Film Theory: What Everyone Got WRONG About Squid Game! (오징어 게임)

you're thrown into a series of six mystery games with 400 other players a pot of 44 million dollars is online but more importantly if you lose you die other channels have covered the tactics to winning the specific games and honestly the show itself does a pretty darn good job of showing you creative solutions to its various puzzles but today we're gonna help you survive when you're going in blind just like the contestants this is how to survive the squid game mild spoiler warning for some of the games and strategies hello internet welcome to film theory the show that's brought to you by our totally not made up sponsor for today's episode usb power banks are you an off-duty police officer who went out of your way to infiltrate a secret society running a brutal death game in the hopes of discovering a long-lost family member if so a usb power bank is the product for you this device fits into your pocket is smaller than a cell phone and can keep your camera powered for days on end so that when you do finally perform a miraculous escape from death game island you have more than a few minutes of video and a 50 word notepad file to show for your efforts usb power banks seriously what were you thinking anyway i finally got around to watching squid game along with most of the rest of the us at this point and i loved the series it was tense it was clever it was also completely misunderstood by everyone watching it you see the thing is being called the next hunger games the new battle royale the cinematic version of fall guys the thing is these comparisons really miss the mark because fundamentally this isn't how the games in the show work and if you're one of the people making that comparison it's likely going to get you killed don't worry most of the characters in the series fell to the same trap and uh let's just say it didn't end well for him but have no fear matpat is here by the time you're done with this video you'll understand the real way to survive the six rounds of playground games regardless of what individual challenges you're faced with so the next time some random guy in the subway offers the a hundred thousand won to flip his paper square or when season two finally launches because let's face it this smash hit is absolutely getting itself a sequel you'll be prepared to survive the squid so pay attention the information today might just save your life and make you rich in the process for the 10 of you out there who still haven't watched squid game here's the briefest of summaries just so you get through today's theory gion is a down on his luck gambler who's in dire need of some cash he's got loan sharks after him his mother can't afford her surgery and on top of that he's going to lose custody of his daughter because he can't afford to pay a lawyer desperate he agrees to play the highest stakes game imaginable he's whisked away to a remote island with over 400 other competitors where in order to win they have to survive six different children's games some of them are pass fail challenges like red light green light where failure results in execution others are player versus player games like tug of war where the losing team falls to their death as for why you'd possibly want to risk your life in a game like this well each death adds a hundred million won to the prize pool 100 million won can you believe that now all of you are scrambling to google for that conversion rate don't worry i did it too when i was watching the show and so did everyone else based on the google trends search results for juan to us dollar conversion it actually amounts to about 84 000 per death considering that there are 456 contestants you're talking about a potential prize pool of 38 million dollars but be warned once you start playing you're not allowed to stop playing and those who do refuse to play have to worry about clause number two consent form clause 2 a player who refuses to play will be eliminated when they say elimination they mean a bullet and your head intersecting in an unpleasant way the only way out once the games have started is consent form clause 3. if all of the players agree to stop playing the games are allowed to end that's actually a mistranslation by the way it's if the majority of players vote end the game that's why subs are always better than dubs so anyway with the rules laid out let's get to the strategy like i mentioned before the players don't know what games they're going to be playing until they get to the death island if they're observant they can piece together clues based on the wall decorations around him but still it's not gonna give him much time to prepare or practice and so that's what we're gonna assume today that we've just signed up and have no idea what's in store for us in this massive game of death what should our general strategies be first we shouldn't assume that just because people are dying that this is a death game because it's not the rule states everyone here will participate in six different games those who win all six games will receive a handsome cash prize if you survive you win and sure while each death boosts the pot it's not like a battle royale or hunger game scenario where there can only be one left standing here there can be more than one winner and that's important it means that the survival of one person or even a group of people is not directly negative to your personal survival which then opens up the question should you be sabotaging your fellow players in order to boost the prize pot and advance yourself this is a dilemma that actually pops up repeatedly throughout the series in the second game song woo figures out the game before anyone else does punching a shape out of a fragile honeycomb candy knowing this he immediately chooses the easiest shape and then encourages the other players on his team to split up getting them to take shapes that are much more difficult and much more likely to lead to their elimination obviously there's all kinds of moral and ethical reasons why you shouldn't intentionally try to kill other people but what songwoo does here in game 2 is one of the stupidest moves that we see anyone make across the entire series the people he chooses to sabotage are people that have agreed to team up with him the players who in the event of a fight are more likely to have his back as opposed to say planting a knife between his shoulder blades oh wait that's exactly what we see happen they come to his rescue the following night when everyone tries killing each other but teaming up isn't just about keeping people and your personal alliance safe keeping more players in the game for longer means more