Everyone could have won ‘Squid Game’ hopscotch, and that’s just bad game design

Welcome to Fix It, our series examining projects we love — save for one tiny change we wish we could make.

Netflix’s South Korean superhit Squid Game is a chilling series that twists the innocent aesthetics of childhood — sunny days on the playground, primary-colored shapes, and schoolyard games — into a deadly contest that brings out the worst in humanity. More chilling, however, is the realization that the games themselves are not a one-off attempt to wring some entertainment value out of the working class. They are an entire industry that churns out games all over the world with identical, repeatable results. Hundreds enter, one emerges, and the games play on at the next location. Everything that happens in the games is torture for the players, but for the people who run them, it’s just another day at the office. And just like a normal office, some people are straight-up bad at their jobs.

The first three games in Season 1 of Squid Game had remarkably straightforward win conditions. Red Light Green Light offered the simple binary of moving or staying still. (Standing behind another player so that the enormous cursed doll couldn’t see you was more of a strategy than a loophole.) The honeycomb game also encouraged backdoor solutions and did not punish players who tore or licked their sugar shape instead of poking it out (Mi-Nyeo’s trick with the lighter was cheating, though). Game three was tug-of-war and its winners were decided by the impartial judge that is gravity. But after that, the game designers basically turned in half-finished work and called it a day.

Game four snapped away from the swaddling comfort of structure and left the rules of the marbles game up to the contestants. While the metagame of tricking the players into self-selecting their own opponents was a stroke of evil genius, all the designers had to do was chuck a bag of glass at a bunch of trauma victims and tell them to figure out who dies next. Is this creative? Yes, but it is also lazy. That laziness continues into the design of the fifth game, which winnowed the sixteen contestants down to the final three and set the stage for the dramatic and eponymous Squid Game finale.

The fifth game was Glass Stepping Stones/hopscotch, and it’s here where the in-universe designers really shit the bed. There is a massive design flaw in this game’s layout, and it’s accompanied by a rules’ loophole big enough for all sixteen of the players to waddle through. First, take a look at the game board:

Spoiler: he can’t do it.
Credit: Netflix

Now, recall the rules (as stated in Squid Game‘s translated English subtitles; so it is possible there are more clarifying clauses that close this loophole in Korean):

“The fifth game is Glass Stepping Stones. Each stepping stone is made of one of two kinds of glass, tempered glass and normal glass. Tempered glass can even withstand the weight of two players, but normal glass will shatter with just one person. Players, you will decide which one of the two tiles is made of tempered glass, and step on those as you pass through 18 pairs of tiles. if you safely cross to the other side, you pass.”

Those rules only define two win conditions. Players must “decide which tile is tempered glass and step on those” and “safely cross to the other side” in order to pass. The information about the types of glass and how much weight they can withstand is interesting, but ultimately superfluous because there is nothing in the rules that says players have to jump on them. They only have to step.

The proposed solution for the hopscotch game doesn’t require the players to work together or even to like each other. All they have to do is walk on the middle beams between the glass panels, right foot on the right beam, and left foot on the left, and shuffle/waddle forward in a slightly wider-legged stance than usual. The glass panels are affixed to the top of each beam, so every player will “step” on the tempered glass of each pair at some point on their way down the line.

If the game designers wanted to be picky about the rules (and they clearly were not at this point in the game), the players could arbitrarily “decide” which of the panels is tempered and shout their answers out loud as they touch each pair, because again — there’s nothing in the rules that says the players have to decide correctly. They just have to make a choice and keep it moving.

While the players in this Squid Game did not see the obvious solution in front of them, it’s possible that future players will. If the game designers want to take advantage of the expensive circus setup and try this game again, they’re going to have to try a lot harder to make it inescapably deadly. One option would be to move the beams farther apart, but that runs the risk of the players not being able to jump between them. It’s only fun if the players fall because they chose the wrong panel, not because they have tight hamstrings and poor depth perception.

The way to make glass hopscotch really special would be to leave everything exactly as it is and subtly bait the players into trying the beam-stepping solution on their own. Then, when the first smarty-pants tries to make a run down the middle, the game designers could toss in a reminder of who really has the power here. Electrify the beams with a lethally high voltage. Superheat them to red-hot temperatures, or hide spikes inside the metal that only emerge when someone steps on them. Put a snake in there. Make them chains instead of beams so everything wobbles a little. Whatever. Just do better.

It is impossible that Squid Game has forgiving or even legal labor practices, so the game designers behind glass hopscotch need to get it together before someone at Squid Game, Inc figures out they’re slacking. Just because they’re the sociopathic minds behind a cruel, playable allegory of the crushing inescapability of capitalism doesn’t mean they don’t rely on that paycheck too.

Squid Game is streaming on Netflix.