La Zone Xtrême “Le jeu de la mort” – or The Game of Death – is a French TV show where contestants ask questions to this man for a shot fame. Get it right, he wins. Get it wrong, and you yourself administer electric shocks to him. We’re not talking the likes of 300v upwards, more than what you can get from a mains plug in your house, which has killed and will kill more people.
Would you be able to pull the lever and see this guy’s face as you administer a possibly fatal dosage of electricity through his veins, to the demands of the studio audience and the presenter?
Well, good thing it isn’t real, then.
80 assumingly willing participants took part in what they believed was a pilot for a TV game show where they “shocked” an actor with near-fatal shocks of electricity until he visibly died on set. The actor was never in danger and was never shocked, but just pretended to be. But it poses an interesting question about the reality of games – another subject I’m sure my lecturers would be glad to hear I’m talking about…
The show’s a rehash of an old experiment conducted by a guy called Stanley Milgram in the 1960s to see if people will be willing to shock a student under order to improve their memory even though they could see it was visually harming them.
However, during the studies simply by being told to, a shocking 62% of participants would actually go through with it. In this quote-unquote “game show”? 81% of them obeyed. Something to do with the crowd cheering you on to shock him along with the TV cameras makes people more induced to kill people, apparently. The studio audience weren’t in on it either, so what does that say about their willingness to see pain and suffering of others?
It was filmed as a documentary highlighting the dangers TV can face and it also throws up a rather interesting idea in my eyes. It goes back to that age-old debate of “Are video games making murderers of our children?” and how a virtual living space such as that on a TV show, where the lines of fiction and reality are blurred, would alter how you act. I’m sure if you were in the same room as the guy, knew the guy and/or were shocked yourself you’d think twice. But killing without consequence… It’s human nature, right?
It’s all very interesting stuff. So, if you didn’t know it was all a farce, how far would you go?
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