It has only been a few days since Squid Game: The Challenge aired its first season finale on Netflix. The divisive non-lethal take on the Korean dystopian drama about the horrors of capitalism and the depths the desperate will go to in a crushing financial system is getting a second season, and, for me, one of its worst horrors was recalling online gaming’s evils.
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From trolling to griefing or general harassment, it all felt on display here.
If you hate these parts of the hobby, please do not watch. If you love them, get some help.
Apart from issues with the winner not being paid yet, and questions over whether the contest was rigged from the start (which have been reported by Rolling Stone), I couldn’t help but get flashbacks to the in-game chat lobbies of games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption. As I watched the Squid Game episodes, the bullying and belittling came out, creating an unseemly air about these real and hopeful people battling for big bucks.
When 299 (Spencer) was the focus of the cookie episode and the show ran comments where he said he was not so sure about having religious faith ahead of him and members of his team’s elimination as a result of having to extract the umbrella symbol without breaking it after being the one to pick it earlier, I got flashbacks to how those with a positive attitude were treated when they had a microphone and a voice in the Xbox 360 era.
While much of this behavior in gaming is now directed towards entertainers and voice actors who losers harass to no end when they don’t give the exact perfect performance certain people expect, in the past, someone who said something earnest or vulnerable in a chat room was told to die, dropped from the team for matchmaking, or was made a mockery of like Spencer just was for an audience of millions of people worldwide. It was wrong on the show, has been and always will be wrong when playing games, and sadly, things only got uglier from this point of the production.
Another contest had the remaining players walk over a glass bridge where half of the tiles would break upon being stepped on, causing the player to fall through. Each person was supposed to go through on their own before the next player took their turn, but instead, almost everyone agreed to stop when someone got a solid tile or fell so the person behind them could go and everyone had an even chance of success. Player 278 (Ashley) was an exception. She repeatedly passed up her chance to go in the order the majority assigned and because of this, 301 (Trey) made multiple leaps, increased his chances of falling and got kicked out of the contest upon hitting a bad panel.
Troll Time
In a post-game interview on Netflix’s website, Ashley dismissed her arrogance and stubbornness. In her view (and to be fair, edits of reality television can be misleading), it was all Trey’s fault for his unwillingness to wait and this kind of excusal reminds me of the wise guys you utterly loathe after a match.
A troll in an online game always thinks the worst things are someone else’s fault, failing to reflect and realize that this is not a normal thing anywhere else in life. We see this kind of behavior in professional studies where men pose as women online, the now-defunct Fat, Ugly or Slutty blog which detailed sexist and violent messages some gamers sent to others online.
If you hate griefing in gaming, then do yourself a favor and steer clear of Squid Game: The Challenge.
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