Don’t Look a Gift horse in the mouth
At first glance, Beast Games sells itself as just another high-stakes competition show: big challenges, bigger money, and the promise that anyone can walk away rich. But once you sit with it for more than a few episodes, it starts to feel less like entertainment and more like an experiment. Not just on contestants, but on spectators as well.
What stands out immediately is that the challenges don’t stop at luck, physical endurance, or intelligence. They creep into moral territory. Players aren’t just asked can you do this? But who are you willing to hurt to win? When a competition repeatedly forces contestants to choose between “playing fair” or “becoming the villain,” it raises a bigger question: is winning even possible without crossing ethical lines?
What makes this worse is how contestants are treated once the show airs. Players get dragged online for “showing their true colors,” as if their environment had no effect. In reality, Beast Games isolates contestants for months. They're away from loved ones, routines, and grounding influences which can make you lose yourself in the game. They live in a closed system with rising stakes, constant surveillance, and escalating pressure. When the game becomes your entire world, you don’t just play it, you become it.
Inside that world, people are flattened into contestants and archetypes: “the loyal one,” “the traitor,” “the risk-taker,” “the threat.” These labels aren’t accidental, they’re narratively useful. They make the story easier to follow and the emotional beats easier to manipulate. From a viewer’s perspective, the emotions feel engineered. Fear, scarcity, hope, betrayal, are all dialed up intentionally.
The hosts and production play a huge role in this. Their commentary often feels instigative, especially in pivotal moments. Taunting contestants mid-challenge by waving cash in their faces? Theatrics like crushing hearts and burying contestants alive ? It’s simply psychological pressure dressed up as entertainment.
This is where the “doing good” narrative starts to crack. If the end goal is generosity or philanthropy, why does it require pushing financially desperate people into psychological warfare? Why are brutal mind games necessary for charity? At some point, the spectacle outweighs the supposed moral high ground. Money isn’t just the reward, it’s also the motivator, the threat, and the measuring stick for human worth.
On one hand, the show undeniably strips people down to numbers, strategies, and reactions. On the other hand, it does reveal something real about human nature: how fragile, emotional, and conditioned people become under extreme pressure. The unsettling part is that both can be true at once. Human nature is being extracted and exploited simultaneously.
As a viewer, the show functions like a mirror. I find myself asking, “What would I do for that amount of money?” or “Where would my moral line actually be?”. But the key difference is that I have the privilege to ask these questions safely. I’m not the one facing consequences for each decision. Considering all the criticism players are facing, that distance matters.
What we’re watching isn’t actually organic human behavior, it’s curated. The narrative, the incentives, the stakes, and the editing all shape what “human nature” looks like on screen. People aren’t just competing, they’re being turned into experiment subjects in a system designed to profit from their predictability, desperation, and emotional breakdowns.
And maybe that’s the most uncomfortable part. It's not “just a game.” To players, it’s a chance to change their life. For viewers, it’s a reminder of how easily humans can be cornered, labeled, and pushed past their limits when money is involved. And how profitable that pressure can be… for everyone except the people inside it.
Strike out,
Dahya Goolsby, Writer
