I love a well-designed, memorable reality competition show. Beast Games isn’t exactly that–not yet–but the sheer spectacle of it is impressive (especially with $5 million as the grand prize), and with a few tweaks it could be great.
What the show does really well in the meantime, though, is inspire questions from the viewers: What–or how–would I do in this situation?
For example:
- If you could choose brains, brawn, or chance (without knowing the game), which would you choose?
- How long do you think you can hang from a pull-up bar? (I thought I could do it for a long time, but the muscles needed to do a pull-up are apparently very different than dead-hang muscles!)
- In a trolley-problem scenario, would you choose to gain a nice new car or eliminate 3 competitors? What if 1 of those competitors is unknown (and could be actually be you)?
- If you had first chance to take as much money from a pool of $1 million, followed by 9 other people who would also get their chance to take as much as they wanted from the remaining amount, how much would you take?
They’re fun questions to ponder and discuss. Are they perfectly executed for the most compelling decisions? Not really. For example, the most recent episode featured the final question (I won’t spoil how much each person took) and followed it with an elimination challenge. It would seem to me that the people who took the most money would have a disadvantage in the challenge, but instead them money gives them a huge advantage. I’m very confused by that game design choice, though we haven’t seen the elimination challenge play out yet, so we’ll see.
How would you answer those questions? Are you watching Beast Games?
Between this blog post and a 2-star Guardian review that seemed to rate the show poorly for the purposes of moral condemnation rather than entertainment value, I decided to watch the first few minutes of an episode. I’d heard of Mr. Beast before, but never watched any of his content. The same is true of Squid games.
Honestly, within the first couple of minutes I found it strangely compelling. I wound up binging the entire series (minus next week’s finale) over the last couple days. I agree, it’s definitely not perfect, and (and I find the host and his friends to have basically zero charisma), but I think the ridiculous spectacle was entertaining, as well as the large number of times that people were offered money in order to quit of give up. In many ways, this eliminated any of the justification for moral outrage that the show seems to have generated – right off the bat everyone who participated had the opportunity to quit for a significant sum, and many of them had multiple opportunities to do so.
I’ll note that I think the final question/situation you mentioned was actually a delightful surprise. I think we all absolutely expected taking the money to come with a penalty as that’s what we’ve seen so often in similar shows or fiction. So having it come with even more of an advantage was great (although in reality, it did come with a much larger disadvantage – everyone knew that you took the money, which was almost certainly more of a penalty than any bribe could overcome).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Having now watched the most recent episode, I think I agree with you–the extra money taken by a few specific players played an interesting role in the challenge (especially with the dynamic that your vote and money are off the table after you’re voted into the final stage).
I also agree about how many contestants were offered payouts at various stages–that led to a number of interesting decisions.