Survivor

I’m glad I was home on Thursday evening, August 24, 2000 because I got caught up in the publicity surrounding the final "Survivor" episode and tuned it in as something I could listen to while doing the dishes. It was the first of the series that I had watched (it seems there were a lot of people who only watched the final) but I remembered hearing of the show in summer previews and now I wanted to catch the final because of all the buzz surrounding it.

I quickly figured out the way the Survivor game worked. The vote (tribal council) was the central element. There you and all your fellow survivors voted for who among you should be eliminated from the game. The other twist was that one person could earn immunity by winning a skill-testing contest and not be subject to elimination by vote of the tribal council.

The final vote that determined which of the two final survivors took the million dollars and which had to settle for $100,000 was conducted among the seven latest-eliminated contestants. This vote allowed the two finalists to make pleas to their peers for their support and also allowed those that were voting to have words (publicly) with the finalists.

Of course, watching the game, I found myself thinking about what I would do in the place of those on camera, figuring out the various strategies being utilized and wondering just how close of a metaphor for life "Survivor" was. Compared to "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire", the other game show which has captured the public’s imagination in the last year, Survivor is vastly more like life. Consider that in WWTBM the rewarded skill is knowledge of trivia and, above all, trivia involving pop culture. To get in the "hot seat" you have to compete with other contestants but from that point on the game has no great social element, it is largely up to the individual whether they succeed or fail. Survivor styled itself, with its tribal councils, fire and stone, as a primitive form of life.

The idea was to start with 16 average people, chosen to be representative of the diversity of the American culture, and to place them within the context of a greatly simpified culture with well-defined rules and see which traits ended up being the most important in that culture. The Survivor culture contained within it hundreds of similarities to real life. Even the injustices created by the rules, such as the criteria chosen for the immunity battles, are not greatly different than the many injustices that discriminate between people in our world. I know that the game was a strong metaphor for life because I constantly found myself pondering how I, as a Christian, would play the game.

As a Christian, I love playing games. Risk, Monopoly, President, Taboo, chess - you name it, I probably love nothing more than playing games, especially games that involve a number of people. Interestingly enough the only games that I don’t care to play are either the ones that are too simple, like Tic-Tac-Toe or chess against a much weaker competitor or complicated to the point where they start sounding like Calvinball in their complexity. (I only played Cribbage once and being that I was learning the various rules while we played it seemed a heck of a lot like Calvinball.) I’ve been bred competitive - you only have to watch my mom and dad play Scrabble to see that I get that nature from both sides. It’s important for me to know the rules, as once I know the rules I will play in whichever way seems most likely for me to come out winner within those rules. I’m no respecter of persons and if my strategy stomps on my wife’s toes, well, "Hey honey, it’s only a game". Again, I would say that as a Christian, I love playing games, but in writing this I see that my way of playing games, for the most part, has little to do with the fact that I am also a Christian.

So let’s say that a Canadian network (Global) decides to cash in on the popularity of Survivor and runs their own show for Canadians contestants, only somewhere in the Northwest Territories instead of a tropical island. In order that contestants can supplement their diets with berries they film the game show in August. Since August is my holiday shut-down period but Carol is working, she consents to let me spend my holidays as a contestant on the aptly named "Hoser" game show.

(All that is just to create a situation anchored in reality so that as I continue to discuss how I would play a survivor-type game, I’m not just talking hypothetically and judging some Americans on a show that I can never in reality participate in.)

As a Christian, I have much more than just a code of ethics to stick to in the game. As a Christian I have a unique slant on reality that so happens to line up with God’s view of reality. One way of summing up that reality would be to use these famous poetic words of C. T. Studd:

"Only one life, it'll soon be past, only what's done for Christ will last."