French 'Game of Death' Shocks Audience, Contestants

PARIS, March 17, 2010 — -- The French contestants thought they were taking part in yet another traditional television quiz show, this one called "Zone Xtrême" [Extreme Zone].

The game consisted of one participant asking questions to another player locked up inside a booth, an electrode hooked up to the booth player's wrist. Any wrong answer meant the first player must push a lever that subjected the player inside the booth to electrical charges of up to 460 volts as punishment.

The audience members, clapping their hands when the contestant inside the booth answered wrong, chanted, "Punishment! Punishment! Punishment!"

Then came the cries for mercy.

"Oh no, I'm sorry, I can't, I'm sorry," one young female contestant said.

"Come on! Go on!" the show host urged.

"No, I can't, I'm sorry, this has become unbearable," the contestant continued. She eventually quit the game, but not before pushing the lever once more, and she left the set crying.

But her cries may not have been warranted. The game show is fake, the player inside the booth is an actor and the host is in on the scam.

In fact, everything is fake, including the electric shocks, but the contestants asking the questions and the crowd don't know that.

They are participating in a documentary that doubles as a scientific experiment. The goal is to show the power television holds over people and whether it can push people to outrageous lengths.

"We were amazed to see that 81 percent of the candidates gave the maximum discharge of 460 volts to the actor inside the capsule who was simulating pain," Thomas Bornot, co-director of the documentary, told ABC News.

Only 16 people among the show's 80 recruits backed out.

"We suspected that television had power, but we never set up, scientifically speaking, a system that allowed us to really measure this power," Bornot explained. "What we saw here was that a show host could order the average contestant to give potentially deadly electrical shocks to another individual."

The documentary, ominously titled "The Game of Death," will be broadcast tonight in primetime on state-run France 2 TV.

The Power of Television

The experiment is modeled on the Milgram experiment, a 1960s study led by the late American psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale University that decrypted the mechanisms of obedience to authority figures.

At the time, 62.5 percent of the study's participants gave the maximum (but again fake) electrical discharge of 450 volts to a guinea pig. All of them tried to stop, but less than a third of them disobeyed when given an order by the scientist to continue.

Bornot said the "The Game of Death" was meant to examine some of the extreme measures seen on modern reality TV.

"It is not a pamphlet against television in general," Bornot said. "But we thought we had to pull the alarm as we came to realize that some reality TV shows are going further and further today by staging humiliation and violence. These shows have a rather strong ascendancy over the audience, most of the time the young audience.

"What we demonstrate in the documentary is the power television has."

After the show, participants in the experiment, most of them in shock, were debriefed by a team of psychologists.

"A great majority, about 60 percent of the candidates, realized that when facing a legitimate authority and when there is an abuse of power, they behaved differently. They become obedient, malleable," Bornot explained.

"There is an acknowledgment of this weakness, of this abuse of power. This is what we show in the documentary, this system of ascendancy which is hitting them. It's very difficult to disobey."