I Designed My Own Squid Game. You'll Never Guess What Happened Next.

The real prize wasn't the lessons we learned about diffuse responsibility for the depravities of late-stage capitalism. It was the friends we killed along the way.

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, the Netflix’s culture-clobbering Korean megahit that just drew to its bloody, depressing conclusion. It is also the plot of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, The Running Man, The Long Walk and Chain Gang All Stars. It is also the core conceit of endless unscripted spin-offs, from the Traitors to Beast Games and Squid Game: The Challenge, along with all the relentless associated derivative merchandising- you can now buy Squid Game plushies, Squid Game jumpsuits for your children, and cute little Squid Game speakers that look like tiny adorable murdergoons waiting for orders. Because no self-respecting network doesn’t know how to squeeze a valuable piece of IP by the soft bits until it screams.

We have spent, by this stage, several decades watching desperate people slaughter each other for survival to entertain the rich and stupid. We lap it up with the unslakeable voyeuristic bloodhunger we still associate with Ancient Rome. Future generations will have unflattering thoughts about why, at this particular moment in history, mass culture is so hypnotised by the idea of the Arena.

Obviously, all of 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 crayola-coloured human abattoir where they fight to survive in cruel and creative ways. The whole thing is decked out like a swollen children’s playground, which feels incongruous until the bodies start to hit the floor and you remember that the playground was never, ever a safe place to be. After each deadly game, contestants are offered a chance to vote on whether to carry on playing. It’s a simple referendum: if a majority votes to stay, you’re all trapped in the death-match murder circus with only yourselves to blame. If you object, a masked guard will accuse you of interrupting the ‘free and fair elections and shoot you in the face.

This is everything Squid Game has to say about representative democracy.

The show became a global hit just as the world was grinding towards its second pandemic winter, when almost everyone was either risking their lives for the privilege of poverty wages or actively trapped in a hellbox with people they would, by that stage, have been prepared to murder for free. ‘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. I’m reliably informed that the English-language translations strip away a degree of nuance, which probably helps out 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.

The whole thing is as subtle as a shopping-mall shooter. 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 in a really extra evil layer while they, who watch our heroes shovepush each other off cliffs from a really extra evil lair. 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 models?

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.

I promise there’s an innocent explanation for how I came to run my own Reality Show Of Death Game.

Well, mostly innocent.

I haven’t told you this before, but I 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.

I will definitely talk about Nordic Style Live Action Roleplaying at length later, but suffice it to say that these games are intense. They’re like escape rooms you have to solve with emotions. Many of them revolve around some species of social experiment - the kind that sadistic academics can’t do anymore 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 sign up for this sort 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 is an easy way to deliver all of that, for the same reason that the trope creates compulsive television: because it plays every plot trick at once. High stakes, ticking clocks, savage choices, games within games, all of it ensuring that every iteration of this story makes for entertainment so moreish it feels as cheap and nasty to write as it does to watch.

Anyway. My game 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.

(From the run of ‘House Party’ at Blackbox Copenhagen, 2024. All photos by Nina Westerdahl.)

Look, it was the first game I made all by myself. I wanted to do a really good job. I didn’t think hard enough about the ethical consequences of success. Instead, I swotted up on Hobbes and Hayek, took notes on Squid Game and its infinite derivatives, tweaked the script to make sure players had that very special Death Game experience of soul-fouling complicity with collective social violence of late stage capitalism, and checked the speakers. 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. There was alibi for days. I thought that it would be easy.

Instead, I learned two surprising things in particular.

The first thing I learned was that it’s harder than you’d think to design a scenario where ordinary people plausibly hunt each other to death. Every time the game ran, players tried their very hardest not to hurt each other, even when given every alibi to be evil. I had 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.

As it turns out, under most circumstances, people would rather not hurt each other even when it’s all pretend. It takes a lot of fiddly worldbuilding to make violent self-interest feel reasonable. It’s not enough that it’s you or them - you need to add in layers of ethical out clauses, a baroque notional dystopia, and some reason players will be guaranteed protection from social punishment- for instance, if there’s no one left to tell on you. I have spent enough years in tv writers’ rooms to know what I’m talking about when I tell you that it takes some very specific design- and 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 hundred dollar 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.

The fantasy of these games is all 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. 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. But the Death Games don’t actually tell us anything about how life is. They show us how life feels.

The real world doesn’t have the decency to excuse us from ethical decisions. 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 Brenman 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.

Which brings me to the more upsetting thing I learned while running my own Squid Game.

Namely, 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 has taken me days to come down from the filthy dopamine high.

It turns out that I love power. That 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, and eventually you find yourself nodding along in the sort of trance that clever plotting always produces while Squid Game ends in the only way it was ever going to end: with eight guys in tuxedos arguing about whether to kick a baby off a cliff.

The audience is not innocent. Sit too close to the barrier at the beast show and you risk getting splashed with moral hazard.

With thanks to the producers and organisers of Knudepunkt 2023, Blackbox Copenhagen and The Smoke, and to all the players of House Party.