Recently, the Korean drama "Squid Game" has become a hit. Why did this show go viral?
It fictionalizes a closed-environment play system that at first glance is a recreation of childhood games such as "one-two-three wooden men", tug-of-war, and marble-playing, but in fact this competition system uses this game system to carry out a brutal killing competition.
Stills from Squid Games.
So we see that every little person like the protagonist Cheng Qixun initially participated with a half-curiosity and half-luck mentality, but after joining the competition system, he gradually made various acts that violated morality and deviated from ethics. For example, cheating on friends to send them to death, bullying the sick and weak elderly, and even personally pushing the beloved wife to the end of the road...
Sometimes, the rules of the system are also reminiscent of historical tragedies. For example, before the game, the participants are acquiesced or even encouraged to kill each other, and the weaker ones are eliminated first, because they are not suitable for the subsequent competition. This clearly has the shadow of Nazi atrocities.
Plots like this overshadow the warmth and care that flashed in the story, making the audience in shock and introspection, thinking about why ordinary people would cooperate with the system to create such evil. It also makes ordinary people reflect again: How far away are we from evil?
Revelations from the "Lucifer Experiment":
Good students can also turn into demons
People tend to think less deeply about evil because it seems far removed from everyday life.
What is evil? Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, defines it as follows: "Deliberate actions involving harm, abuse, commanding, lack of humanity, destroying innocent others, or using authority, systematic power to encourage and allow others to do so and to benefit from it." ”
To "explore the dark side of human nature," Zimbardo devised the controversial "Stanford Prison Experiment": transforming a school building into a prison and having student volunteers play as prison guards and inmates. More than thirty years later, in the book Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo reconstructed and dissected the entire experiment.
"The Lucifer Effect", by Philip Zimbardo, translated by Sun Pei/Chen Yaxin, Edition: Life, Reading, And New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore, October 2015.
It turned out that what surprised him at that time was that the expected two-week experimental process was less than halfway, and the situation was close to getting out of control, and there was serious bullying, abuse and other phenomena. Students who originally advocated "love and peace", once given the status of prison guards, became cruel demons, so that the experiment had to be terminated early. The students, who were assigned to the role of prisoners, were reluctant at first, but soon they obediently integrated into the roles and stopped rebelling against what they were ordered to do.
The results of this experiment led Zimbardo to focus on the deeper question of why there have been atrocities such as the Nazi Holocaust, the Nanjing Massacre, and the Rwandan Massacre in human history. Evil, he concluded, is not the preserve of some bad guys or tyrants, and that harsh environments can be potentially harmful and enable good people to behave pathologically against their nature. "No matter how horrific atrocities humanity has committed, as long as we are in the wrong situation, these acts can occur to any of us."
King of the Flies, by [English] Golding, Translator: Gong Zhicheng, Edition: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, July 2014.
The classic dystopian novel Lord of the Flies has long envisioned that in a closed system, even a group of children could establish a shocking tyranny and even brutally kill their companions. Similarly, Zimbardo unceremoniously pointed out that the Holocaust could have happened all around us, and that our seemingly kind neighbor could become a homicidal maniac.
However, the "harsh environment" does not fall from the sky. How is it generated? Or, in Zimbardo's words, "Who has the authority to plan and design this behavioral environment and to maintain it in a special way?" "In Squid Games, the system's black hand is the chaebols who see through the darkness of human nature, and the global magnates with morbid hobbies who wear masks and enjoy killing in the meat forest of the wine pool. Such a setting is too simple and facial, which may be convenient for ordinary audiences to understand the plot, but it is not conducive to revealing the theme in depth.
The game tests human nature:
Learn to think morally and be wary of evil in the virtual world
It is worth pointing out that we only need to change our perspective to find that as a viewer of "Squid Game", we have unconsciously become participants in this survival game. "I hope to see more brutal fights" and "two can only live one, eager to know what the couple will do", these are common mentalities when watching the show. The creators take advantage of the darkness of this mental refraction to allow the audience to see the limitations of their own human nature.
Maybe "Squid Games" is still just a look through, but the famous director Michael Haneke's "Fun Game" explains this more bluntly. Breaking the fourth wall, Haneke constantly provokes the audience, causing the violent murderer to turn his head directly to the audience and force the audience to admit that he also approves of this (although only on the picture) violence by arbitrarily changing the direction of the plot, almost sarcastically.
Stills from "Fun Game", in which the actors will break the "fourth wall" to provoke the audience.
Compared to Squid Games, Fun Games establishes a more direct interaction with the audience, thus building a system composed of both the film and the audience. In this system, the viewer feels that the bottom line of their own humanity is repeatedly tested. I don't know if it angered the audience, including film critics, "Fun Game" was quite bad at the box office that year.
