Prime Video
"Beast Games," the game show on Amazon Prime Video from MrBeast, debuted Thursday, and I watched along with my elementary-aged son. As an adult, I enjoyed the spectacle and found the show highly watchable. But as a parent, I'm not sure I liked the message about money that it was imparting to my young ward.
Elementary school-aged kids, whether or not they're allowed to watch YouTube, all know who MrBeast is. He's a superstar to Gen Alpha. His candy bars are on grocery store shelves, and his specter hangs over playgrounds and lunchrooms.
(My colleague reports that his teenage son says MrBeast isn't quite as cool in high schools anymore, perhaps because he's seen as for little kids.)
Like most parents, I want to teach my kids the value of a dollar: that money comes from hard work and that saving and budgeting are important.
"Beast Games" flies in the face of all that. Money is tossed around as this strange, easy-come, easy-go object. It opens with MrBeast standing on a pyramid of cash (allegedly the full $5 million prize in stacks of bills). We are repeatedly told this is the largest cash prize ever in a game show.
The show's premise is that a group of contestants will elaborate on challenges to win that big prize — a season-long version of some of his popular YouTube videos.
Later in the season, there will be physical challenges (we see preview clips of people pulling a monster truck), but in this first episode, the games are almost all psychological tests.
This first series of mini-games aims to winnow down the contestant pool from 1,000 people to 500. The games are variations on the prisoner's dilemma — games that pit individuals choosing for themselves vs. for the good of the group.
In the first game, MrBeast makes this offer: Anyone who quits the game immediately can share a pot of money — but the pot gets smaller and smaller for each person who chooses to take the early out. In another game, each team of about 100 people must have one person sacrifice themselves and leave the game with no prize money at all — or else their whole team is eliminated. People are sobbing, yelling at each other to be the ones to quit.
As an adult watching, it's a fascinating challenge. But I'm not sure a kid can really understand what's going on — the wrenching pain of people losing what they thought could be a chance to pay off loans or buy a home.
In the game, money is an object to build into pyramids or toss around in bags — it's funny money, it doesn't feel real.
Representatives for MrBeast didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI about Donaldson's views on financial literacy for young people or the game show.
Other game shows have cash prizes — even kid-friendly ones like "Is It Cake?" or even the old "Double Dare" on Nickelodeon. But on other shows, the prize was an exciting treat at the end, it wasn't the whole point of the show.
In "Beast Games," money is the point — and even the games themselves are about money. I'm not sure I like what subtle message that's sending to young minds not old enough to earn a real paycheck.
