This is probably going to end up part ramble, part essay, so be warned.

Gameshows are a staple of WAM fiction. You might even call them a cliché, honestly. It's something I've thought about quite a lot over the years, and I thought it might be fun to share some of my thoughts and ask you for yours.

I think there are three main reasons they're so popular. The first is obvious: many people discovered their kink via some kind of gameshow.

It leads nicely into the second point: gameshows are a great excuse/reason/setup. Unless you're writing about people getting messy in private, you don't have a lot of options for keeping mess realistic.Gameshows are the perfect answer to this problem, because you can't get much more realistic than a thing that, y'know, actually exists already. But you can also go into more heightened realism type stuff from there, too. You can end up with some pretty out-there stuff but still maintain a hint of plausability because "it's a gameshow."

Thirdly, gameshows naturally give you a conflict that some WAM stories lack. I talked about this in another thread - the difference between stories and scenes. But in a gameshow, someone is going to win, someone is going to lose: boom, there's your conflict baked into the format.

So, yeah, thanks for coming to my TED Talk, I guess. What do you think? I find typical gameshow stories a bit trite now, but I've been reading and writing them for years. I do enjoy some of the freakier ones, because as a humiliation-freak myself, adding an audience to the weirdness definitely adds to the humiliation.

This is *exactly* the kind of thread I'd hoped for on the writing forum. This kind of stuff, the psychology of WAM stories I've discussed with many WAM friends in private, so thank you for starting this thread!

I think for me it's as you say - our first contact with WAM is likely as a punishment for losing a game. The thrill, either of seeing someone desirable or imagining yourself in that situation fuses the two things together, mess and humiliation as a consequence. Perhaps as Brits, on TV being gunged always seems to have been treated more as a punishment or ritual humiliation, whereas on Nickelodeon in the US it seemed a bit more playful so a view from more countries would be really interesting.

It's a great raiser of tension - it's *stakes*
"I don't want to get gunged"

Which is why a lot of stories often seem to have the consequences not fully understood until it's too late
"you're going to have to strip and get gunged, you signed the waiver" "But I didn't read it/I didn't think it meant it"

Doing it on a gameshow on TV gives a) more risk, b) a greater audience to witness the humiliation and also c) means you can have people nudged into things (depending on how fast and loose it's playing with consent) they wouldn't normally agree to due to the eyes on them.and not wanting to lose greater face by not "being a good sport" and d) you can go bigger on TV - it's believable to have hundreds of gallons of gunge, whole teams emptying stuff into buckets, making pies... outlandish contraptions, it just again feels easier to suspend disbelief.

I think we can also accept TV being a bit more sleazy. If it was a random man bringing girls to his flat to gunge them (with dubious consent) - I think that would hit very differently than it happening on a TV show.

As an aside, I have played with the idea for a while of trying to write a more "realistic" gameshow premise, where the consequences for losing are much more hard hitting than just some mess and temporary humiliation - the idea I had was a bride losing and having her dress, her real wedding dress for her upcoming wedding, ruined beyond repair at a loss of thousands. And of course you'd need to set that up by making you care about the bride, her groom, her family. I fear it would please neither the wankers who want quick and plentiful mess and would be too weird for those who would appreciate the characterisation and plotting

Good point about the permission/consent aspect. It's a little bit dodgy at times, but at least in a gameshow you can handwave it a bit with "well you signed up for this." I also agree that's it's a great way to make it okay internally, too. Leaning on the peer pressure, not wanting to be a bad sport etc.

This also makes me think someone should do a stiff upper lip British character who "mustn't grumble" their way through an absolutely appalling amount of public humiliation.

Yeah, I think both of you are getting at the sort of quasi-dominance/submission dynamics that operate in game shows. There's competition between the contestants, and that's definitely a driver of narrative tension and dramatic stakes in and of itself. But it also creates a situation where peers (of a sort) are made to experiment with being in positions of power or submission relative to one another in a weirdly bodily way, which to me is resonant with sex.

The same thing is true of the host or emcee or what-have-you. A game-show-like setting is one of the few plausible, public, real-world situations in which you can want to please someone in a position of authority, have that person encourage you to humiliate yourself and then praise you for doing so, and not end up, like, traumatized as a result. Again, this sets up a real dom/sub kind of dynamic that's hard to justify or replicate in other settings.

(Just to give a contrast, a lot of people have gone with the idea of having these power dynamics play out in a job setting, but that requires a whole different level of suspension of disbelief. Especially with regards to consent and stuff, as you two have been saying, something like a work spat is very, very different from a game show.)

The other main thing that I'd add to what you two have already said is the disinhibition that goes along with entering any kind of game. Games very often allow us to discard our inhibitions - think of the physical violence in many sports, the purposeful intoxication of drinking games, or the sense of financial wantonness that comes along with gambling. So when you put people in a situation where they're naturally disinhibited, they feel a nervous excitement, they're rewarded for experimenting with uncertain and/or fluid power dynamics, and then they experience weird bodily sensations that are both kinda pleasant and kinda unpleasant... I mean, that kinda sounds like sex.

As an author I think another reason for using a gameshow style story is that whilst the format is somewhat predictable (e.g. introductions, round one questions, round two challenge, more questions, final and big forfeit), it can be fun to play around with this structure and it does still allow for creativity in the design of the challenges and forfeits.

