The Other Squid Game: How Splatoon 3 Promotes a Culture of Coziness,Inclusivity,and Becoming-Cephalopod

Abstract

The 2021 Netflix series Squid Game's themes of economic critique are often framed as contradicting the exploitative nature of its ancillary texts like Squid Game: The Challenge (Netflix 2023), a reality series that materially reproduces many of the same hardships that the narrative series ostensibly condemns. This paper argues that this is a product of the series’ emphasis on interactive screen media as a marketing and production tool without accounting for how this modal difference would alter the themes of the series’ narrative. The Nintendo multiplayer shooter Splatoon 3 (2022) serves as a useful example of how these challenges can be overcome within the context of a popular multimedia franchise. This is done through the game's emphasis on an ecological coziness whereby principles of cozy gaming and a cephalopod-like tentacular approach to screen media create a text whose themes and inclusive community standards do not exhibit the contradictions seen in Squid Game.

Two years after the release of the Netflix series Squid Game (2021) the streaming service released its first official follow-up, Squid Game: The Challenge (2023) a reality series where real contestants would compete in a recreation of the narrative series’ games. Both Squid Game and The Challenge feature a series of stylized children's games with a large cash prize as an incentive to play, but where the former uses this scenario to critique contemporary economic exploitation, the latter is just one example of the series being used to facilitate such exploitation. Within a month of the original series’ premier, the YouTube channel “Mr Beast” replicated several of the games and offered a substantial cash prize to real players who were willing to play their part. Netflix themselves incorporated the interactive component of their series into its initial marketing campaign well before the announcement of The Challenge, with cities around the world hosting pop-up games for members of the public to play as one-off marketing events. From these games where people physically compete for real financial stakes to the memes and ads that use imagery from the series, these interactive paratexts have become an inextricable aspect of Squid Game and thereby invite comparisons to other interactive media. Rather than framing these recreations of the series as “misreadings” (Di Placido, 2021) of the original text, this paper will examine how this is in fact a natural extension of the series’ game design by comparing it with a game actually about squids, Splatoon 3 (Nintendo, 2022). Through the game's tentacular assemblage of coziness, player agency, inclusivity, and cephalopods themselves, Splatoon's squids demonstrate a way of thinking through the problems that Squid Game's contradictions raise.

Squid Game's first—and at time of writing, only—season follows 456 people in contemporary South Korea who participate in a series of challenges for a 45.6 billion Won prize to be claimed by the sole surviving player. The games are modelled on playground games but with a violent twist added to help winnow the number of players, such as the losing side of a match of tug-of-war being pulled into a deep pit, or simply being shot by the game's overseeing guards. The reasons to play anyway range from helping family to get out of North Korea in the case of Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon), to the eventual winner Seong Gi-hun's (Lee Jung-jae) challenges as a father and gambling addict. The message of the show is made clear in the final episode when Gi-hun confronts one of the creators of the games Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) where he outlines their purpose as both a source of amusement for the jaded ultra-rich and a test of human nature. The series positions childhood as a simpler time whose values have become inaccessible due to the confounding economic factors of the modern age.

Splatoon 3 is an online multiplayer 3^rd person shooter released on the Nintendo Switch in late 2022 and is the third iteration of the series since its initial release on the Wii U in 2015. The game is set in the “Mollusc Age” a time in the far future where the effects of anthropogenic climate change have both completely wiped out all human life and led the ruined cities to be inhabited mainly by anthropomorphic cephalopods called “Inklings” or “Octolings” who can transform from a humanoid form to a cephalopodic “swim” form at will. Multiplayer PvP matches in the game are framed as one part of Inkling society's leisure activities and the primary mode “Turf War” awards points to a team based on amount of the map covered in that team's ink rather than “splatting” the opposing players. To that effect, all weapons are based on some sort of liquid dispensing device from water pistols to paint brushes and mop buckets. This ink also serves an important mechanical purpose, as players are hurt by contact with enemy ink and can move quickly across horizontal and vertical surfaces in their own color while in swim form. This leads to a style of gameplay that ties the environment into the player's technological repertoire and is itself not entirely dissimilar to how the cephalopod itself functions within its own environment.

