According to Paul Verhoeven, in the majority of submitted screenplays that he received, the wife openly condemned her husband's extramarital affairs. He chose to ignore this in lieu of having the wife stoically accept it under certain conditions, which he found a much more interesting and less predictable situation.
The participating audience also formed film crews to film the sequential scripts. Some teams dropped out during the project, others shot the 8 sequences and put them online. Paul Verhoeven, to the frustration of these teams, never interacted with them. One team in particular, IO film productions, hired veteran Stephan Brenninkmeijer instead and shot their counterpart of the movie titled: Lotgenoten (2013). In contrast to "Steekspel", "Lotgenoten" did have an official theatrical release in the Netherlands.
Paul Verhoeven called the project his '14½' movie; a witty reference to Fellini's masterpiece 8½ (1963), meant to indicate that Verhoeven considered this project to be only 'half a movie'.
The movie was made as part of Entertainment Experience, an experiment of audience participation whereby the production of the movie was going to be combined with a talent-hunt like "American Idol". Aspiring film makers were encouraged to use three minutes (written by 'Kim van Kooten') as the basis for writing a full movie script and send it in, out of which Paul Verhoeven would select his favorite version to direct. Amateur actors were initially attracted to star in the film. However, Verhoeven finally filmed Steekspel (2012) with professional actors and did not use the submitted screenplays. He wrote the screenplay together with Robert Alberdingk Thijm, based on some ideas they got from the submissions.