Dystopian Games: Diagnosing Modernity as the Scene of Tests,Trials and Transformations

Abstract

Emergent genres can serve as diagnoses of society, particularly dystopias which exaggerate yet articulate problematic elements within modernity. Herein the focus is on ‘dystopian games’, particularly The Hunger Games and Squid Game, part of a wider genre emerging in contemporary culture wherein dystopia is not just totalitarian, oppressive or ideological, but also requires its protagonists to participate in contests and trials which transform them. Arguably, the global success of these texts reflects the cultural resonance of their diagnosis of the contemporary world as itself the ‘scene of a trial’ in Boltanski’s phrase. Following Stark on the sociology of tests, dystopian games can be related to the proliferation of intense competition in education and the labour market, relentless trials and evaluations at work and the contests for attention and popularity on social media. Building a dialogue between social theory and dystopian literature inspired by Foucault’s work on ‘truth-telling’ and ‘transformations’, what emerges is a vision of ubiquitous transformations created by compulsory participation in trials and tests, less emancipatory or self-actualizing than a nightmare.

If our nightmares change, what does this tell us about our waking lives? What can dystopian fiction tell us about modernity? Scholars from cultural studies to the sociology of culture have often incorporated fiction into their analysis of contemporary society, with particular attention paid to utopia and dystopia as forms of meta-theorizing. Herein, the focus is on what I term ‘dystopian games’, a contemporary sub-genre of dystopia wherein protagonists in a socially engineered nightmare are not simply subject to ideology, oppression and surveillance, but are required to participate in ‘games’ – contests, trials, experiments, performances of all sorts, which transform them in very ambivalent ways. The key examples are The Hunger Games and Squid Game, partly because these are globally successful dystopias, which demonstrates their widespread resonance, but also because their narratives centre most explicitly on games. There are many other examples, the Maze Runner and Divergent series are about tests and experiments, Battle Royale, 3% and The Platform concern competition, and Black Mirror episodes from Nose-Dive to Fifteen Million Merits are satires of performance culture. This turn towards ‘dystopian games’ arguably reflects both contemporary transformations in society and cultural interpretations of this predicament, moving beyond the critique of capitalism or neo-liberalism to a specific diagnosis of tests, trials and transformations in modernity.

Evidently, dystopian games are not innocent, playful pastimes; they involve dangers and risk and often result in destruction and death, even tragedy as they involve participants in terrible moral quandaries, perhaps pushing them into cruelty and self-abasement. Crucially, dystopian games put their protagonists to the test, subjecting them to trials of strength and character, which ‘prove’ their worth or otherwise. Frequently, these games are visible, spectacular, almost pantomimes of violence and struggle – or even deliberately set up as quasi-experiments. Of course, in the revolutionary melodrama of critical dystopias (Tompkins, 2018), protagonists resist these games, initially through heroism but also by subverting the test, co-operating rather than competing, preserving their values and honour, or recapturing the meaning of the performance with an alternative narrative. Conversely, the ‘game frame’ serves to corrupt other characters. Thus, the dystopian game is an experiment and a wager, which transforms many into the playthings of the gamemasters, but can be resisted by protagonists transforming themselves in crucial ways.

Drawing on dystopian narratives as conversation partners for social theory, this article seeks to diagnose the complex relationship between games, tests, experiments, transformations and ‘truth’ within modernity. Explicitly, dystopias put their protagonists through trials, and these ordeals serve as emblematic tests of society – for instance, whether humane co-operation or competition wins out (Kim and Park, 2022). Yet, this ‘truth’ can only be established through the test – without an experiment, nothing can be known about individuals or society – yet such tests are not mere evaluations but transformative ordeals. Within these dystopias and many other genres, people are transformed through the tests which supposedly reveal their true character, for good or for ill. Whatever the glimmers of hope in the narrative, whether gestures of resistance or revolutionary uprisings, they occur through transformations. Read thus, ‘dystopian games’ are not just diagnoses of the proliferation of ‘testing’ within neo-liberalism, but reflections on modernity in general as an on-going experiment to reveal the ‘truth’ of society or individuals or history, but this ‘truth’ is unstable and subject to further transformations, which insidiously and relentlessly emerge from further trials.

This article begins by elaborating its approach, taking ‘dystopian games’ as more than just a foil for critiquing society but as exploring the cultural logic of tests and transformations. After setting this genre in context, and sociologically situating it within neo-liberalism and gamification, the article moves on to analyse The Hunger Games and Squid Game in detail. Thereafter, the article offers an ‘experimental’ analysis of tests and transformation as part of the constitution of modernity, an ontology which frames our interpretations and shapes our society.

