Are there signs of pathological gambling in “The Squid Game”?

“All of you who are here are in an extreme situation … You have debts that you cannot pay.” That is the main argument of the netflix series The Squid Game (in English Squid game). In it, 456 players voluntarily agree to play six simple children’s games to finally pay off their debts.

If someone wins them all, they will be able to enter more than 33 million euros and change the very poor course of their lives. But if they lose they will be eliminated not only from the game, but also from life. They will die instantly leaving behind what they had.

From gambling to addiction

The play In itself it is a playful behavior associated mainly with pleasure, but also necessary and adaptive from a psychological point of view. When we are children we play to simulate real situations, train our ability to interact with others, learn to comply with the rules and self-regulate our behavior.

In fact, most animal species also play as a way to improve their physical and psychological abilities and develop social behaviors. During adult life, humans continue to play as a way to entertain, evade, and put aside our everyday problems for a while.

In this Korean series, all players are in dire financial straits, triggered by different experiences. It is then that they receive a strange invitation to a survival game.

Before entering, only some protagonists embodied this addictive disorder, formerly known as gambling, which now is diagnosed as pathological gambling. The first is Seong Gi-hun (player # 456), a chauffeur in debt for horse racing bets. The same happens to Jang Deok-su (player # 101), a gangster with large debts incurred in casinos.

This serious socioeconomic, family and labor problem is based on the possibility of winning or losing is conditioned by chance. That is, it does not depend exclusively on the skill of the player (although the player thinks that selecting the strongest horse or choosing a number from the lottery will increase their chances of success).

What is considered pathological gambling?

Pathological gambling behaviors activate the same brain circuits reinforcement than those altered by drugs of abuse, causing some symptoms similar to addictive substance use disorders.

For example, intense desire before and excitement during gambling or consumption, discomfort when not able to gamble or consume, loss of control and repetition of gambling or consumption. All this happens even when the person is aware that it causes serious damage: non-compliance or abandonment of academic, work and family obligations, risk to physical and psychological health, etc.

From a psychological point of view, people addicted to gambling run through three consecutive phases.

1. Profits: At the beginning, the player can obtain prizes or benefits, rewarding his behavior and causing it to be repeated. In addition, success reinforces the importance of profits and minimizes the impact of losses (begins to build false expectations). This builds excitement, confidence, optimism and leads you to place higher and more frequent bets for bigger prizes. In the Korean series we see it, for example, in the protagonist, Seong Gi-hun (player # 456), who experiences this intense excitement when he plays and wins at horse racing bets during the first episode.

2. Losses: The serious accumulated losses cause gambling in a habitual and compulsive way to recover what was lost and not to win money. If you do not stop this behavior, they can go bankrupt and go to lenders to solve the situation with gambling as the only option to recover what they lost. We also observe this phase in the protagonist Seong Gi-hun, who insists on compulsively playing the so-called “ddakji” (tazos with blue and red cards) in the subway station, despite losing most of the time.

3. Despair: There is intense suffering produced by family alienation, social rejection and loss of work. People with this addiction feel exhausted and desperate. In addition, they experience other psychological problems of an emotional nature (inability to enjoy, anxiety and depressive state). On The Squid Game, Cho Sang-woo (player # 218), childhood friend of the protagonist and head of a securities company, is ruined by the stock market losses and is able to lie to his mother and disappear from his life because of his shameful situation.

It is in this last phase where many of the characters of the Netflix series are found, leading them to make a decision that we would never believe capable of making: risk our lives and play with others to recover losses.

Why does gambling addiction occur?

Gambling conduct is established by instrumental associative learning mechanisms. That is, when some stimuli are present (betting applications, roulette, cards, etc.) the person performs a behavior (plays, bets) and can obtain a favorable reward (positive reinforcement).

Thus, the next time this stimulus is presented, the response will be more likely to be repeated and to become an addictive gambling habit. In this process other factors also influencesuch as expectations, uncertainty of the outcome, or intermittent reinforcement.

But also has been shown that when the addiction is established, the gambling behavior is maintained for an indefinite time, not so much to achieve pleasant rewards, but rather to avoid unpleasant consequences derived from accumulated losses (negative reinforcement) with the false hope of recovering the lost money .

We know that addiction is a chronic disease, although not everyone who gambles develops pathological gambling. In this sense, it is a complex problem triggered by multiple factors. Among the same there are risk variables, such as certain personality traits (impulsivity, sensation seeking), genetic or hereditary factors (allelic variants of dopamine receptors) and social variables such as the legalization of gambling, especially in stages of greater vulnerability such as adolescence. At this age we are more susceptible to losing control over this behavior.

Although the addiction to the game is established and maintained in the long term, it does not mean that it cannot be overcome, as it happens to the protagonist of the series, Seong Gi-hun. Although doing it without professional help is very difficult for anyone, since relapses can appear at any time in life.

In short, this fictional series reflects social and real aspects and problems suffered by many people in our immediate environment. Specifically, 2.2% of the population between 15 and 64 years old, according to the AGES survey of the Ministry of Health of Spain. Therefore, we must play responsibly and, if we cannot, seek the help of a professional psychologist.

Eduardo Blanco Calvo, Professor of Psychobiology, University of Malaga, Malaga University and Carmen Ruiz Molina placeholder image, Collaborating Professor, UOC – Open University of Catalonia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.