Squid Game, or, The Squeamish Pleasure of Asian Death

Squid Game, or, The Squeamish Pleasure of Asian Death

Edmond Y. Chang

Debuting in September 2021, Netflix’s South Korean survival, body horror drama captured over 142 million viewers and piggy-banked 900 million dollars for the streaming service. The premise is stark and simple: 456 players who are deeply in debt and down on their luck sign away their lives to play six rounds of “children’s games” to potentially win 45.6 billion won (approximately 38.7 million dollars).  However, in the spirit of Battle Royale, Hunger Games, or “The Most Dangerous Game,” the players learn that playing the game means playing to win or die. 

 
 

On the one giant-robot-hand, much blood and ink has been spilled extolling the show’s near-perfect metaphor for late stage capitalism, it’s critique of crippling personal debt, and its bright pink and green dramatization of the hell that is “human nature.”  On the other bloody-knife-through-the-hand, the show has been criticized for its problematic translations, its depiction of women, and its flat, derivative dystopian vision. As the discussions continue around and across screens big and small, this viewer—positioned as a non-Korean, queer, Asian man from the US—finds something missing or left implicit in the conversation, something which discomfited me even as I was entertained and engrossed (and sometimes grossed out) by the show’s pathos, bloodshed, and twisted games: How do I feel, or how should I feel, watching episode after episode of Asians being killed?  What does it mean to find pleasure in the show’s cavalcade of Asian death? 

Here I turn to the prescient work of Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard, particularly in their introduction to Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice.  In particular, my concerns about Squid Game resonate with Gray and Leonard’s discussion of the first-person shooter Battlefield 1 (DICE 2016) and their account of “the pleasure in and normalization of Black Death.”  This promiscuous circulation of images, videos, reports, and reenactments of the killing of Black and Brown people in games, media, and lived experiences normalizes the idea that bodies of color are not fully human and ultimately disposable. 

 
 

According to the Battlefield Wiki, Battlefield 1 “takes place during World War 1 across six different ‘War Stories’ which revolve around different people in different aspects of the Great War in campaigns such as the Italian Alps and the deserts of Arabia.”  The first mission “Storm of Steel” is a prologue to the game’s main story taking place in 1918 somewhere on the Western front. The prolgue features the American 369th Infantry Regiment are more commonly known as the “Harlem Hellfighters,” a primarily African American and Puerto Rican regiment.  The “Storm of Steel” mission allows the player to take on the role of a Harlem Hellfighter who narratively and algorithmically is destined to die. Then the player jumps to the next Black or Brown soldier, who also dies, and so on. Ostensibly, this level is meant to foreground the contribution of soldiers of color in World War I and to elicit empathy, sympathy, and sorrow for the underdogs in the face of impossible odds. However, as Gray and Leonard argue, the level signals the “impossibility of survival for Black and Brown men,” reinforcing the racialized norms and violences already all too common in the culture-at-large. Black Death in games is hypervisible, ubiquitous, and pedagogical and often centers white male play, empowerment, and excitement. 

 
 

With all of this in mind, I turn back to my earlier questions regarding Squid Game and name the tremor of “Asian Death” that haunts the viewing experience of watching over four hundred Korean men and women and one Pakistani man get shot, stabbed, clubbed, crushed, even cut up for spare parts. I cannot help feel a little uncomfortable and disturbed not only by the colorfully graphic ways the characters die but also by the immense popularity of the show in the US and the West, which cannot help but be framed by the ongoing pandemic, geopolitical fear over China, and the escalation of anti-Asian hate and violence. I cannot unwind the horror of Asian Death from the pleasure of Asian Death any more than the characters can compartmentalize the brutal juxtaposition of playing a children’s game and playing to survive. 

Moreover, I cannot unyoke myself from the uncomfortable possibility that I occupy the point of view of the villainous VIPs, the bored billionaires betting on whether players live or die. I know I am supposed to identify with the players, following their perspective and progress through each trial. But, much of the gaze of the camera—from the long tracking shots from above to the intrusive panopticon of the security cameras—places the viewer in the perspective of those positioned to be watching and enjoying the action. Netflix’s viewers then are implicated in the blood and circus and in a way complicit in the funding and enjoyment of the spectacle. We, too, have paid to watch, to be thrilled and engrossed, and our dollars and won pile up in Netflix’s piggy bank to fund another brutal season.

 
 

As an aside, the recent social media dismay over the “bad acting” of the VIPs misses an opportunity to see the wooden, even cartoony characterization as another way to signal the VIPs lack of affect, nuance, and self-awareness; they are voyeurs, predators, and ultimately, consumers. Their investment in the games is shallow, so therefore they are shallow. If they do not like what they see in this round of games, there is always the next. Ironically, Player 001, the boss and host of the games, recognizes the futility of only being a spectator and decides to join the game, to live-action role-play as a cheerful, unassuming, doddering old man. Of course, Player 001, who gives us some of the up close and personal camera POVs, can play without real consequence, even as the other players believe they have power and control over their destinies.  

All in all, the ambivalences of Squid Game make for intriguing and complicated entertainment and analyses offering a tangle of pain, pleasure, exploitation, and resistance. The goal here isn’t to take away from the show’s condemnation of systems of power, privilege, debt, and wealth.  Rather, I hope to offer another way to view the tempered and untempered representations, experiences, and interventions offered by the show. As with Gray and Leonard’s critique of Battlefield 1’s emotional exploitation of the Harlem Hellfighters, the specter and spectacle of Squid Game’s Asian Death must be named and made visible, made legible in order for it to be addressed and challenged. 

The Games of Color Column, note from the editor, Edmond Chang:
Welcome to the Gamers with Glasses Games of Color column! The column aims to foreground, highlight, and engage with BIPOC games, gamers, scholars, designers, and artists. Given that games code and encode, render and represent social, cultural, political, even pedagogical norms, we hope to address the problems and possibilities of this medium we enjoy. Once or twice a month, we will think, talk, and play through the ways that games and gaming communities must reckon with race, difference, diversity, and equity.

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