If viewers don’t really see him having fun, that’s by design. Donaldson has outright said he sees “personality” as a limitation for growth, once noting in a podcast that hinging your content on who you are as a person means risking not being liked. And if someone doesn’t like a creator as a person, they may not give the videos a chance.
McLoughlin’s comments hit at another bleak possibility: Viewers may hardly see MrBeast having fun in his videos because he’s not actually having a good time. In podcasts, Donaldson tells hosts that he goes so hard, he won’t stop working until he burns out and isn’t able to do anything at all. With a laugh, he admits that he has a mental breakdown “every other week.” If he ever stops for a breather, he says, he gets depressed. MrBeast is so laser-focused on generating content on YouTube that he describes his personality as “YouTube.” He acknowledges that this brutal approach to videos, which has cratered many creators over the years, is not healthy. “People shouldn’t be like me. I don’t have a life, I don’t have a personality”
While his free time seems minuscule, the rare times he does pull away from work are for dates with his girlfriend that center around activities that could enrich his videos, because he considers a single hour of a date to be worth $100K had it been dedicated to work instead.
Absolutely brutal indictment of algorithmic capitalism.
Sorry hate to go against the flow here but this is always going to be a stupid comparison. People die in the Squid Game, people dont die in Mr Beast and the Netflix RTV show. By taking away the death you take away the thing that makes it actually ghoulish. Game shows are not inherently ghoulish and Squid Game isnt such a sacrosanct piece of art that you have to protect it from this sort of thing. Its just another reality competition. Its a game, with a prize. Thats it. Its no more ethically bankrupt than fucking Wheel of Fortune lol.
i dont like Mr Beast but even though I bought into this reason for awhile I actually thought about it, realize I’ve watched other reality competitions for money before, and realized “wow people whinging about the ethics of this are actually really silly!”.
I bought the idea that recreating the Squid Game was Torment Nexus at one point but at some point seeing all the over the top navel gazing and pearl clutching over the Netflix version compared to what I was witnessing in the actual clips of it they were saying this about, where I saw… normal everyday gameshow shit and a bit of human drama added in, I realized the whole thing was overwrought and silly. that one hockey player voice Its only a game why you haf to be mad.
Squid Game’s conceit of death was meant to throw the perverse incentives and implications of regular game shows into sharp relief by means of exaggeration.
i’m rather with you for the complaints acting like the show was more important than it was, but it’s a correct read to find the ‘reality’ adaptions as anathema to the themes of the original
I agree that its counter to the original I just dont think the original is important enough that you have to respect it. I haven’t seen it but my RTV friends have said the Squid Game RTV show turned out to be some pretty good human drama lol so shrug . If thats odious to you then I do get it. I just dont really vibe with that. Maybe being a competitive RTV fan makes me biased, but I really don’t think theres deep ethical problems with Survivor and such.
It sorta reminds me of Undertale. It makes a big moral deal of something that to me isnt morally wrong? In Undertale’s case it was completionism, and in Squid Game’s its game shows.
There is something to be said for the idea that using people who are desperate for money as entertainment is somewhat perverse. But I can tell you, as someone who consumes that kind of media, that shit doesnt really come across that often in the actual product. It certainly doesn’t in Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy and whatever, and it only does a little bit in social strategy RTV when you see people’s emotions over losing or being betrayed. But I don’t think thats as perverse as Squid Game made it out to be. I dont think game shows or competitive rtv should be banned or anything.
I would absolutely prefer Survivor post-capitalism where everyones playing just for the game itself and the adventure. At least ethically, admitedly there being no money on the line does take some of the human drama out of it lol. People would probably take things less personally so that aspect of the intrigue of the show would be lessened. But I can put ethics first and see that as largely a good thing. And actually thinking of it, I’ve played online games of Survivor with no money on the line and people still take it seriously and get hurt by betrayals and shit so.
Kinda thinking aloud here as I go sorry. As a Survivor (and other competiive RTV) fan where thats my special interest, its a subject that interests me. And like other art that critiques my special interests in ways I find exagerated or unfair (Undertale for JRPGs, The Boys for superhero stuff [noteably tho I do like Watchmen so its not ALWAYS bad]) Squid Game is something that gives me mixed feelings because I can appreciate it as a piece of media and what its tryign to do, but also be kind of annoyed at what I think isnt really the fairest of criticisms.
i think the structural financial incentives designed to attract people who wouldn’t otherwise consent to have cameras stuffed up their gills overrides the fact some of the people that find their way onto RTV are the performer sort that’d like to do it without the financial incentive.
I think youre making big assumptions! The current casting pool of Survivor is 100% superfans who are passionate about the show and want to be there. Thats the 'new era,'s whole deal.
You so rarely see “this was a bad experiance for me” in interviews (and ive read a lot of interviews) let alone “i wouldnt have done this if not for the money”. I think ur just taking your own mindset and applying it to others inappropriately. I can count the number of people who have negative things to say about their survivor experiance on like maybe two hands, possibly just one. And a lot of those are people who did morally reprenesible things on or off the show and got exposed for that and dont like that fact!
Survivor had to rely on financial incentives before it had superfans, no?
but this is kind of moving the goalposts on what Squid Game set out to do. the text is explicit that it’s condemning financial incentives for desperate people. this does apply to a lot of RTV in the present and past, but i can’t imagine they were trying to condemn similar show formats that lack the financial coercion. Taskmaster seems totally irrelevant to Squid Game’s thesis, despite superficial similarities in format.
you’re reading entirely too much into my pithy one-liner and probably a little too shallowly into what Squid Game was about. i don’t even like the show and couldn’t watch it past like two episodes because it was laying it on entirely too thick. if mr beast can’t grasp the core message it was trying way too hard to ram down your throat enough to realize the folly of recreating it, with or without lethal consequences, then he’s absolutely worthy of my scorn.
just to make it explicitly clear: using outsized monetary incentives to tempt people into doing demeaning and occasionally dangerous things they normally would refuse for the sake of profit and amusement under a system where basic needs and comfort are not guaranteed and in fact proportional to ones wealth and usually dependent on performing a lifetime of subservient labor for the same class offering those incentives is inherently exploitative and contemptible.
If society stopped pretending that they disliked violence, Mr beast would absolutely throw a rusty knife into a crowd of homeless people and tell them the survivor gets a million dollars.