Game of Death

How far will people go to inflict pain on another person in order to win a TV game show?  How obedient will they be when egged on by a domineering TV host and a cheering audience? The controversial, but highly engaging documentary Game of Death takes these questions even further to ask: as reality television strives for greater extremes to increase viewership, will we reach a point where on-screen death becomes customary entertainment?  

In 1963, an infamous scientific experiment led by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram demonstrated that a majority of people would administer unbearable electric shocks to another man, when encouraged to do so by an authority figure.  Surprisingly, more than sixty per cent of the participants completed the experiment. They learned afterwards that the 'victims' were in fact actors and no pain was ever inflicted.

Filmmaker Christophe Nick re-creates Milgram's experiment in the form of a TV game show, where 80 participants are asked to follow its onerous rules. The participants are recruited for a test TV show and are brought into a real game show set in a television studio with technicians, a live audience, and an attractive hostess.  Despite the contestant's increasingly urgent protests and howls of pain, will they obey the TV host's commands and inflict electric shocks on an unseen man?  Or will they stop before it's too late?   

As in Milgram's experiment, the participants don't know that the supposed victim is actually an actor who is never hurt - despite his blood-curdling (but fake) screams of pain.  Behind the scenes, the production team and a group of academics follow the proceedings as they unfold and analyze them afterwards. The end result is Game of Death - and it's not pretty.  

Are we more compliant than those who participated in the same experiment fifty years ago?  Does peer pressure or a desire to adhere to authority make us do things we would not ordinarily do? And what does it take for someone to simply say no?  The answers are quite disturbing.  Although some people do eventually defy the rules of the game, most participants do not. Game of Death is a chilling commentary on the power of persuasion and, in particular, the medium of television.

Written & produced by Christophe Nick, directed by Thomas Bornot, Gilles Amado & Alain-Michel Blanc (Rezo Films & Yami 2) for France 2.