Seven-Up, Squid Game & Traitors

For the six years that I taught third grade, I could never figure out why the students would beg to play “Seven-Up.” The bookworm kids who carried at least three books with them everywhere they went. The encyclopedic kids who could recite the names of all the countries in the world. The sporty kids who seemed to have baseball or football games whizzing nonstop through their brains. All of them pleaded to play “Seven-Up” whenever we had a few minutes at the end of the day.

Here’s how to play: Choose seven students to come up to the front of the room. Everyone else puts their heads down on their desks, closes their eyes, pretends not to peek, and holds out one fist with a thumb sticking up. The seven students in the front creep around the classroom, each choosing one person’s thumb to push down. Then the thumb-pushers return to the front of the room. Everyone opens their eyes. The students whose thumbs got pushed down each get one guess as to who did it. If they guess right, they get to switch places with the thumb pusher.

That’s it. That’s the whole game. My students loved it.

“Why do you like this game so much?” I asked them one day. I was genuinely curious.

Most of their hands went up. I called on a girl who had shown herself to be intellectually sophisticated for a nine-year-old. She was waving her hand with great urgency.

“It’s fun,” she explained, “because if you get your thumb pushed down, then you get to guess.”

That was it. That was all I was going to get.

I thought about this recently as my husband and I sat, riveted, in front of the Netflix show Squid Game. It’s a Korean drama about a fictional reality show in which adults compete in children’s games, some no more complex than “Seven-Up,” with a large money prize at the end for the winner. Oh, and when a player gets eliminated, they die. As I watched the show, I assured myself I was drawn to its exploration of socio-economic class in Korea.

But then we watched, equally riveted, the American reality show that soon came out based on the drama. It was identical to the Korean drama, just without the actual killing part. Instead, the contestants who got eliminated fell down and played dead. What was so interesting about watching people play “Red Light, Green Light”? Or inhabit a human-sized version of the classic guessing game “Battleship”? Or try to chisel the outline of a cookie without cracking it? Memories of “Seven-Up” tickled the edges of my brain.

Soon after, I found the reality show Traitors on Peacock. I watched this one myself as my husband was away on his second-annual-once-in-a-lifetime-trip-to-ski-in-Japan. In the American version of Traitors—and there are already UK and Australian versions—Alan Cummings welcomes 20 or so players to a Scottish castle for a game that works like this: A few players are secretly chosen to be Traitors. Everyone else is a Faithful. Each night the Traitors meet to choose one Faithful to “kill.” The following evening, all players vote for which player they think is most likely a Traitor, and that player is banished. At the end of the game, whoever has not been banished or “killed” splits a big pot of money. But if there are any Traitors left at the end, they get all of the money and any remaining Faithfuls get nothing. 

To occupy the players’ days, they engage in games and challenges to add money to the pot, but that part doesn’t interest me. I like the social dynamics of watching them guess who the Traitors are. 

“But Ms. Hornik,” I can picture a student asking me, “what’s actually FUN about Traitors?”

“Well,” I’d explain. “Overnight somebody gets a letter saying they got murdered, and then everyone else gets to guess who sent it.”

I might as well put my head on a desk and stick up my thumb.

---

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash.