• “Beast Games” is YouTuber MrBeast’s Amazon Prime Video game show.
• The series is family friendly, but its message about the concept of money makes me uncomfortable.
• I’d say enjoy the show, but remind your kids that that’s not how money works in real life.

“Beast Games,” MrBeast’s game show on Amazon Prime Video, premiered on Thursday and I watched it with my elementary-aged son. As an adult, I enjoyed the spectacle and found the show well worth seeing. But as a parent, I’m not sure I liked the message about money it conveyed to my young community.

Elementary school-aged children, whether they are allowed to watch YouTube or not, all know who MrBeast is. He is a superstar of Generation Alpha. His candy bars line grocery store shelves and his ghost hovers over playgrounds and cafeterias.

(My colleague reports that his teenage son says MrBeast isn’t as cool in high school, perhaps because he’s seen as something for little kids.)

Like most parents, I want to teach my children the value of a dollar: that money comes from hard work and that saving and budgeting are important.

“Beast Games” contradicts all of that. Money is thrown around as a strange, easy-to-get, easy-to-handle object. It begins with MrBeast standing on a pyramid of cash (supposedly the entire $5 million prize in stacks of bills). We’re constantly told that this is the biggest cash prize ever on a game show.

The show involves a group of contestants devising challenges to win the grand prize – a seasonal version of some of his popular YouTube videos.

There will be physical challenges later in the season (we see preview clips of people pulling a monster truck), but in this first episode the games are almost entirely psychological tests.

The goal of this first series of mini-games is to reduce the number of participants from 1,000 to 500. The games are variations on the prisoner’s dilemma – games in which individuals make decisions for themselves rather than for the good of the group.

In the first game, MrBeast makes this offer: Anyone who leaves the game immediately can share a pot of money – but the pot gets smaller and smaller for each person who chooses to leave early. In another game, one person on each team of about 100 people must sacrifice themselves and leave the game without prize money – otherwise the entire team is eliminated. People are sobbing and screaming at each other to stop.

I worry about the message “Beast Games” is sending

As an adult, this is a fascinating challenge. But I’m not sure a child can truly understand what’s going on – the terrible pain when people lose what they thought could be a chance to pay off loans or buy a house.

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In the game, money is an object that you can build into pyramids or throw around in bags – it’s weird money, it doesn’t feel real.

Representatives for MrBeast did not immediately respond to a request from BI for comment on Donaldson’s views on young people’s financial literacy or the game show.

Other game shows have cash prizes – even kid-friendly shows like “Is It Cake?” or even the old “Double Dare” on Nickelodeon. But on other shows, the prize at the end was an exciting treat, it wasn’t the whole thing Point of the show.

“Beast Games” is about money – and the games themselves are also about money. I’m not sure I like the subtle message being sent to young minds who aren’t yet old enough to earn a real paycheck.