid Game portrayed an unethical and dystopian scenario just because the contestants were killed for failure. The show is comically obvious with its belief that the real evil of the game is that it preys upon truly desperate people in an unequal society. They are offered a choice in principle, but given their personal situations and need for money, it is not a choice in practice. Put another way, the games are so dire that the only people who would participate in them are those who didn’t feel like they had a choice.

The clearest villains portrayed in the show (I’ve not seen season 2, mind) are not those that run the show, but those for whom the show is put on: the wealthy VIPs, the capitalist spectators and sponsors, the immoral observers who lounge on their recliners, laughing and celebrating the various miseries of the contestants.

When I were a lad, and doing my uphill-both-ways paper round, game shows like Fort Boyard or Takeshi’s Castle did have humour at others expense, but it was alongside the elation of triumph and teamwork. Nobody was booing when a team actually managed to win Takeshi’s Castle. Crystal Maze was partly about getting frustrated that everyone seemed so crap at the ticket-grabbing game, but it was in an environment of the players (as a group) versus the game. There are still gameshows like this: The Chase isn’t about cheering the fucking chaser.

Players defend their foam towers from other contestants wielding dodgeballs. Source: Last to Leave Their Circle Wins $500,000

So what are Mr Beast’s challenges about? Are they a celebration of teamwork and triumph? Well, they’re almost all modelled on Squid Game, so no. They’re designed to foster distrust, to put people in uncomfortable environments and make them debase themselves. Very few of them are about thinking, many of them target some basic human need (sleep, personal space, privacy), and almost all of them provide some avenue for the contestants to screw each other over.

These games reinforce and scream a zero sum worldview, where success only comes from burying 1, 9, 99, or 999 other people. Teamwork is temporary, only worthwhile if it gets you closer to the money. If you doubt this point, consider that a game like Fort Boyard or The Crystal Maze would be extremely hard if not impossible without teammates to help, but in the case of The Beast Games or other Squid-likes, there wouldn’t be a game if not for other people: you’d just win. Other people are the obstacle, the challenge, the enemy.

In some respects, The Beast Games are more insidious than its fictional inspiration in its communication of this message.

The Squid Game show is put on for the enjoyment of a tiny group of morally twisted individuals, the equivalent of a snuff film. This isn’t the opiate of the masses, it’s the pornography of the powerful, and while the treatment of the contestants is obviously abhorrent, there is a twisted sense of honesty to it. They’re here to suffer for the amusement of others: the contestants are (after the initial games) aware of that, the showrunners are aware of that, and the viewers are aware of that.

Mr Beast’s audience is primarily children at a formative age, who are having the message of “the world is zero sum, screw over others before they screw you” blasted into their brains under the guise of Mr Beast doing some sort of public good. Isn’t it nice that these people are in demeaning situations, personally there for the vague hope of winning a large sum of money, but practically there for YOUR amusement (and the immense financial benefit of Mr Beast).

Source: Every Minute One Person Is Eliminated

Part of this isn’t a particularly novel criticism, it’s exactly the same “people being watched in a zoo” critique that has been levied at reality TV since its inception, but the zoo has never been so cold, the message so stark, nor the showrunners so oblivious.

Squid Game’s creator was unbelievably transparent and clear in his belief that the existence of the games is a bad thing, yet dead-eyed human automaton Mr Beast saw the jumpsuits, the cool plastic masks and thought “I could do that!”.

“I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society, something that depicts an extreme competition, somewhat like the extreme competition of life. But I wanted it to use the kind of characters we’ve all met in real life,” Hwang said.

…

“It’s not profound! It’s very simple! I do believe that the overall global economic order is unequal and that around 90% of the people believe that it’s unfair. During the pandemic, poorer countries can’t get their people vaccinated. They’re contracting viruses on the streets and even dying. So I did try to convey a message about modern capitalism. As I said, it’s not profound.”

- Director Hwang Dong-hyuk on why the show within Squid Game is just definitely a great and lovely idea that we should have in real life, and all we need is some doughy-faced American manchild to bring a less aesthetically pleasing, cheaper version to our fucking phone screens.

This isn’t a case of a company being blissfully ignorant of the torment nexus, or using the aesthetics of the torment nexus for a different end. This is about someone watching a show called “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus”, and flatly going “I am going to create the torment nexus”. I absolutely believe that if Mr Beast thought he could get away with it, or if the TV regulations around filming a death were relaxed, he’d have competitors murdering each other within the week.

If that happened, we’d be looking at Squid Game and thinking it was somehow aspirational by comparison. At least all of it was happening behind closed doors, at least it wasn’t being watched by children, at least the showrunners weren’t selling signed fucking t-shirts with fake smiles and loathable faces.

Ah well, at least Mr Beast gives out some iPhones on occasion. What a lovely man.