Playing with Theory and Culture

Broadly, dystopian games are interpreted by reviewers in mainstream journalism as satires and critiques of capitalism, highlighting how individuals are increasingly pitted against each other in competitions which are deadly for losers and which corrupt winners. (Bouchard, 2022; Ruthven, 2017; Tompkins, 2018). More specifically, The Hunger Games has been read as reflecting the pressures on young people from education to social media (Leigh, 2015), and Squid Game has been taken as a meta-commentary on indebtedness in the economy and dehumanization at work (Abdelmahmoud, 2021; Di Placido, 2021; Wong, 2021). Chronicling these ills of capitalism is beyond the limits of space, but importantly, ‘dystopian games’ particularly respond to the era of neo-liberalism.

Specifically, neo-liberalism transforms and extends existing capitalist economic relations, by extending the market principle to new arenas, and moving beyond production and consumption to continuous competition, which particularly impacts workers and youths (Lee, 2015). Here, South Korea followed US neo-liberalism in the Segyewhu reforms of the 1990s and deregulation and liberalization imposed after the 1997 IMF bailout, both creating a ‘sweeping transformation of society’ (Hyun-Chin and Jin-Ho, 2006: 10). Furthermore, neo-liberalism institutes competition and contests in the economy through ‘gamification’ (Woodcock and Johnson, 2018), driven by neo-liberal managerialism (De Winter, et al., 2014), and instituted through governmentality (Schrape, 2020). In Mark Fisher’s (2009) term these macabre contests are forms of ‘capitalist realism’, in that they reinforce the pessimistic diagnosis wherein there is no ‘realistic’ alternative. Herein, this article aims to move beyond these existing scholarly accounts by putting dystopian games in dialogue with social theory (Váňa, 2020).

Both texts are extraordinarily popular, The Hunger Games selling around 40 million copies of its trilogy, with immense theatre and video audiences (Ames, 2013), and Squid Game achieving the best-ever viewing figures by Netflix (Sparks, 2021), despite the perceived disadvantage of being a non-anglophone production. Both succeeded in the market test, but are not just commercially significant, but represent the emergence of a genre, ranging from films, novels and TV series to dystopian computer games, which incite their players and audiences into participating in the narrative, which stands as a ‘playful trial action’ (Farca, 2020: 16). Despite being fictional, through ‘cognitive estrangement’ dystopias serve as a ‘a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action, and – most important – a mapping of possible alternatives’ (Suvin, 2016: 24). Perhaps more actively than other genres ‘games, as metaphors and forms, alter our understanding of contemporary social political and economic systems’ (Jagoda, 2020: 6). Even as readers or watchers, we are involved in these games.

For some, dystopian fiction is an exaggeration which distracts analysis from the real problems of society, it may even be ideological, foregrounding individual heroism, replicating gendered and colonial roles and expressing liberal ‘state phobia’ in classic satires of totalitarianism, such as We by Zamyatin or Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell. For others, dystopian fiction refracts and reveals the reality of contemporary society in visions which are both diagnoses of the present and warnings of future developments, yet also offering glimpses of hope, for instance in resistance, ethical choices, solidarity in adversity and even revolutionary hopes, described by Moylan (2000) as ‘Critical Dystopias’. Alternatively, following Sargent’s typology (1994), dystopian games could be considered as ‘anti-utopias’ in the very specific sense that they critique the neo-liberal ideal world of meritocratic competition. For Jameson (1982), the foreclosure of the future due to our incapacity to imagine alternatives is signalled in sci-fi and dystopian literature. Despite this pessimism, dystopian games are clearly an emerging genre, reflecting perhaps the advent of reality TV, the spread of computer-games and anxiety about technology, (Stypinska and Rossi, 2021) and how contemporary society is suffused with and transformed by gamification (De Winter et al., 2014).