Putting the Squid in Squid Game

Squid Game's titular game does not derive its name from biology. At the beginning of episode one, the game and its rules are introduced by a narrator over a scene of children playing the game in a playground. The name is derived from the pattern of intersecting shapes drawn on the ground. The centrality of these symbols to the series’ iconography is hammered home in the series’ title sequence as the text is assembled from these symbols as this opening sequence fades to black from an aerial shot of the playground. These symbols are not however, a representation of any material connection to squids themselves, with this absence illustrating the series’ framing of the arbitrary link between its games and narrative.

The narrator introduces the game's terminology with hesitancy, with the very first line of the show being “My town called that game ‘the Squid Game’,” with a further terminological explanation prefaced with phrases like “No one knows why, but we called that person the secret inspector.” This emphasis on the particularity of these naming conventions is maintained in both English translations of the series and creates a sense of the show beginning in media res, the “that” of the subtitled translation or the emphasis on “my” in the dubbed version's opening line of “in my town” implies that there's an expectation that this game is supposed to be familiar to the narrator's interlocutor even if the particulars of his town's version requires some explanation. Whether the viewer is or isn’t familiar with the Korean children's game in question, the framing of the show positions its portrayal as a specific instance of something more abstract and universal than what is depicted.

The seriousness by which those involved in the games execute their role in a sometimes-comical system demonstrates that the focus of the series is indeed a universal human experience. One such instance is when the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) punishes a cadre of guards for trading secrets with a player in exchange for using his medical skills, as this violates the almost sacred “fairness” these games represent. In another scene, when Il-nam is asked why he participated in the games and why he spared Gi-hun's life during them, his answer and final words were that he had “fun” in a way that he hadn’t in many years. In this same scene Il-nam is very clear that it is money holding him back from accessing any enjoyment, telling Gi-hun “If you have too much money, no matter what you buy, eat, or drink, everything gets boring in the end,” something that's true for those with no money either. What Il-nam is seeking in his participation within the games is an attempt to recapture this lost sense of “fun” from before his entry into the symbolic world of adulthood and economics.

The series itself gives some hints on how to interpret this by citing its sources in the form of a copy of Jacques Lacan's The Four Fundamental Principles of Psychoanalysis (1973) lying on the desk in the Front Man's old apartment. Lacan here lays out that which causes people to desire what they desire, “It is the libido, qua pure life instinct… And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives” (Lacan, 1973, pp. 197–198). Slavoj Žižek summarizes the objet a as “an entity that has no substantial consistency, which in itself is ‘nothing but confusion’, and which acquires a definite shape only when looked at from a standpoint slanted by the subject's desires and fears—as such, as a mere ‘shadow of what it is not'” (Žižek, 2007, p. 69). Childhood play in the logic of Squid Game is precisely this objet a, with the absurdities of its fantastical premise only serving to strengthen its role as that which stands in for the enjoyment that is inaccessible to those trapped by modern economic constraints. The games allow Il-nam to experience joy again, or for the Front Man to leave his cramped apartment and old life behind.

The term “squid” in the titles of the games is arbitrary because the games themselves are arbitrary, as the series’ true interest is that part of subjective experience that lies at the cracks of our society's symbolic order; but the arbitrariness of their construction, this lack of “true consistency” leaves them open to be co-opted by any message in-particular. That Gi-hun was the victim of violent strike breaking tactics from a Korean car manufacturer doesn’t stop the series from being used to sell cars (Fan Reviews, 2023), nor does the crushing nature of the player's personal debts seem to interfere with a Malaysian bank offering Squid Game themed credit cards (Cheong Pui Yin, 2021). This gets at a problem with the psychoanalytic framing of the games as a window into the reality of human nature as the “Real” qua Lacan “is not an external thing that resists being caught in the symbolic network, but the fissure within the symbolic network itself” (Žižek, 2007, p. 72), therefore if we take these signifiers out of their symbolic network then they no longer point to the Real of their original narrative context.

That Squid Game has now existed for far longer outside of its original narrative setting has only made this seeming paradox between its stated values and its demonstrated ones more apparent. “To love Squid Game: The Challenge” writes one reviewer “means succumbing, at least a little bit, to media illiteracy” (Abad-Santos, 2023) and yet the series’ success suggests that it is a more suitable fit for this environment than its original narrative setting. Given the games are now living a life of their own, it is worth exploring the contrast between the series’ squid as that which is other with Splatoon 3's construction of a screen environment in which its digital squids and their human players are at home. In Squid Cinema from Hell, David H. Fleming and William Brown introduce the cephalopod as a way to think of things differently “That is, what humans find problematic may not be so for the cephalopod—and vice versa. Perhaps, therefore, cephalopodic thought can help us to overcome humanity's problems” (Fleming & Brown, 2020, p. 20). Screen media are the environments of Fleming and Brown's cephalopods, both as creatures whose bodies are themselves multicolored screens but as creatures in, on, and within screen media like Splatoon 3's Inklings.

