Gonggi Is Squid Game Season 2’s Breakout Hit

I understand Squid Game. I get that it’s a critique of the capitalist society that pits poor people against each other while the rich can treat life like a game, and that making them play children’s games is a vital part of this critique (as well as, in-world, part of the humiliation). Hi, Mr Hwang Dong-hyuk. Big fan. And yet part of the draw of watching it are the games themselves. As a Westerner, many of these games are unfamiliar to me, but just like dalgona in season one (the honeycomb shapes), gonggi has captured my imagination this time around.

Gonggi is essentially jacks, but different. It’s interesting to consider what games you might swap in if it were British instead of Korean – red light green light is basically what’s the time Mr Wolf, while you’d imagine there would be a place for bulldog at the table too. Hopscotch, yo-yos, skipping rope rhymes, conkers, and tiggy (that’s tag, if you want to be American about it) might all fit too. Maybe the world would be singing A Sailor Went To Sea (Sea, Sea) if Squid Game were in my country. But it’s not. And so the world is playing gonggi.

How To Play Gonggi

Squid Game doesn’t bother to explain the rules of gonggi, which I feel is the right decision, dramatically. Despite the first season’s global popularity, it is founded on Korean cultural touchstones, and just as you wouldn’t need to explain piggy in the middle to any British person, gonggi speaks for itself. This helps underline to outside audiences how commonplace these games are, even if we’re left in the dark on how gonggi actually works.

Watching it doesn’t necessarily help, because the contestants mess it up as often as they succeed and (likely to disguise that it’s not the actors playing), gonggi is given a frenetic editing sequence that obscures the rules. But they’re surprisingly simple. You have five stones, and you spill them on the table. You choose one to pick up, then toss it in the air and sweep across the table, grabbing one extra stone each time. It doesn’t seem to matter which stone you throw upwards when you start gathering multiple, as long as it’s just one.

After all five have been collected, you spill them again, grab one, and this time sweep up two at once. Do that twice, and you’ve got five in your hand. Spill them again, grab one, then toss and either grab a set of three or just grab one. Now do the other. Spill them again, grab one, sweep all four. Now with all five in your hand, having gone through gathering them in ones, twos, threes, and fours, it’s the final stage (which you’ll remember from the show). You throw the stones up, catch them on the back of your hand, then throw them upwards again and grasp them all before they fall.

How do I know this? Well, one, I looked it up. But two, and more importantly for why I’m writing this, I bought myself a set of 3D printed gonggi stones and I’ve been practising the fine art. There are no masked soldiers waiting to shoot me, which makes it a little easier, but I’m still getting the hang of it.

There Is No Squid Game Universe

There are some riffs on Squid Game that misses the point of the show, I know. I find Beast Games to be hackneyed, both because MrBeast’s personality-less personality does not translate well to television and because he and several other people have done this concept before. (I said he and several other people have done this concept before!). However, his attempt is not as vulgar as Netflix’s own reality show version, which seemed to take glee in the suffering of its contestants. While they weren’t killed, the tears as various players were eliminated drained any meagre fun the concept might have had.

I’m also deeply concerned at the discussion of a potential Squid Games Cinematic Universe. While that widely shared screenshot of a Marvel-esque timeline at some sort of convention is a fake, Netflix has previously discussed making a ”universe”, and we already have a third season airing this year as well as the existence of the reality show. There’s also a board game adaptation, where the two wolves inside me (one of whom loves board games, the other of whom loves feeling superior to other people and hence uses words like ‘whom’) are constantly locked into a battle on whether to buy it. For the record, I do own Netflix’s official The Queen’s Gambit Board Game, and it is both not chess and quite good.

But buying cheap gonggi stones online to practise the relaxing (with no impending violence, at least) activity feels distinctly separate from TikTokifying Squid Game, which was my concern with discussion around Player 120. I can get to the third level pretty consistently, so if the Front Man comes calling, maybe I stand a chance.

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Release Date

September 17, 2021

Writers

Hwang Dong-hyuk

Showrunner

Hwang Dong-hyuk