‘Squid Game: The Challenge’ Dangerously Misses the Point
George-Philip Dumitrascu
November 2023 saw the release of Squid Game: The Challenge—a reality television contest based on the popular thriller television series Squid Game from South Korea, featuring a story of the lower class competing in a life-or-death game for a grand cash prize that would set them for life. However, the gamification of Squid Game in Squid Game: The Challenge is perhaps the most dangerous consequence of the popularity of the original show and severely undercuts the entire point of Squid Game by bringing it to life.
Squid Game makes it a point to show the lives of the main cast of the show before entering the game. All people entering the game are poor, lost, crushed by debt and have nowhere else to turn, except to risk their lives for the chance to gain riches. They are not heroes—far from it. Among the cast are criminals, outcasts, murderers, and all sorts of easily hateable people. The skill that Squid Game demonstrates is in humanizing them and, as the show goes on, eventually turning the audience to hate not the players, but the game itself. The viewer comes to hate the game that turns people into monsters, fighting to the death for money all at the entertainment of faceless multi-billionaires who will never face justice for what they put people through. All of this works hand in hand with its anti-capitalist message. The director, Hwang Dong-hyuk, told The Guardian: “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.”
In light of the deeper themes and meanings behind Squid Game, Netflix decided to produce a reality TV show based on the very principles that the original Squid Game tells the audience to be appalled of. Though, of course, Squid Game: The Challenge does not feature people being killed on screen, they still feature the same aesthetic as the original show, including the games being played for the grand prize of 4.56 million dollars—they even feature exploding packs on the players to signal when they have been ‘shot’ and are instructed to play dead.
This is an appalling example of how Netflix has dangerously misunderstood the original point of Squid Game. It was not liked merely for the games themselves—it was liked because it humanized characters in an environment that was supposed to reduce them to something that was less-than-human. Now we, the viewers of Squid Game: The Challenge, take on the role of the greedy, faceless and soulless people who run and enjoy the games, placing bets on lives and only wishing to consume more of it. In a sick twist of fate, Netflix has fulfilled a prophecy that was never meant to be fulfilled.
Death games in popular culture are not a new concept. The likes of The Hunger Games and Battle Royale sit firmly in the public consciousness as examples of the medium, but if we forget the point that these death games in the media are trying to present, then we risk falling into the same trap that their fictional people have made: making death games a spectacle rather than horror.