Child’s Play and Survival: Examining Children’s Games in the Squid Game

Abstract

Children’s games have never strictly been ‘children’s’ games and what goes into the commonly, oft-lightly used term, ‘child’s play’ has a close relationship with a lived, socio-cultural context. Netflix’s new TV series, Squid Game, presents an interesting take on children’s games by placing popular Korean children’s games into the frame of a dystopian, survival game which is watched as a live telecast by a group of entertainment-hungry billionaires, finally presented to the Netflix audience in the master-frame of an episodic drama, and, subsequently, replicated and subverted as online games by fans of the series. This paper is an examination of the six games, including— Ddakji game, Red Light, Green Light, the Dalgona Challenge, the Tug-of- War, multiple variations of marbles games, the Stepping Stone Bridge game, and finally, the Squid Game itself—played in the series, with specific interest towards the game design, player strategies, and subversive gameplay. The games in Squid Game are a cyborgization of children’s games into violently competitive games and tell the story of voyeuristic capitalism, the political ecology of gameshows, and nerve-wracking choice-based and choice-defying gamification of the players. The cyborgization of the children’s games carries within it a doubling, mirrored in the cyborgization of the players who participate in these games where, in the absence of any notion of fairplay, the very figure of the player co-opts and reinvents itself in the figures of the ‘cheater’ and the ‘spoilsport’ to win, a win in which survival constitutes at least part of the prize. This is further problematized by the audience which is both witness and participant in the violence of the game. At the same time, this paper is interested in, conversely, looking at the championing of an ethics of care by the players in this survival game. In doing so, Squid Game offers a point of intervention into existing notions of players in co-op playing, and how cooperation and teamwork exist precariously in games when the players must choose between care and survival. Squid Game presents a valuable opportunity to study games in reference to the politics of competitive survival as well the category of games in and as digitizing the planetary and using the concept of ‘teamwork’ to ‘stick together’ and make it out.