Games Gone Wrong

3 Twisted Takes on Children’s Play

Few things are as tantalizing to people as corruption. You see it everywhere, from supposedly sexy Halloween costumes to Creepypasta takes on Disneyland. The popularity of coming-of-age stories fits into this pattern as well. After all, what’s the draw of those sorts of films and novels? It’s watching a young person’s innocence or naivete run into the jading, corrupting realities of adult life.

For horror writers, this proves incredibly fruitful ground. Children are terrified of the darkness of adulthood seeping into their lives. Adults often find cute or innocent things alien and terrifying in their own right. So we take something precious, and we ruin it. We explore ways they might be used to make the blood run cold. I took the game of peekaboo and turned it into a dark comedy.

One of the most popular IPs of the 2020s is the Netflix series Squid Game. In the South Korean show, players participate in a series of death

games to win a massive cash prize. Many of these games are classic children’s games, such as a version of Red Light, Green Light, where moving when you’re supposed to stay still will result in getting shot.

With that in mind, let’s look at 3 pieces of art that run with this concept, injecting horror into children’s games. They might just inspire you to consider how to corrupt your own childhood in your next project.

1.  Kami-sama no Iutoori (As the Gods Will)

When I watched Squid Game, I immediately thought of this horror manga written by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and illustrated by Akeji Fujimura. One day, students find themselves suddenly playing a version of Red Light, Green Light (Daruma-san ga koronda). Those who lose have their heads explode. Yikes.

You can see the logic in the punishments between this and Squid Game. A Daruma doll is a hollow piece that resembles a human head, so it empties out your head/leaves a spot for the Daruma doll to attach if it wanted to. With Squid Game’s Red Light, Green Light, you’re shot. The lights summon ideas of traffic signals. Disobeying a traffic light would bring you the ire of the police, and the police are known to shoot people. You can carry this logic through to your own corrupted game. Look at the name of what you’re working with. What is it associated with? What sorts of punishments fit that?

There are plenty of these games in the manga. Toward the end of the sequel series, they play old maid. Of course, being the last player with the old maid card will result in your death. However, there are also instruction cards (e.g., you must smile if you have this card) and punishment cards (e.g., this card is a bomb that will go off in X amount of turns). Failure to obey instructions or receiving punishment will also result in your death.

This sort of death game survival horror is a relatively popular niche in Japanese manga. You’ll find versions of it through Real Account (primarily using social media and phone games) and all the takes on Werewolf/Mafia/Hang the Witch (e.g., Jinrou Game and Rabbit Doubt). In certain cases, they go with the easiest route to horror: Losing means death. Easy here isn’t synonymous with bad, by the way. You can choose to go the exact same route in your corruption and write a thoroughly gripping, character-driven piece of horror that drips with delicious, devious tension.

But you can choose something else.

2.  Bleach

Bleach is one of the most successful shonen manga ever written. Tite Kubo’s horror-adjacent take on death gods (shinigami), sword play, and fashion was part of what was called the Big 3, sharing the stage with fellow juggernauts Naruto and One Piece.

Most of Bleach has nothing at all to do with children’s games. The teenage main characters struggle with more existential themes than that, but we do see this corruption through Captain Shunsui Kyōraku. The lecherous leader of the 1st Division of the Soul Society’s fighting force has a powerset that’s based around children’s games, and he uses them to devastating effect.

As in the other cases, we get another version of the moving-statue game (Daruma-san). We also see variations on tag. Kageoni is shadow tag. When Shunsui activates this, not only do you have to watch out for attacks on your physical body, but on your shadow as well. If he slashes your shadow, you too will be wounded. Kubo stretches this for some horror imagery, such as having Shunsui emerge from an enemy’s shadow, dripping in the black ink that manga gets to play with so well for creepy shots.

Irooni is basically color tag. You declare a color, and you may only attack areas that are that color. However, anyone can be the “chaser.” So if you call black, your opponent can attack any spot of you clad in black. The more risk you take on, the more powerful your attacks.

The creepiness comes in part from Kubo’s art style. But there is an inherent creepy factor to seeing the rules of a children’s game being used to attack, maim, and murder an opponent. You could easily imagine a magic system based on this sort of thing, with various schools or ability trees based on various groupings of games (playground, board, card, video, and so on). 

How might a game of Tug of War be used? Well, you could look to the Chunin Exam arc in Naruto, where the Third Hokage plays tug of war with an antagonist’s very soul. You could say one of the final scenes in Avatar: The Last Airbender is a version of spiritual tug of war.

What other games could you give catastrophic effects? Deadly dodgeball? Poker with explosive card combinations? Hide-and-seek?

3.  Ready or Not

The highly successful horror-comedy Ready or Not sees a newlywed bride introduced to her in-laws’ family game night, a tradition they’re contractually required to play whenever someone joins the family (via marriage). The game is randomly selected. Most of the games, we’re told, are harmless and straightforward. They’re probably the actual versions of those games. The one exception? Hide-and-seek.

Of course, our poor final girl is dealt that awful card. So her new family tells her to go hide. They take up weapons. And they’re going to hunt her.

Now, hide-and-seek stories play into a much older trope. They’re cat-and-mouse. They’re The Most Dangerous Game. Strictly speaking, this concept doesn’t have to be a corruption of a childhood game. It’s probably more sensible to argue that hide-and-seek is a sanitized version of a real, deep fear. Through it, we teach children how to hide from the things that go bump. Through it, they find a safe way to experience, express, and conquer this fear.

In most narrative versions, we don’t present it as a children’s game. Ready or Not does. This adds both horror and comedy to it. It also makes it more seductive for audiences. This is not a story about the real adult horror. This is a story about the corruption of something from our childhood. We love to blaspheme ourselves. When we witness the destruction of our innocence, we can more easily come to terms with the person we are now. Or perhaps we further kill our inner child. Or perhaps we come into touch with them once more.

My challenge for you is this: Consider the games you used to play when you were young. Which ones were the most important to you? Do any of them bring fond memories? Do any of them make your adult self uneasy? Take the ones that stand out to you, and heighten them. Twist them. Blacken their beings, and see what happens.