Death games aren't particularly unique, but one of the most chilling things about Netflix's hit show Squid Game is how it combines something as innocuous as children's games with killing. In Squid Game, the activities are based on games that Korean children play -- like Red Light Green Light and marbles -- but with the added twist of dying if you lose.
The stakes are incredibly high and the games have consequently also revealed the participants' dark sides when pushed to their limits. A 2015 anime named Death Parade has a very similar premise, where pairs are challenged to play children's games to decide their fates.
The Games System in Death Parade
Death Parade is set in the afterlife, where pairs of people who have died at the same time are sent to arbiter Decim's bar -- with no memory of how they died. There, the players stake their lives on childrens' games like darts, bowling and air hockey. As an arbiter, Decim receives memories of their lives before they died and observes their behavior as they play the games in order to make a judgement on them. At the end, he decides who gets to be reincarnated and who gets sent into the void.
Around the halfway point of the game, snippets of the players' memories come flooding back. They start remembering key moments in their lives, like a wedding or the day a childhood friend moved away. As the games approach the end, they remember how they died and realize they've been playing to prove they're good enough to be reincarnated.
The Twisted Idea of 'Fairness' in Squid Game & Death Parade
The games in Squid Game and Death Parade were never fair to begin with. Although Squid Game's principle preaches equality with fairness where everyone has an equal chance to win, it's clearly not fair. Everyone comes from different backgrounds, sizes, ages, and nationalities. Putting all these people in the games with the same conditions that will naturally favor some people over the other is completely unfair. In Episode 2, the pink soldiers offer the players a choice to either continue playing or to give up. It gives off the sense that they're being gracious and fair, but really all of these players were chosen for a specific reason: their situations are so bad that going back out into the real world may be even worse than participating in the games. It was never a choice in the first place.
Similarly, Death Parade also has a distorted sense of fairness. Arbiters only receive a small portion of their memories and have a finite amount of time to go through it. To assist their judgement, arbiters often manipulate the games to add pressure onto the players. As a result, the players get frustrated and panic as their desperation to stay alive ratchets up. All of this is done so the arbiters can see what players are like when forced into a corner. But how is showing people at their worst equivalent to showing who they really are?
The Flaws in Death Parade's System
Because arbiters are not human, have neither lived nor died, and have no human emotions to speak of, they're supposedly the best to judge who is most deserving of reincarnation and who isn't. But thanks to the nameless black-haired assistant's presence, Decim realizes this type of judgement may not be so flawless. The first game of Death Parade proves just that when Decim mistakenly sends the husband to reincarnation and the wife to the void. The black-haired assistant could see the wife was lying in order to save her husband's soul, but Decim couldn't.
Episode 9 was a powerful turning point for Decim. The two players, a young man named Shimada and a detective named Tatsumi, are murderers. Having both of their loved ones harmed, the two plotted their respective revenges. When they're playing against each other, it's revealed that Shimada had killed Tatsumi because the latter watched and did nothing as Shimada's sister was being assaulted. The black-haired assistant nearly succeeded in stopping Shimada from making a damning choice, but the detective's taunts push him over the edge and prevent him from ever seeing his sister again.
Lacking emotions was once seen as a strength in Death Parade, but the black-haired assistant argues that not being able to understand the complexity of human emotions is leading arbiters to make bad judgements. And deciding people's fates based on something as one-sided as the darkness in their souls -- as well as engineering conditions that force them to make bad decisions -- doesn't make the judgement fair at all.
Squid Game's events were designed with the intention to kill participants for rich people's entertainment, while Death Parade's games judge people's worth. Yet both shows demonstrate how these games can bring out the best and worst in people.