This paper's framing of the tentacular in relation to Splatoon 3 is not entirely unrelated to the non-hierarchical structure of the “rhizomatic” as described in A Thousand Plateaus, in no small part because of its use as a critique of psychoanalytic frameworks of subjectivity and desire (Deleuze & Guattari, 2015). Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome has no clear beginning or end as—just like in botanical rhizomes like ginger or potatoes—any one position of the structure can become the basis for any further growth of the network, unlike what they term “arborescent” forms where the presence of a trunk orders the potential growth of new branches or roots, locking the structure in place. While Deleuze and Guattari admit that there is always a potential for localized arborescent forms of growth to emerge within a rhizomatic structure, ongoing research on the mycorrhizal nature of forests and their unseen fungal networks complicates the use of these biological terms when we are discussing critters whose life worlds are at the fringes of Deleuze and Guattari's terminology. Indeed, the growing popularity of fungal and rhizomatic life worlds may serve to obscure rather than clarify our discussions due to the contemporary nature of research in this area in both the humanities (Tsing, 2015) and biology (Karst & Hoeksema, 2023).

The words we use to describe life forms shapes how they are perceived and describing the slimy appendages of the cephalopod through the language of the sylvan rhizome obfuscates the particularities that distinguish these two worlds as much as it highlights their similarities to ours. A more productive term is Donna Haraway's conception of the “Tentacular… life lived along lines—and such a wealth of lines—not at points not in spheres” (Haraway, 2016, p. 32). These tentacular ones like jellyfish, squid, or even more seemingly rhizomatic critters like fungal mats or electronic networks, are joined by the grasping digits of humans and raccoons, or the “swelling roots” reaching out from the base of a tree trunk (Haraway, 2016, p. 32). The emphasis on the tentacularity of these specific beings rather than folding them into the framework of the rhizome interfaces with Haraway's concept of sympoiesis (making-with) “a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it” (Haraway, 2016, p. 58). The presence of the tentacular in the construction of the environment and characterization of Splatoon 3's world embeds a sympoietic collaboration with these tentacular ones within itself. By acknowledging the qualities of the natural world even if only for an esthetic or ludic function, we invite it in as a collaborator.

Expanding on Haraway's writing on game studies and the tentacular, Melissa Bianchi expands on a deficit of scholarship in this area regarding an understanding of “how becoming in games might offer alternative models of humans’ entanglements in social and biological ecologies” (Bianchi, 2017, p. 139). In describing Haraway's writing on sympoetic video game storytelling Bianchi articulates a tentacularity that “here, describes the processes of becoming-with and making kin… that results from connecting animal species and technologies in complex systems during both gameplay and the game's production” (Bianchi, 2017, p. 140); however, Bianchi goes on to note that the imperative on players to inhabit particular identities within the games they play demands a greater look at how tentacular games enable “players to not only think alternative kinships, but also enact making them” (Bianchi, 2017, p. 141). Bianchi in particular focuses on the interactions between networked human social interactions and the tentacularity of the hand, limb, and cephalopod in Splatoon's multiplayer gameplay.

Before proceeding some time should be spent on the definition of a cephalopod. It is a class of mollusc alongside snails, slugs, oysters, mussels, and clams and whose subcategories include the multiple varieties of octopus, squid, cuttlefish, and nautilus. To put the biological qualities of the mollusc into perspective, human beings are more evolutionarily connected to sea urchins than to these creatures and their alien qualities are readily apparent in their three hearts pumping blue blood around a slimy mass of tentacles. But perhaps the more surprising aspect of the cephalopod is their similarity to us despite this radically different starting position. An octopus’ eye is nearly identical to that of a human's, but beyond that they also exhibit a staggering degree of intellectual complexity ranging from tool use, to the formation of social structures ranging from schools of squid on the hunt, or large breeding gatherings of cuttlefish. But for many species of cephalopods’ lives these events are exceptions to the rule, as they are a predominantly solitary class of animals with short lifespans that makes the formation of social structures familiar to mammals like us difficult to see over long periods of time.

