Imagine you wake up in a shadowy industrial space, unsure of how you got there. You cannot move, and metal contraptions have been attached to your head and appendages. The grim voice of the Jigsaw Killer echoes in the room, and he wants to play a game to teach you a vicious lesson. For this hypothetical, let’s say you’re a jaywalker. To survive, Jigsaw says you must slice off both feet, but there’s a time limit of three minutes. If you succeed, you can go free, and doctors can reattach your feet later; if you fail, a bomb strapped to your feet will explode, and you die. This is a typical situation built by the Saw franchise’s resident sicko. But I ask you, if you were in this situation and only cut off one foot, yet you were allowed to go free anyway, would you ever jaywalk again? Wouldn’t the experience of being held captive and forced into self-mutilation shake you out of what Jigsaw perceives as your disregard for the rules? What’s gained if you die? And why only three minutes? Wouldn’t you learn the same lesson if you had, say, an hour to remove your feet? Instead, because Jigsaw is an all-or-nothing maniac, he would rather dispose of a human life than merely scare you straight.

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