You have to watch The Devil’s Plan on Netflix. It’s a Korean reality TV series where 10 contestants face off playing games of strategy and intelligence. It’s like Physical 100, but for smart people.
What I found particularly interesting was that it wasn’t just a game show, but there were several metagames being played throughout the series. Cedric Chin from Commoncog defines a metagame as the game above the game. For example, someone playing Magic the Gathering plays the game at two levels: 1) Battling their opponent, 2) Acquiring and adapting whenever the publisher releases new cards. Someone who attains true expertise in any arena (e.g. chess, marketing, sports, etc) has not only mastered the fundamental skills of that domain, but is often playing the metagame.
What’s interesting about The Devil’s Plan was that there was not just one metagame, but several. Here, I’ll share four levels of metagames in the series, and what they taught me about business and life (Spoilers ahead!) They are:
- Level 1: The skill level of the players
- Level 2: The players’ alliances & philosophies
- Level 3: The balance between cooperating and competing
- Level 4: The underlying motivations of playing in the first place
Level 1: The Skill Level of the Players
Ramit Sethi from IWT once wrote that there’s a game being played around you. In any given field, the top performers are often so far ahead that they’re not just better, they’re playing an entirely different game. In The Devil’s Plan, I’d consider 6 out of the 12 players (Seok-Jin, Dong-Jae, Guillaume, See-Won, ORBIT and Dong-Joo) as “top performers”. In each game, they were the ones who were strategizing, scheming, and calculating, while everyone else simply waited to be told what to do.
However, in real life, the distribution is much more skewed. In business, the top 10% of players are often so far ahead of everyone else that they bring in 90% of the value. They pretty much carry the entire organisation, and they get rewarded disproportionately: They earn 10x the bonuses, get hired into roles that aren’t advertised, and are invited to all the secret parties. We can either resent them for it, or we can try to learn how to get better at the game from them.
And how do they get better? By practicing all the time.
In the final episode, the eliminated contestants returned to watch Seok-Jin face off against ORBIT in a game of Nine Men’s Morris. While most of the eliminated players simply watched, some of the smart players like See-Won and Guillaume took out a game board and played alongside the finalists. I thought that was so telling that they would take the effort to bust their brains during a period of leisure, because they simply wanted to practice and get better, for its own sake.
Top performers are always practicing. They don’t see life as work vs. play, but as one long, neverending quest of becoming better. In business, you can tell who are the ones who are “practicing” by those who like to talk shop. They’re always analysing their environment, their competitors, and their strategies, even at lunch. But this is rare. In many of my previous roles, my colleagues would roll their eyes whenever someone tried to talk seriously about work during lunch hour.
But top performers will often find each other, build communities, and help each other get better.
Level 2: The Players’ Alliances & Philosophies
The second metagame of The Devil’s Plan goes beyond the actual games, and moves into the domain of alliances. It was clear that alliances played an outsized role on the players’ chances of success. The weaker players were able to leverage their alliance to eliminate stronger ones early on in the game.
However, what I found interesting was that strong players like Seok-Jin, See-Won, Dong-Jae, and Guillaume had trouble mastering this alliances metagame at the start, resulting in Guillaume and Dong-Jae being eliminated early on. This caused the remaining players Seok-Jin and See-Won to accuse ORBIT of messing up the game dynamic, and pivot to a more “purist” philosophy of playing. They focused on playing based on their own merits, but by doing this arguably put themselves at a higher risk of being eliminated. Perhaps they didn’t have a choice, but IMO this was a suboptimal way of playing.
Cedric Chin from Commoncog wrote another excellent essay called Are You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win? which talks about how many people are focused on playing the game the “right” way, instead of playing to win. I see this happening in my own career, when I sometimes spend too much time polishing my slides or coming up with better insights, instead of spending more time figuring out what my client actually wants.
Sometimes, playing the game skillfully isn’t necessarily one that gives you the best chances of winning.
Level 3: The Balance Between Cooperating and Competing
The third metagame in The Devil’s Plan involves mental models, and the balance between cooperating and competing.
ORBIT seemed obsessed with this metagame from the start, openly declaring that he wanted all 12 players to cooperate and get to the finals together. Many people found this puzzling (There’s a whole Reddit discussion on it). If the prize money could only go to one person, what’s the incentive for everyone to cooperate?
My guess is that ORBIT presumed that this was a Hunger Games-type of situation where the players might have been incentivized to compete, but everyone would be better off by cooperating. Sort of a more complex version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This was apparently the optimal way to play in another similar Korean reality show called The Genius (also produced by The Devil’s Plan director Jung Jong-yeon).
I haven’t seen The Genius, but I’m guessing that ORBIT’s mental model was what drove him to help all the weaker players. Of course, this assumption turned out to be false, since helping all the weak players get through the game didn’t really help anyone increase the prize money.
This is the downside of experience. Experienced players often develop sophisticated mental models of different situations, and often apply them as shortcuts to deal with a new experience. This isn’t a bad approach: 99% of the time, it helps them work through new problems more efficiently. The trouble comes when the situation doesn’t match their mental model.
This is something I need to constantly remind myself of in my work. Whenever I’m faced with a new stakeholder, a challenging question, or a complex project, my first instinct is to search for an existing mental model to apply it to (e.g. “oh, this is a typical politically-motivated stakeholder” or “oh, this project should be simple enough for manage with weekly check-ins”), instead of reasoning it through from first principles.
There’s always a danger of applying mental models too early on in the process, as ORBIT found out towards the end of the game.
Level 4: What game are you REALLY playing?
The fourth metagame talks about the contestants’ underlying motivations for playing the game in the first place, beyond the prize money.
In Episode 10, Seok-Jin and See-Won faced a fascinating dilemma. Throughout the series, they uncovered “the game within the game”: A hidden game that could only be accessed in prison. If they chose to play, they would either gain 10 Pieces if they won (the game’s currency), or get eliminated on the spot if they lost.
Now, think about what you would do if you were in their shoes. Would you choose to play? What if this was real life? For example, if you were given a chance to invest in a new stock that would either 10X your wealth or bankrupt you, would you do it? The more I reflected on this, the more I realised that I would not do this in real life, but I would totally do it in the context of a game. Why?
Because the real objective of The Devil’s Plan isn’t the prize money.
Think about it: Seok-Jin, See-Won, and most of the other contestants were already Korean celebrities. Even the full prize pool of 500M won ($500K SGD) wouldn’t have made much of a difference to their lives. Instead, the REAL goal was to strengthen their popularity among a global Netflix audience.
From that perspective, giving up on the hidden game would have been perceived as an act of cowardice, while playing and losing in a blaze of glory would have been heroic. It didn’t matter whether they won or lost, but it matters that they tried.
(And as a side note, to look super cool while doing it. In the words of one of my friends, Seok-Jin had “main character vibes” throughout the season. One can only imagine the number of movie and TV deals he must be inundated with now)
In business and in life, it’s important to stay focused on your underlying motivation for playing the game you’re playing. Many times, I get so stressed over the day-to-day minutia of clearing my to-do list that I forget why I’m doing this job in the first place. For some people, it’s their family. For some, it might be to validate their place in the world. For others, it’s ambition and money. But even those motivations can dug into further. For example, WHY do you want more money? Is it security? Freedom? Self-worth?
Some REALLY interesting findings come up when you take the time to truly examine your metagame and your motivations. In my personal opinion, there’s a chance that we might all converge to the same conclusion, but that’s for another blogpost.