But perhaps one cephalopod is already a crowd (to paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari), and their solitary lives are a limitation of our own perspective rather than a reflection of the cephalopod umwelt. Unlike the vertebrate body plan, where the complex structures of the central nervous system are relayed through the peripheral tendrils that run through our bodies, Cephalopods have a radically decentralized nervous system, with the ‘brain’ being a small doughnut shaped organ that wraps around their oesophagus and the majority of the ‘thinking’ being done by clusters of nerves assigned to each of their arms. These arms can act independently of each other and control not only the overall motion of the arm but also the individual motion of all the suckers on it, which can grasp, feel, and taste what it encounters. Fleming and Brown describe this mode of existence as a contrast to the human relationship between waking and dreaming cognition, the cephalopod existing in a dreamlike state of reaction, punctuated by momentary flashes of executive function. Each arm is pursuing its own goals as part of a collective, with coordinated centralized activity being the exception not the norm. Fleming and Brown quote Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec in describing the creature like so: “What to us is wakeful consciousness is, to it, the subconscious, a fact that manifests itself phenomenally in its stance toward life: head down, belly up. Its critique of pure reason is our psychoanalysis” (Fleming & Brown, 2020, p. 22).

It is this capacity for the cephalopod to act as a gateway to a more decentralized form of cognition that Bianchi identifies as being foundational to a discussion of tentacular multiplayer games. Players in Splatoon are assigned into teams of four players without the overriding structure of voice chat that is common to many other multiplayer shooters. This isn’t to say that Splatoon is any less of a team game, but rather the players “become-with each other by simultaneously entering into assemblage with one another” (Bianchi, 2017, p. 143), their four separate avatars becoming the uncoordinated tentacles of the singular entity that is the team. Bianchi goes further to link the tentacularity of the gameplay to the esthetic and narrative connections the game has with Haraway's “Chthulucene,” with the shapeshifting bodies of the Inklings personifying a making-kin both between cephalopod and humanoid life, but also with the interrelation they have with their ink and the environmental effects it has on both the game and their bodies. Bianchi summarizes this succinctly when describing “the multiplicity of technologies and their uses in conjunction with the Inklings’ hybridity demonstrates the tentacular quality of Splatoon's characters—their experiences are enmeshed in a rich ecology where it is difficult to discern kid from squid from tech” (Bianchi, 2017, p. 146).

The distinction between Splatoon's close link to the squid itself and the geometric abstraction of Squid Game's Cephalopoda is indicative of this paper's framing of the two texts as one that views its games as a mediator for the subject's enjoyment, versus the former text's construction of games as that which brings the subject into being through the ecological systems around them. Given that Squid Game frames enjoyment as something that can only be achieved through the gaps in the structure of its material world, the fact that Splatoon makes this structure the heart of its production of desire and enjoyment place the two texts in stark contrast. If Squid Game bases its construction of society as some sort of framework that is placed on top of extant individuals, then Splatoon takes a more ecological approach, from the collective agency of its players, their Inklings and their environment, to its use of another tentacular being, the jellyfish to populate its urban settings in a way that reflects the role of jellies as a pelagic ecosystem engineer in the same way that their relatives the coral function in shallow seas (Breitburg et al., 2010). This contrast between individual desires and the desires created through a more explicitly ecologically derived subjectivity plays out not only in the foundational construction of each text's world as discussed here, but also can be seen in each game's construction of safety, inclusivity, and coziness.

From “Gay Little Fish” to “Happy Little Workers”

Ludic coziness is an intentionally nebulous term referring to an affective scale that “evokes the fantasy of safety, abundance, and softness” that can be applied to “a wide variety of both casual and core genres” as “a subversively humanizing design practice in a society built on monetizing base animal needs” (Meiners et al., 2017, p. 1). Typical examples of this type of game are Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, games set in the countryside with low-pressure gameplay goals like recreational fishing, or socializing with neighbors. Splatoon 3's urban hub areas and multiplayer stages are an unconventional setting for cozy esthetics, but qualities outlined by Meiners et al. (2017, p. 8) can be seen in its welcoming and slightly run down city of Splatsville. The coziness of Splatoon 3 becomes more apparent when one looks at the descriptions of cozy game mechanics, in particular how Meiners et al. describe them augmenting the frequently “dehumanizing” qualities of online gaming such as dealing primarily with strangers, a lack of a persistent identity, and low bandwidth communication (2017, p. 19).