Why turn to dystopias to diagnose this trend when there are already substantial sociological and scholarly accounts? Perennial debates between the idea of fiction as ideology or critique go back to Plato’s Republic at least and maintain an unhelpful false dichotomy. Felski (2015) argues that whether we criticize literature as ideological or project our critical impulses onto it and declare it subversive or transgressive, this is largely the same interpretative move, only inverted. Fruitful analysis focuses on the specific meanings and values articulated within texts as part of our culture and recognizes that critical scholarship is part of our culture (Boland, 2019). Rather than taking literary texts as symptomatic of social norms or a treasure trove for methodology, instead theory and literature are considered as ‘conversation partners’ making sense of society through exploration, expression and meaning making (De la Fuente, 2007). Indeed, rather than take literature as raw material for sociological explanation, the approach here focuses on the meaning created between texts and their readers as a dynamic process of understanding and imagining society (Váňa, 2020). The attempt here is to go beyond existing diagnoses of neo-liberalism, authoritarian liberalism in governmentality and gamification, to explore the interrelation of tests, transformations and ‘truth-telling’. Literature, and dystopias in particular serve as a point of reflection to understand cultural ideas about transformation (Bynum, 2001).

A crucial question here is: Why are ‘dystopian games’ so resonant today? Detailed studies may track the circuits through which popularity develops (Ahmed et al., 2022), yet our focus here concerns how they become meaningful for huge disparate audiences. Yet how texts and genres are interpreted is not necessarily subjective, but considerably social, long expressed by Fish’s (1982) idea of ‘interpretative communities’, which share a generalized reading of a text; for instance, the generalized idea that dystopias satirize and subvert contemporary capitalism, nuanced in various ways. Cultural sociology unpacks how deeply embedded symbols and scripts are performed and understood by various audiences, thereby adapting and renewing cultural tropes (Alexander, 2013). Rather than critically unmasking these as ideologies of the ‘culture industry’, they are approached here as recognizing significant concerns and issues within society (Boland, 2019). While popularity is not always the best index of the significance of a text, those which achieve global reach are still remarkable, and should be understood as not just ‘catching the zeitgeist’ but socially meaningful through interpretation and emotional engagement between reader and text and thereby offering new understandings of social life. These dystopian texts interconnect with history, theory, journalism and more, taking up contemporary social concerns (Borchard, 2022). Strikingly, within the Anglophone world, generally dystopias are initially popular in novel form, for instance, Divergent or Maze Runner, but only achieve global impact in cinematic or televisual format – which perhaps indicates something about cultural-flows, but equally how the medium draws viewers into the ‘game frame’ which unfolds within them.

For Seeger and Davison-Vecchione (2019), the dystopian imagination is akin to the sociological imagination, rethinking the interconnections of individual and society and sceptically re-examining politics, technology and progress. Dystopias provoke their audiences to reconsider their experience and their world, even to adopt new values, parallel to Mills’ (2000 [1959]: 8) classic formulation of how the sociological imagination transforms people: ‘They acquire a new way of thinking, they experience a transvaluation of values’. Perhaps more interestingly, even reading a dystopia here appears as ‘transformative’, a test of the conscience of the reader. In Moylan’s (2000) terminology, utopias hold out emancipatory visions, but critical dystopias – if not utterly pessimistic – can diagnose contemporary problems and make social change possible. While passive spectators, the audience participates or has a stake in these imaginative games, insofar as the character of society and any utopian hopes are tested within them.

Beyond sociological critiques of ‘gamification’, Boltanski and Thévenot have highlighted how tests, ordeals and competition proliferate in contemporary society. Most strikingly, Boltanski (2011: 25) envisioned ‘. . . the world as the scene of a trial’. This ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’ links consensus and conflict by describing routine social life as sporadically interrupted by crises, creating the ‘imperative for justification’, which means actors must elaborate criteria or ‘orders of worth’ and undergo ‘tests of strength’. Arguably, crises are increasingly chronic, and society is perpetually involved in tests and trials, of technologies, policies, lifestyles and much more, all of which transform society, quite ambivalently, considering how social media is not just revolutionizing communication but also rewiring our neural networks in worrying ways. For Boltanski and his collaborators, tests are not just imposed by neo-liberalism or governmentality, but are fundamental to creating social order and worth in modernity: everything and anything can be critiqued and questioned, leading to tests and evaluations and contestations over worth.

