jean-Léon Beauvois

The Game of Death is a documentary co-produced by France Télévisions and Radio Television Switzerland1 in 2009 and staging a fake game show (The Xtreme Zone) during which a candidate must send electric shocks increasingly strong candidate to another until voltages that can cause death. The staging reproduces the Milgram experiment carried out initially in the United States in 1960 to study the influence of authority on obedience: electric shocks are fictitious, an actor pretending to suffer, and objective is to test the ability to disobey the candidate who inflicts this treatment and who is not aware of the experiment. The notable difference with the original experience is that scientific authority is replaced by a television presenter, Tania Young.