Meiners et al. describe various strategies whereby game designers can include cozy elements to mitigate these problems, but in the case of Splatoon 3 one can see these three points being neatly addressed through the tentacular assemblage of teamwork described by Bianchi. The points outlined by Meiners et al. regarding online play presuppose a networked assemblage that focuses on each individual point on a network, but as Haraway reminds us, this is not how a tentacular online network should be viewed and indeed, the more decentralized online gameplay of Splatoon 3 serves to function similarly to how Meiners et al. seek to use coziness. Justyna Janik refers to games that function in this way as “bio-objects,” in that they assert an agency of the object over the more traditionally biological subject playing them; and by interacting with them “The game becomes our partner in play—the Other imposes its otherness over us” (Janik, 2021, p. 33). The other here is not only the biological other of the tentacular cephalopod, but also the other human players.

The Splatoon series is noted for the inclusive and progressive character of its world and player base. Within the game's internal social network “Splatnet” posts featuring players self-identifying as queer are omnipresent, a sentiment that plays out on channels outside the game as well (King, 2022). This progressive character can frequently take on a political tone with Splatnet having been a repository for information concerning the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 (Mee & Jackson, 2022), this discussion being aided by the robust design of Splatnet's posting restrictions that restricts the kind of antisocial behaviors seen on other social networks (Greszes, 2022). A grim indicator of this inclusive community can be seen in some scattered responses to the game from individuals going to substantive lengths to voice their displeasure at the perceived lack of spaces for straight men within the game; with one disgruntled “fan” buying shares in Nintendo to attend a shareholder meeting so that they could rant about the perceived preferential treatment of female identifying players in the game's clothing and hairstyles (Scullion, 2023). Further harassment campaigns were responsible for the cancellation of several live events for the game scheduled in Japan in late 2023 and early 2024 (DeAngelo, 2023).

These incidents speak to the perception of the game and its community as one that is inherently inclusive rather than one under siege like in the self-identified aims of the gamergate movement (Kidd & Turner, 2016). While not entirely reducible to it, the ludic tentacularity of Splatoon 3's community plays a major part of engineering the social foundation of the game's digital ecosystem. The omission of native voice chat in Splatoon offers more than just the kin-making properties mentioned by Bianchi as it also removes a significant tool for gatekeeping online spaces, with the expectation that players should speak to their teammates carrying with it the expectation that they should share the aspects of their identity that their voice elicits (Dewinter & Kocurek, 2017, p. 57). One response is to avoid using voice chat all together (Butt, 2019), but when paired with an assumption that such communication is essential for effective teamwork this translates the outright harassment of gatekeeping male players into a ludic friction that maintains an effect of exclusion. By removing the expectation that players need to use voice chat, coupled with the replacement of this mode of team coordination with one that is formally linked to a mode of ecological thinking, the tentacularity of the game's digital squids is entangled with this inclusive environment.

The inseparability of this inclusivity and the tentacular in the Splatoon series also maps onto the inseparability of the game's approach to coziness and the tentacular. In their overview of cozy games Agata Waszkiewicz and Martyna Bakun make a connection between inclusive and feminist gaming spaces and coziness through their emphasis on safety and increased player agency (2020, p. 231). The game's bottom-up approach to curating an online community is grounded in the materiality of both the game as cozy as well as a tentacular bio-object and serves as a foundation to keep the game's principles grounded when it moves towards less straightforwardly cozy topics. Splatoon 3 features some elements of not-quite- cozy urgency in its seasonal item distribution, but these items are purely esthetic, not locked behind any microtransactions and customization are strongly associated with the game's canvas as a mode for queer expression, with one reviewer's commentary on Splatoon 3's wardrobe selection saying that it was quite hard to not look like a “gay little fish” (Walsh, 2022) when putting together a look. Just as the mechanical properties of the game feed into its inclusivity, so too does this cozy and frequently queer esthetic feed back into policing the games tone when elements of gameplay stray from some of the more core cozy principles.