chances for other people to help you survive again take that honeycomb game as the example in it players are given a needle to punch out their shape which is fine for easy shapes like a triangle but not very effective for the more fragile shapes like the umbrella or star however one person in the group our hero gion out of desperation comes up with a completely out of the box strategy ignoring the needle entirely and licking the candy so the shape can pop out this in turn saves multiple other contestants who copy the strategy people who otherwise would have been eliminated just like the rest that's why it's stupid when the players try to kill each other between games two and three because these are men whose lives were saved by the person that they're now attempting to eliminate you know what they say two heads are better than one so 50 heads should be even better and 400 heads is even better than that it's why the internet hive mind is so good at solving puzzles everyone brings their own experiences and expertise to the table so let's just say that you were i don't know faced with a challenge that involves jumping across panels of glass with 50 of those panels being tempered and safe to stand on well it would be really helpful if the group had someone who is a glass expert that could tell the difference between tempered and untempered glass oh wait that's exactly what happens except instead of sharing his knowledge the glass expert hides this fact until the end after practically all the other players have died this is stupid not just from a statistical angle but also from a strategic one considering that most of the games are timed everyone else realizing that they're just blindly guessing on a coin flip that could cost him their life wastes time every second that you're hiding your knowledge is the second that the group isn't making progress as a result our glass maker despite having the knowledge that should have kept him alive through this challenge ultimately dies because he runs out of time had he shared it from the get-go mostly everyone could have survived what was one of the most disastrous and difficult challenges of the batch also can i just digress here for a minute this one bothered me i just didn't really like this challenge i get that it was a cool visual and interesting concept but the challenge just didn't work for me it didn't seem to be based on a playground game like all the others the game makers cheat by turning off the lights midway through which directly counteracts their whole everyone has a fair chance motto the whole putting people into a specific order felt unfair and then the way they conclude it with a giant explosive finale puts everyone's lives at risk it was just good spectacle but also something that felt kind of cheap alright rant over of course there is the elephant in the room every player who dies adds more money to the prize pot but that's the wrong way to think about it let's assume that like we see in the show there are six rounds and that there will be at least three games that require 50 of the players to be eliminated this would be games like tug-of-war and marbles where some amount of death is guaranteed that means that your portion of the prize pot is already going to be sitting at a hefty 800 million won 668 000 us dollars even before any additional deaths from the other games if you're someone like gion who has loan sharks to pay off a family member surgery to pay for and an ex-spouse to fight in court that amount should cover everything while still leaving you with enough to make a down payment on a new house there's also an economic principle called the law of diminishing utility which states that if someone is down on their luck having an extra eighty thousand dollars is a huge huge massive deal if you're guillan that money has a lot of use but if you're already standing to win over six hundred thousand dollars another 80k on top is certainly nice but no longer is the life-changing sum of money that it once was once your basic needs are met as income increases you gain a correspondingly smaller and smaller increase in your life satisfaction yet a slightly nicer car a slightly nicer house therefore it's not something that's worth risking your life over this is surprisingly a topic that the last episode focuses on though for spoiler reasons i'm not gonna play the clip no don't get me wrong i'm not saying that any winner of the squid games shouldn't have that money but what i am saying is that there's a tipping point where each additional dollar earned is less and less worth risking your own life to achieve and by just playing the game with survival as your first priority you wind up with plenty of money to change your situation while also minimizing your risk of losing that life so you know you can go on and spend it obviously there's gonna be rounds where you're forced to fight for your life and eliminate other players but if you don't have to kill people then don't never thought that's a sentence i'd have to say but here we are but there is one big concern that you have to be aware of clause number three at any point the players can vote on whether or not to end the game if the majority of players want out that causes the game to end not just for them but for everyone in order for you to walk home with your money you have to complete six games but people will probably vote to escape the games if they're put into a position where they're almost certainly gonna die so with that in mind let's go back to the glass bridge unless you have outside knowledge of what tempered and untempered glass looks like the game is generally decided by random coin flips and by coin flips i mean the first few people in line coming down with a mild case of death for the good of the group in the challenge there are 18 sets of panels worst case scenario you have 18 deaths the best case scenario is zero deaths with the person in front correctly guessing every time but fat chance there as player number three correctly estimates when he's three panels in probability then i'll get everything this one in 32 768. overall if you're first in line you have a one in 262 144 chance of survival the average here is nine deaths with the probability distribution curve basically looking like a bell curve which you can see using any binomial visualization tool yep have one of those handy right using that probability chart we can see that the first six people in line are basically screwed having less than a five percent chance to survive while the people going 13th and later have a 95 or better chance to survive but even if you're trapped in the game with no calculator it doesn't take a whole lot of brain power to