Squid Game

A Cultural Critique

I recently had a debilitating stomach virus that forced me into basement quarantine for a couple days. Between urgent toilet trips and delerious fever dreams, I was finally able to watch the second season of Netflix’s original series Squid Game free from my wife (hates violence) and toddler (loves violence, too young). It almost made it all worthwhile.

For those few people in the world unfamiliar with Squid Game, it’s about a contest hosted on a secret island centered on Korean children’s games where the losers get killed and the winner takes home 40 million dollars. To date, Netflix estimates around 330,000,000 people have watched the first season, the most popular show they’ve ever produced. With those numbers, I suspect Squid Game might be among the most popular pieces of media ever produced, period.

The South Korean series is presented in the Korean language with subtitles. I’m simple enough to be pretty annoyed by subtitles and I’d imagine I’m not alone, so it’s a testament to the show’s quality and universal appeal that it became the number 1 show in 94 countries anyway.

I’m not going to review the second season in detail here because I don’t want to spoil it for anybody who hasn’t seen it. Suffice it to say that I love Squid Game and the second season doesn’t disappoint. I love the writing, the surreal set designs, the creepy off-kilter music, the acting and character depth, the eery juxtaposition between brutal violence and children’s games…I could go on. But significant for this newsletter, I love that it so deftly weaves together deep truths of human nature and culture into an engaging and suspenseful story without feeling forced or patronizing. And that’s what I’d like to write about here.

Squid Game Theory

I don’t know if writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk set out to create a series about game theory, but I suspect it entered his mind. I won’t pretend to speak with authority on game theory because I’m a novice on the subject. But in general, game theory explains how rational agents make strategic decisions when faced with simple rules that govern their interactions. The idea has roots in early 20th century mathematics, but has since been adopted by a wide range of disciplines, from economics to evolutionary biology to anthropology and other social sciences. Game theory has become somewhat of a unifying theory for the social sciences, capable to uniting multiple disciplines under a single theoretical paradigm.

I thought I might be clever enough to have landed on this notion for the first time, but in the course of researching the series I stumbled across at least one story in a Bangladeshi news outlet and a 2022 economics paper that uses the series as an instructional aid. Both pieces point out that many of game theory’s core ideas are present throughout the show, sometimes seemingly overtly.

For example, the contest as whole, which is comprised of six individual games, is the oldest and simplest form of game: a zero-sum contest. When one person loses another gains in equal measure. In Squid Game, each of the 456 human lives in the contest is worth approximately $70,000. When someone dies, their $70,000 is added to a pot to be shared between the surviving contestants. The sinister implication, of course, is that a rational actor in the contest should ensure the deaths of as many of their fellow players as possible.

Beyond this, the individual games draw heavily from game theory concepts. Game theory, for instance, recognizes a distinction between simultaneous and sequential contests. Paper, rock, scissors is a simultaneous game because players decide their moves at the same time while chess is a sequential game, where decisions are made in response to one’s opponent. Squid Game contains a brilliant, if simplistic representation of sequential play where teams must make their way across a suspended bridge comprised of pairs of transparent panels, each pair containing 1 fragile glass and 1 robust plexiglass panel. In keeping with expectations from game theory, first movers have an inherent disadvantage in sequential contests because second movers obtain knowledge through the game, and in Squid Game that disadvantage results in falling to a gruesome death through glass panels. Sequentially later players adjust their decisions in response to the failures of all earlier players, eventually making their way to the opposite side of the bridge to safety.

I suspect that Squid Game’s many nods to game theory contribute to its global appeal, not because 330 million people are big nerds for van Neumann (the father of game theory), but because the drama attending the games is universally intelligible across borders and language. By basing the series’ drama on well-established properties of human rationality, the writers ensured it could appeal to a global audience united in the capacity for modern human cognition. Again, I don’t know how intentional that was, but it’s certainly effective.