That Splatoon 3 is a competitive multiplayer shooter acts as a limit to this cozy feedback loop and certainly if one is playing the game primarily in those modes without engaging in the curation of outfits, trading card decks, or kitsch tchotchkes then a great deal of this cozy experience isn’t going to be as impactful. Waszkiewicz and Bakun acknowledge this tension within the Splatoon series (2020, p. 235), but offer a framework to describe games that feature elements that are either “dissonant” with straightforward coziness through upsetting content, or “situational” in the coziness functioning as a reprieve from elements of less cozy activities (2020, p. 233). In the case of Splatoon 3 while the game's featuring of frantic multiplayer action and consumerist iconography has been noted as potentially problematic in the context of its relatively young target audience (Mullen, 2020, p. 312), focusing on these elements alone ignores the multiple cozy and tentacular loops that work to reinforce these elements coherence to a central theme in spite of the directions they may find themselves being drawn towards. Just as each arm of the cephalopod is capable of action as an individual actor they are bound by their shared identity as part of the whole animal, even if at any moment there may not be any single cognitive force overriding the occasionally divergent desires of these constituent parts.

It is in the game mode “Salmon Run: Next Wave” that this cozy principle is most strongly tested in Splatoon 3, but in doing this it offers a stronger point of comparison with Squid Game. Much like other popular multiplayer games with laborious requirements for unlocking certain items, Splatoon 3 gives players a means to earn in game currencies far quicker than playing conventional matches; however, this is not done through microtransactions of real-world currency but rather by having their Inkling sign up for part time work at the “Grizzco” corporation. The CEO Mr Grizz instructs players to collect “Salmonid” eggs in a series of four player PvE matches and will pay you handsomely in company scrip (Grizzco points). Shifts rotate every 20 hours and while a player can play as many rounds as they like, they are only substantially rewarded for the first 1200 Grizzco points they earn. Even though there is no requirement to work for Grizzco or even to work any number of shifts, the game's economy rewards players who clock in and out regularly with a more readily available supply of in-game items than if they were to only play the other game modes.

Salmon Run thus forces a temporality of labor time onto the otherwise mostly cozy world of Splatoon 3 through its schedules and harsh time restraints overriding the more player agency-focused structure of the game's world overall. The game design of Salmon Run functions as a bio-object within the tentacular assemblage that builds the agency of any given Inkling, with the insertion of this non-human agent on an “equal” footing as the player reshaping their own desires as part of this system (Janik, 2021, p. 25). Rather than the egalitarian collective of multiple Inklings playing a game, the corporate agency of Grizzco at times dominates the agency of the players in creating a distinct feeling of Salmon Run as time spent laboring rather than playing. That Grizzco is an unsavory employer is not only reinforced through the mechanical integration of Salmon Run in the game's economy, but also through the corporate language used throughout the mode as well as in fan-made paratexts like art that features the normally peppy Inklings being run down after a shift in the grimy post-industrial tidelands of the Salmonids (iwa to mushi, 2022).

Rather than viewing this as another non-cozy element of the game's situational coziness, Waszkiewicz and Bakun's category of dissonant coziness offers a way to read the esthetic and mechanical properties of Salmon Run as yet another part of the game's cozy structure. Salmon Run matches have their own soundtrack separate from the diegetic pop music that plays in other parts of the game and all the player's personalization options from their weapons to their clothes are replaced with company issued gear and uniforms that—while certainly looking OHS approved—obscure almost all the identifying traits of a player. The tentacularity that Bianchi identifies in the game's usual pre-planned tryptic of equipped weapons (Bianchi, 2017, p. 146) is here replaced with a semi-random allocation of equipment that at times seem antagonistic on the part of the corporation. Antagonism certainly is a hallmark of playing a game of Salmon Run, the gameplay being markedly more stressful, chaotic, and grim than the other modes with their sunny inner-city locales replaced with crepuscular and grimy abandoned industrial sites. Salmon Run is certainly a fun and engaging part of the game, but the qualities that make it so don’t neatly conform to the qualities that a fan of Splatoon 3's leisure time coded activities might necessarily enjoy. And yet it remains an important element of the in-game economy and world itself with Mr Grizz being the principal antagonist of Splatoon 3's single player narrative.