determine that you do not want to be one of the first nine people to play so you as a smart player hopefully chose not to be one of the first few people in line but even if you're feeling good about your odds of survival remember that for you to actually make it across the bridge you need the game to happen let's say that the game has been reduced to 13 players and you're lucky enough to be 13th in line that's good news for you you have 95 odds to survive however you probably won't make it across the bridge for the simple reason that there are good odds that the first seven people in line are gonna nope the heck out of there go in with a majority vote to end the game meaning that even though you had the ideal position and would have won you get nothing good day sir and you see this is exactly what could have happened in the show 16 players remaining knowing that the first nine were likely to die they could have voted to end the game right then and there and because they were in the majority clause number three would have been enacted game over now let's take the alternate scenario let's assume knowledge was shared and everyone's cooperating at this point there would have been two 50 elimination games tug of war and marbles in the best case scenario 456 players would have been reduced to 114 by the time you get to the bridge even if every single one of those first 18 people in line got cold feet they wouldn't have enough votes to end the game and instead of most of them being wiped out we'd expect an average of nine of those players or eight percent of the 114 player group to get eliminated 92 percent of players surviving to get past this game pretty darn good odds in short your chances of survival increase the more people are around you to take the blows so now that we've spent a lot of time talking about what not to do what can you do to increase your odds of surviving in squid game apart of course from playing nice with your fellow competitors well the first one is obvious don't panic red light green light is an easy game and the timer was very generous as long as you stay calm and you use your time wisely also just like with the three clauses make sure that you're paying attention to the game's rules for instance we see songwoo cheat at marbles by misdirecting his partner but his method for collecting 20 marbles doesn't actually involve breaking any of the rules that are established by the game master a player who manages to take all ten marbles from their partner repeatedly throughout the series we see players presented with an obvious solution like the needle in the honeycomb game and they just assume that because this is the default or recommended way to play the game it must therefore be the only way to play the game but rarely is that the case you can lie to your partner and take his marbles you can lick your candy until the sugar melts the problem everyone falls into is that they assume certain rules are there when in fact they're not in the glass bridge episode we see that guillain was able to take a single marble as a keepsake with him which ended up being relevant in that very game a second third or 20 more marvels could have come in real handy with that one also with that glass bridge the rules just state that you have to jump from panel to panel for this game you will guess which one of the next two tiles is the tile made of the stronger tempered glass and only step on those across the 18 pairs of tiles but nothing said that you had to land on the middle of each panel landing with your feet on the supporting bars holding up the glass is gonna reduce the weight on that glass ultimately helping resist the breakage is it breaking the rules i don't know honestly i don't think so but here's the thing you know that you're gonna die if you choose wrong so why not try pushing the edges of the rules just a little bit when there's nothing else to lose by taking a moment to think about the actual hard rules of the game and not automatically dismissing unconventional solutions by assuming that anything else isn't allowed you might actually be able to find the loophole that allows you to survive lastly use your surroundings not only are the walls giving you clues but your clothes the bed the springs and the mattresses all of it could potentially prove useful were you given a glass bottle yesterday as a part of your meal instead of breaking it to try and shank your opponents why not bring it with you to your next game tug of war throw it onto your opponent's platform to throw them off balance or put glass under their feet maybe cut the rope so neither side loses another thing that i want to get off my chest this is just a terrible idea i think that doll senses when you move around that person in front of you is gonna stop at times that you don't expect or anticipate if they get shot that bullet might go through them and pierce you or their dead body might knock into you and instead of focusing on the game itself you're gonna be focused on another person as you run down that field which is not where your attention needs to be in short your number one strategy to surviving the squid game should be to ignore song woo i think he would put us at a disadvantage if we just choose one you think for being the smartest person in the room all of his ideas are dumb i guess except for the tug of war game anyway if you happen to meet a well-dressed man in a train station who invites you to throw squares of paper at each other now you know what to do and that's to say no because unless your desire to win more than half a million dollars is greater than your desire to have more than a 12 chance of surviving the next week of your life it's not going to be worth it but hey that's just a theory a film theory and here's a game for you press that subscribe button as fast as you can see how many times you can press it before this video ends maybe you'll end up subscribed to this channel maybe you won't we'll find out together it'll give me the weirdest data for unsub to resub to a video of all time youtube analytics is gonna be so mad at me for this one

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 8,405,798

Keywords: squid game, squid game games, squid game theory, squid game ending, squid game explained, how to survive squid game, red light green light squid game, squid game episode 1, squid game movie, squid game song, green light red light, squid game full movie, roblox squid game, squid game trailer, squid game scene, squid game reaction, squid game gatcha, squid game tiktok, film theory, film theorists, matpat, film theory squid game, squid game netflix, 오징어 게임

Id: 54avjfIu1OI

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021