Our obsession with deadly game shows--from "The Running Man" and "Squid Game" to MrBeast's real-life reënactments--reflects a shift in the national mood to something increasingly zero-sum. It seems we can't get enough of game shows in which the losers die. "The Hunger Games" became a multibillion-dollar media franchise over the past decade, with audiences returning to the theatre, time and time again, to watch adolescents try to kill one another in an enormous arena--a contest devised by the leaders of a society rife with inequality. Netflix's " Squid Game " followed four hundred and fifty-six desperate individuals into an underworld where they play lethal versions of children's games in the hope of winning a life-changing amount of money. Four weeks after its release, the show had become Netflix's most-watched series ever; to date, the first season has been viewed more than two hundred and sixty-five million times.

Squid Game is not a subtle show. It is impossible to misinterpret its very obvious message that the games are bad, and people should NOT be driven to such desperation by a merciless capitalist system that they will murder each other for rich people's entertainment. I would not be the first to point out that there is some conflict in the fact that we, the viewers, are watching all these competitors get killed for our entertainment, but still: despite the violence, despite the shock value, there is no ambiguity around the narrative intention. In this spin-off video game from Netflix, by contrast, the games are not bad. They are supposed to be fun.

Battles between human and artificial intelligence are no longer science fiction. The strikes in Hollywood led by the united guilds of actors and screenwriters have a common, intangible enemy: the algorithms and computer-generated imagery that are increasingly programmed by studios to render them redundant. In New York last week, a new front in that stand-off was opened by a group of American novelists – including John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and Jonathan Franzen – who are suing OpenAI, the creators of the ChatGPT program. The legal case may help to define and protect those increasingly porous boundaries between human creativity and the robots that mimic it. In the meantime, Amazon, these days flooded by self-published books written by AI, has taken its first half-hearted steps to curtail that practice.

Time is running out inside the Gamebox, and you've got to jump or die. You're partnered up with your friends, who must agree on questions about a series of images projected to the left and right of you. Each of you wears a visor with sensors on top of it; the box can tell where you are and how you move. In this challenge, called "Glass Bridge," your team must decide, as seconds tick away, the answer to questions like, "Which side had the most birds?" To vote, teammates jump on circles representing the left or right side.

That's what the doll in Squid Game says. But how would you know! You got subtitles on your plate. Shows like Squid Game and Money Heist topping Netflix charts opened up a whole new genre of drama and entertainment for the audience to explore with different language content. People locked inside the doors during the pandemic brought the world closer together in its unique ways.

Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday. When my husband asked me if I wanted to try the "cat trivia game" on Netflix, I thought it was going to be some sort of quiz about felines. I like cats, so I said sure. The "cat trivia game," it turns out, is Cat Burglar, which Netflix calls an "edgy, over-the-top, interactive trivia toon." It debuted in February and comes from the makers of Black Mirror.

Dubbing, where recordings in other languages are lip-synced and mixed with a show's original soundtrack, is an exploding business. One localization platform, Zoo Digital, saw revenues jump by 73% to $28.6 million in July 2018 compared to the year prior. Another, BTI Studios, told Television Business International that dubbing grew from 3% of its revenue in 2010 to 61% in 2019. According to Verified Market Research, the film dubbing market alone could reach $3.6 billion in worth by 2027, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 5.6% from 2020. But barriers stand in the way of expansion.

Netflix's Korean drama "Squid Game" was one of the most-watched dubbed series of all time, proving the massive potential for foreign-language programming to become a hit in overseas markets. Now, a startup called Deepdub is capitalizing on the growing demand for localized content by automating parts of the dubbing process using AI technology. With its end-to-end platform, Deepdub can decrease the time it takes to complete a dubbing project, allowing content owners and studios to have results in weeks instead of months. What's more, it does this by using just a few minutes of the actors' voices -- so the dubbed version sounds more like the original. The Tel Aviv startup has now closed on $20 million in Series A funding for its efforts, led by New York-based investment firm Insight Partners.

The recent controversy surrounding the mistranslations found in the Netflix hit "Squid Game" and other films highlights technology's challenges when releasing content that bridges languages and cultures internationally. Every year across the global media and entertainment industry, tens of thousands of movies and TV episodes exhibited on hundreds of streaming platforms are released with the hope of finding an audience among 7.2 billion people living in nearly 200 countries. No audience is fluent in the roughly 7,000 recognized languages. If the goal is to release the content internationally, subtitles and audio dubs must be prepared for global distribution. Known in the industry as "localization," creating "subs and dubs" has, for decades, been a human-centered process, where someone with a thorough understanding of another language sits in a room, reads a transcript of the screen dialogue, watches the original language content (if available) and translates it into an audio dub script.

The protagonist of the Netflix megahit Squid Game is Seong Gi-hun, an indebted gambler and absentee father who screams, sweats, and strains his way through the very intense experience of watching hundreds of people get straight-up killed--while trying to avoid being killed, and retain some sense of ethics and loyalty, to boot. But we wondered: what was it like to voice Gi-hun in English for the many people who watched Squid Game with the dubbing option turned on? So we asked the voice actor Greg Chun, a veteran of video games and anime who spoke to Slate from his studio in Los Angeles. Our conversation--on the hardest Squid Game scene to dub, the controversy around the Korean-to-English translation, and his time working on Call of Duty--has been edited and condensed for clarity. Rebecca Onion: What was your reaction when you first saw the Squid Game script?