Players now are presented with a choice between the relaxed gameplay that is more closely integrated with the game's wider system of incentives but pays poorly, or working according to the schedule of their nefarious employer to gain access to the joys of consumer goods. There is a balancing act here between the cold economic incentives represented by the corporate branding of Grizzco and the cozy and inclusive esthetic of the game's diegetic and non-diegetic society that can be seen in surface level readings of players’ interactions with the company. From “Happy Little Workers” the discordant electronic jingle that plays in the Grizzco lobby, to the comically corporate language that frames everything from descriptions of game mechanics to Mr Grizz's villainous monologue, the disingenuity of Grizzco and its promises to the player regarding safe working conditions and ethical corporate governance are obviously laughable. But that isn’t to say that they are openly dishonest, as at no point does Grizzco not follow through on its promise of financial remuneration and its necessity within the game's economy brings this dissonance outside the walls of the Grizzco building and into Splatsville proper.

This is not the only site of dissonant coziness in the Splatoon series as the game frequently references the nature of its world as one that was previously wiped out by anthropogenic climate change. In Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion (2018) the character revealed to be the primary villain, Commander Tartar is a sentient computer program built by a human professor with the aim of ensuring that whatever species emerges in the future doesn’t repeat the mistakes that lead to human extinction. Commander Tartar finds the Inklings and Octolings lacking in this regard based on their obsession with consumer goods, fashion, and needless conflict and decides to wipe the slate clean on earth again. Commander Tartar is hardly alone in this assessment, with the game's own descriptions of Inkling society commenting on its obsession with appearances and violence, with large scale conflict between Inklings and Octolings and associated racial tensions persisting to the present day. The shallowness of Inkling society and the dissonance of Grizzco are nonetheless still part of this cozy system as the identity of the player-Inkling assemblage itself is ecologically entangled with these cozy systems that promote inclusivity and safety and thereby provide necessary context from which these textual elements can be viewed.

Salmon Run's union of iconography, gameplay, and cozy player agency puts into stark contrast the distinction between Squid Game's use of the games as a signifier of an abstracted message and Splatoon 3's use of games as the message themselves. This makes the iconography of Splatoon 3 far less culturally virulent as they cannot spread as meme templates or credit card promotions, but it also prevents the separation of these elements from their symbolic context as seen with Squid Game. With the proliferation of recreations like The Challenge, that original context is increasingly becoming secondary to the life of these games as games and therefore as signifiers without the social consciousness of their original narrative environment. In Splatoon 3 coziness is not just a set of signifiers but is more importantly a means of anchoring the game and its paratexts to a cozy affect. For all of Squid Game's emphasis on social consciousness and its cutesy childlike esthetic, the ability of its constituent parts to become so easily untethered from this moral foundation demonstrates the absence of this more structural coziness. They may look cozy, but it is more important in this context to feel cozy.

One can see this most clearly in how both games approach safety. One of the key questions prompted by any attempt to play Squid Game with real participants is whether the players in The Challenge will suffer the same mortality rate as the characters in the series. Even as the show dispenses with the intentional murder of participants, reports on the poor conditions and frequent injuries among contestants leaked from the production several months prior to its premiere (Abad-Santos, 2023). Safety in The Challenge is defined by the removal of explicit lethality, but this is a far cry from Waszkiewicz and Bakun's understanding of the term as offering something more substantial than mere physical safety (2020, p. 231), and even that claim is dubious for those taking part in The Challenge. Even as Salmon Run pushes players to work in conditions that evoke an esthetic of un-safety and according to temporalities that deviate from many of the principles of coziness, there is no understanding of subjective agency in the world of Splatoon 3 that isn’t networked with the overriding cozy ecology of the game as a whole.

One simply cannot remove the games of Splatoon 3 from their context in the way that one can with Squid Game and it is this modularity that helps to demonstrate the ideological link between the series and the cultural forces it is attempting to critique. This distinction could be seen as a product of the distinction between games and non-game media, but given the transmedia context both of Squid Game's initial reception and its afterlife beyond that original narrative, the series has produced far more content as a networked transmedia text than one bound by the symbolic order of its original narrative context. This can be attributed both to the hazy line between these two forms of media in the 21st century (Consalvo, 2009) as well as the distinction between the kinds of performance seen in reality shows and by those playing electronic games (Tavinor, 2017, p. 27). The argument that those who ignore the supposed anti-capitalist sentiment of Squid Game are demonstrating a kind of “media illiteracy” (Abad-Santos, 2023) is one that ignores the influence of this far more substantial context in which the series operates.