If most film and television works are limited to traditional forms and have limited interaction with their audiences, the popularity of video games just makes up for this weakness of the former. Due to their inherently interactive nature, video games open up a pathway for players to experience a variety of systems. Many video games compete to incorporate philosophical thinking into the plot and gameplay, and the moral choices that are difficult to choose and almost cruel are thrown in front of the player. As long as the immersion is done well, the player will be placed in a position similar to the Cheng Qixun, as if they were given a number card to join the "Squid Game".
In some open-world games, players can beat or rob NPCs on the road and easily get away with it; of course, you can also strictly demand that you don't do anything bad from start to finish, but this doesn't bring any substantial reward to the character. In such a system, not everyone will follow the moral law of the heart — even if the NPCs do it as vividly as the protagonist of Out of Control.
Stills from "Runaway Player".
A more direct sense of the moral dilemma is "This Is My War." The game is set at the end of the war, and the city is almost in ruins by artillery fire. As surviving civilians, the player tries to keep himself and his relatives and friends alive until the end of the war a few days later. Due to the lack of supplies, the character can easily fall into various negative states such as hunger, disease, cold, depression, etc., so obtaining survival supplies has become the most important behavior in the game.
The problem is that war supplies are scarce. So a mother knocks on the door in the snow and kneels down to beg you to give the only food left to her child who is about to starve to death; or your relative is very ill, and the old man in the next block happens to have a life-saving pill, but he will not give it to you, unless you steal or use violence, in any case, the old man loses the medicine means that he is doomed to die of illness because of your actions... Players will frequently encounter such random events, and none of the decisions will be easy.
Jokingly called "The Cure for Depression," "This Is My War" attempts to explore a heavy proposition, that is, in an extreme system far from normal social order, if the price of increasing the probability of survival must be evil and sacrifice of others, is it possible to reconcile the conflicts between the parts of human nature that are compassionate, restrained, and just, and the human survival instinct? The choices made in the game are only part of the game strategy adopted by the player and do not have to be subjected to moral cross-examination; but learning to embrace goodness and guard against evil through the virtual world is the more valuable experience attached to the game process.
Those who refuse to participate in the game:
Resisting inhumane instructions is heroic
"Squid Game" is like a wake-up call, reminding the audience not to forget to face up to the abyss of human nature. In it, it is not difficult to glimpse the shadow of other dystopian works. For example, "The Hunger Games" ten years ago and "Battle Royale" twenty years ago are all classics of such films and television.
The American film "Pass the Pass," which was released in China thirty years ago, was a sensation for its level of thriller and excitement, and it was full of fire, criticizing the entertainment to the death of the television industry. Schwarzenegger starred as a lone hero who defeated rivals such as "Ice Rink Killer" and "Chainsaw Maniac" along the way. The system appears here in the form of a variety show, depersonalizing and dehumanizing people in the name of entertainment and competition, and ultimately rationalizing bloody killings. Therefore, "Pass the Level" may also be the inspiration for "Squid Games".
Stills from the movie "Pass the Pass".
One thing about the above is almost the same, that is, the protagonist chooses to risk his life at a critical moment to resist the rules set by the system. Like the name of a song by the band P.K.14, they are all "people who refuse to participate in the game", and it is precisely because of this rejection that they can partially or completely preserve the goodness in human nature. Zimbardo's research shows that in bad systems, most people are either obedient, submissive, or persuaded and tempted to do things they shouldn't do, but there are always a few who refuse to obey inhumane instructions.
Like the evil of mediocrity, the heroic act of mediocrity can happen to everyone. You can certainly follow the system, follow the authority, follow the current, which seems safest and most advantageous; but you can always choose to follow the morality of the heart and say no to the system. In this regard, the story of the indie game Forgotten City is impressive. It takes place in an ancient Roman city where citizens believe that the "Golden Rule" laid down by the gods—that is, "one man does evil, all suffer" (a setting inspired by the "eleven-stroke law" commonly used in the Roman army) – ruled their lives.
The problem is that the Golden Rule does not have a specific explanation for what "evil" is. As a result, this small society has evolved into a strict system, and most people not only dare not cross the thunder pool half a step, but also beware of people around them making excessive moves. But even so, there are still some people who try to play the edge ball. Players must also constantly test the bottom line of the Golden Rule in order to find the truth of the city after repeated failures.
The story seems to suggest that even if a set environment seems harsh, people in it still have the opportunity to find gaps and challenge the system. In today's world, such revelations are still of practical value.
Author | Zhang Zhe
Edit | Go away; Qingqingzi
Proofreading | Janin