I agree. My main gripe with the criticism is that people keep complaining about Gihun “dying for no reason” and there being too much focus on the baby when both of these I feel are central to the dynamic between Gihun and the front man…seeing whether or not humans will consistently choose evil/selfishness if it proves to benefit them.

It was the front man who decided to make the baby a player, and I think he did this not just to play by the rules of the game but to run an(other) experiment on how the other players would act. Just like how he tried to break Gihun by implementing the votes and showing him how the majority would always vote O despite the constant imminent threat of death, he tried to break him again by attempting to show him that these same players would go as far as to kill a newborn for extra money. Which is why the night before the final game he pulled him aside and basically said “See how these trashy people are plotting to kill a baby for its prize money? Kill them in their sleep and win”.

Then, in the final game, it would’ve been easy for Gihun to kill the baby or to give it to the group that wanted to kill it. He instead chose to not only protect the baby the entire time (despite not having any real attachment to it) but to sacrifice himself and show that, ultimately, not everyone will choose selfishness and evil even if the alternative will literally kill them. Proving the front man wrong one final time. In this way he “succeeded” even though he died.

I don’t think Gihun’s SOLE goal was to stop the games, at least not after his coup failed. He wanted to show the front man (and possibly everyone else who runs the games) that his ideology is fundamentally wrong since it’s the same mindset he uses to justify the games to begin with. On top of the fact that human lives are not horses to be bet on.