This is the product of the series’ insistence on the importance of an individualistic agency in determining its moral foundation and it is this individualism, coupled with the iconography of the games existing as floating signifiers that makes this text so amenable to capture by texts that glorify capitalist meritocracy. The Front Man's decision to execute the player who traded their medical skills for inside knowledge from the guards is placed in contrast with his decision not to punish another player for using their skills as a glassblower to gain an advantage in a later challenge. Both skills were acquired through both men's engagement with the workforce, but one was exercised through further integration with an emerging market within the games, whereas the other was internalized as a personal skillset and thus part of that individual's basic makeup. Just as the glassblower is able to be taken from his original context and function in a new one, so too can the different elements of Squid Game function in the new context of The Challenge or car ads. Even though the series frames the camaraderie of its protagonists in a positive light, they are still framed as individuals first and members of a collective second. This might not be a problem for the message of the series within the symbolic confines of its narrative context, but it is when the games are used to structure an actual collective in the form of a real game for real people to play.

Conclusion

When one engages with Salmon Run either by playing it, avoiding it in game, or commenting on it paratextually, the context of it being an imposition of labor time in an otherwise cozy space is enmeshed with the tentacular agency of playing as an Inkling. This is an example of how thinking about the construction of the relationship between individuals and texts benefits from thinking about them as ecologically enmeshed as a means of grappling with the shape of digitally networked media. In Félix Guattari's The Three Ecologies he describes an experiment where an octopus taken from a polluted harbor was perfectly healthy in a tank of such water but died upon being placed in a tank of clean “natural” sea water (Guattari, 2000, p. 42). Guattari's point is in service of a broader understanding of ecology as not just a study of the natural world as somehow alien from the influence of the human and artificial, nor even an appeal to simply consider the two as an interrelated assemblage, but that the study of human society and the human itself is one that functions ecologically. That Guattari uses the octopus to demonstrate this speaks to the remarkable suitability of the cephalopod for this mode of ecological thinking. The balance of their alien and familiar characteristics, their intelligence, and their tentacular identity makes them not only a guide for thinking through concepts that directly evoke their slimy appendages but as Fleming and Brown argue, can serve as the defining lifeform for our tentacular age (Fleming & Brown, 2020, p. 6)

For those of us who have known no life before the advent of home computing, video games, and increasingly the always connected internet, the milieu of consumerism, manufactured nostalgia and omnipresent branding are the polluted harbor water, and we are the octopus. This can be seen in deeply held nostalgia for what were once cynical marketing gimmicks, to the very literal intermingling of plastic with the soft tissues of our bodies. This is not a call for moral condemnation or valorization of this situation but more so an invitation to acknowledge it as a starting assumption when attempting to engage in popular social critique. Squid Game promises its protagonists a clean break from the conditions that produced them and follows through with that in the policing of its rules like in the case of the glassblower, or in Il-nam's genuine connection to a sense of happiness through the temporary abandonment of his old life in favor of playing the game himself. When thinking ecologically the idea of a clean break from the context in which one lives, to move something “outside” the environment, is laughable on face value and as such this theoretical framework places productive limits on what can even be depicted.

The Inklings in Splatoon 3 are also Guattari's octopus and when playing Salmon Run the player is never distanced from its dissonant construction in the same way that players of The Challenge are from the symbolic narrative context of the original series. The squid in Squid Game as something abstract that focuses the audience's attention on something deeper, doesn’t work without the symbolic context of the original narrative that underpins that depth. But this too ignores a lesson from squids, as to understand depth is an articulation of thought that carries with it ideas of standing and of being objectively over or under something; both concepts that cephalopods lack (Fleming & Brown, 2020, p. 17). Likewise, this paper doesn’t focus on cephalopods as a universal model, nor does it claim that a game about cartoon squids will play a pivotal role in 21st century politics; rather, it serves as a clear way to demonstrate the shortcomings of Squid Game in recognizing the ecological structure of the media environment it finds itself within. Playing Salmon Run and grappling with the explicit agential presence of the bio-object of Mr Grizz's industrial empire keeps these ideas embedded within the game in a way that Squid Game's modular iconography cannot match. That it can do so without succumbing to overt didacticism or moral condemnation of those who derive joy from their consumerist surroundings makes it a text deserving of future scholarly attention in those areas and on its own terms as the real Squid Game.