Squid game

What I learned from running my own Squid Game

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, Netflix’s Korean mega-hit that just drew to its gory conclusion. It is also the plot of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, The Running Man, Chain-Gang All-Stars and The Long Walk. We have spent several decades watching desperate people slaughter each other for survival to entertain

Lurking beneath the gore are moments of wit and sensitivity: Squid Game reviewed

Should we be worried that Squid Game is the most popular show in Netflix’s history? If it’s a case of art imitating life, then the prognosis for our civilisation is not good: most of us will die, horribly, sooner rather than later, but for the very few who survive there will be untold riches to enjoy in the company of the cruel and capricious controlling super-elite. Squid Game is a Korean update of the Japanese cult classic Battle Royale (2000) which spawned — or revived; let’s not forget Rollerball (1975) — the genre known as ‘death games’. These films take place in a dystopian future where ordinary, desperate folk compete