I'd say that gameshow stories are popular for good reason. As others have mentioned, they help provide the story with structure and stakes, give an excuse for different characters to interact, not to mention providing a semi-legitimate reason for them to be at risk of getting messy in the first place.

The format also allows for all kinds of creativity in the games and challenges that can be played. You could make the story almost any length and could feature any number of players - anything from a single player challenge to a 'Takeshi's Castle' style mass event. Similarly, you could have individuals competing against each other, have them pitted against the house, playing as teams, bring in the host or other recurring characters as helpers or antagonists, or basically whatever you want.

Another advantage of the gameshow format is that it can easily be tailored to each author's preferences. For example, for those of us who aren't into the humiliation aspect, a messy gameshow could just as easily have its forfeits kept light-hearted and playful if that's what the author wants. Two writers could take a pre-defined gameshow and produce two very different stories (which might actually be an idea for a future writing prompt).

I think stakes, conflict and believability (to an extent as there's many I've read where it's so far beyond believable what's allowed) is the main reasons.

But I also think there's a couple of other important ones.

If someone is unsure of where to begin writing, it gives them easy rails to build off as they don't have to think of a show, they can copy one that exists

I actually quite like making up gameshow concepts (particularly if their is a degree of audience interactivity) but if you don't really care about that, it lets you bypass that part and go straight into writing about the gunging you actually care about. Plus readers are on board and understand without too much exposition. Plus if the gameshow actually exists there are clips you can use for reference or how people react.

The other reason for Gameshows I think bares mentioning, Celebrities. It ties into the believability aspect but celebrities go on shows and get gunged so if there's someone in particular you fancy, it's an easier premise to have them appearing on a gameshow where they might get gunged.

As someone whose WAM fiction is dominated by Gameshows, I think this is fascinating.

For me, I would say that the key thing is that it is (for me, at least) extremely difficult to conceive of varied scenarios in which gungings can be had in everyday life in a vaguely believable way. Of course, my gameshows push beyond what is realistic, but the initial conceit is at least there. I've tried to write things in a variety of other situations and I struggle with believability. I like my characters to be relatable and authentic and when, say, they are getting a monumental naked gunging because they made a mistake at work, it's hard to keep it grounded. Others can manage it, which is great, but I freely admit to finding it tricky.

Also, I think the best gameshow fiction can really experiment with form and character. I can have a dozen girls gunged in a single show, perhaps playing five or six games, with all sorts of contraptions. We can put the nervous against the enthusiastic and the furious against the humiliated all in the same tale, and see what resonates.

One last thing is that I actually really like the challenge of writing games of chance. I've said before that every game of chance in my stories is exactly that: if it's a dice roll or roulette spin or coin toss, that happens in real life, and the story moves on accordingly. For example in the current series of The Gunge Show, contestants spin a roulette wheel to win a million pounds (enhanced reality!!) I myself have no idea which, if any, will win. If it happens in episode one, what do I do with the rest of the series? If a character I find harder to write loses a coin flip and gets gunged instead of an easier one to write, that's a sudden great writing exercise there.

Could I please just ask everyone to calm down and consider their behaviour?

We're dangerously close to an interesting, sincere, and polite intellectual conversation on UMD here...

There's an interesting recurring theme in a lot of these responses - the overlap with fan fiction. Hear me out.

I used to have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about fan fiction. I'd never read any but I have always been quite judgemental. Then I watched a video where someone was talking about how it makes for a great starting point for new or inexperienced writers. In fan fiction, this is because everybody already knows the characters, so you just add your own elements and write the plot that you want. It relives a lot of the pressure in coming up with characters, motivations, etc.

A lot of people in this thread are effectively saying the same thing about gameshows. You can just do a straight up copy/paste of INSERT SHOW NAME HERE with your own characters if you want, sure. But you can also build from there into whatever kind of adult (or not) thing that you want. It's a shared, widely known foundation, and what you put on top of that foundation is what matters. Maybe you like coming up with specific games as someone mentioned above. Maybe you just want a specific person to get the gunge. Maybe you want it to be more like fear factor and get really unpleasant. Whatever. You can kind of plug and play the parts you like.

Oh, absolutely. This goes right back to the other conversation we were having about originality. A big part of being a writer is learning how to choose the right tropes for your story and then weave your original stuff into those tropes.

The game show thing has big, bright tropes, and that does make it a comfortable starting place. And there's nothing wrong with that - not everything has to be some kind of A24 awards-bait thing. Writing with big, bright tropes can be a fun thing to do on its own, it can be a necessary part of telling the type of story you have in mind, and it can be a way of getting more comfortable with storytelling so that you can build the skills to eventually choose tropes that are subtler or more complex. All of those things are totally legitimate

Id be interested to know if anyone else feels this way, but to an extent I sometimes feel I use Gameshows as a bit of crutch and been feeling recently I should be trying to branch out a bit more

I think there's a similar point to the above be made about carnivals, charity events, etc, if less likely to have much raunch and quite as much gunge involved if going for the 'vaguely plausible' angle. Maybe a WAM theme night at a fetish club could get quite wild I suppose.

They're other scenarios where someone could realistically end up in a pillory being pied, in a gunge tank, poised above a dunk tank and so on.

Again, such scenarios could then be taken in pretty much any direction.

If you wanted to get really pretentious about it, you could argue that charity events and stuff like that are practically the same thing as a gameshow - at least, in our specific niche.

Yeah, there are definitely moments when I feel like I'm going back to the same well too many times. If you feel like branching out more, go for it!