Strikingly, today we live in an era of tests, exemplified less by the individual Covid-test than the generalized sense that our collective responses to crises reveal something about society (Stark, 2020a). Performance tests and pilot trials are both increasingly carried out, but furthermore, this interpretive frame is increasingly pervasive: ‘Testing and the discourse of the test are increasingly prevalent in modern society’ (Pinch, 1993: 27). Reviews, competitions and rankings permeate our culture, built into governmentality wherein both populations and policies are subject to scrutiny and transformation (Schrape, 2020). Such tests are ‘modes of veridiction’ whereby society learns about itself by framing tests, indicators, proxy variables which can be noted and deciphered as ‘telling the truth’ – for instance, the market takes price as a sign of value, psychiatrists take symptoms as manifestations of pathology (Foucault, 2008). Such tests not only evaluate the present, but also seek to transform the future, moving ‘from test in a setting to “testing the setting” . . . Today’s tests directly and deliberately modify the environment’ (Marres and Stark, 2020: 435–436). The logic of tests and transformations runs from the detail of government to politics writ large; the European Social Pillar action plan makes this explicit: ‘It is at times of deep transformations such as these, that our social fabric is put to the test’ (European Commission, 2021: 5). Reactions to international wars, global climate change and migration, unto the pandemic; all of these are framed as tests and taken to reveal something about society.

Evidently, ‘dystopian games’ explore this world of tests and trials: Notably, the Maze Runner series subjects its protagonists to an experiment, while feminist dystopias such as Only Ever Yours depict factory-like apparatuses for producing sexualized women (Elices, 2016). There are sociological and dystopian versions of these visions, for instance, Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism is paralleled by Egger’s The Circle and The Everything, each highlighting how perpetual evaluation and visibility leads to invidious trials which transform individuals. Similarly, Black Mirror resonates with audiences by presenting a familiar world, made dystopian, often through minor technological changes which transform that imaginary scenario in negative ways, an experiment which reflects problematic issues within contemporary life (Stypinska and Rossi, 2021). From utopias set on islands or other planets to dystopias set in proximate futures, these genres deliberately subject the present to scrutiny (Koselleck, 2002: 84–99), implicitly a test of society and their readers, calling for transformations. Following Fisher’s (2009) formulation of ‘capitalist realism’, the generation of the ‘truth’ about society or individuals through transformative tests should be recognized as a ‘realization’ created through competition, posed by neo-liberal thought as a trial which reveals worth.

What does a pessimistic reading of these games tell us about modernity? Since the Enlightenment, the modern world has been conceived as a project or venture, an attempt to achieve something – progress, equality, revolution, mastery over nature, scientific knowledge, individual liberty and even happiness. Rather than just following tradition or reacting to problems as they emerge, modern politics, government, industry and so forth attempt to create anew (Koselleck, 2002). Of course, these utopian impulses also produce disasters, unanticipated consequences and tragic outcomes: revolutionary impulses produced the Terror or totalitarianism, science and industry aimed at happiness leads into economic inequality or ecological disaster. These pessimistic visions of modernity as a misadventure are widespread, narrated as the decadence, decline and fall or doomed character of modernity (Yair and Soyer, 2008). Yet, this too is just a narrative. An optimistic reading might stress the possibility of alternative strategies, ‘gamification from below’ (Woodcock and Johnson, 2018), where ethics trumps strategy, revolutionary hopes are rewarded, and co-operation succeeds over competition (Kim and Park, 2022). Yet within both readings, the ‘game-frame’ persists, by taking these narratives or any social situation as a test which reveals the truth and transforms people.

Given this focus on tests which transform, it is interesting that, many contemporary dystopias focus on ‘youth’. Concern for the malleability of those ‘coming of age’ was a concern in 18th-century bildungsroman long before ‘brain plasticity’ or environmental triggering of DNA were discussed (Koselleck, 2002). Indeed, youth undergoing the transition to adulthood is widely figured as being tested and transformed – in academic discourses as much as The Lord of the Flies or the Divergent series. Importantly, The Hunger Games and Squid Game are explicitly trials of their protagonists, and not just in the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ as per Battle Royale where students are transported to an island and left to fight to the death. Rather the ‘game frame’ structures how protagonists behave, whether in collaboration or self-interest, or in dissimulation before an audience, whether fellow competitors or the TV audience to these contests. This ‘game frame’ gives shape and meaning to the tests and trials undergone, beyond the attractions of spectacular bloodbaths or heroic narratives, and furthermore serves to transform the protagonists – and depicts their antagonists as corrupted by power, violence and cruelty. These two dystopian games are especially interesting, not just because of their global reach, but because they explore trials which are explicitly framed as such, and thereby stand as tests of protagonists, which resonates with our contemporary experiences of being constantly evaluated and subjected to tests which transform us – not always for the better.

Serious Games

As complex narratives, both The Hunger Games and Squid Game can be interpreted in numerous ways, and typically both are taken as dystopian critiques of contemporary capitalism or neo-liberalism as described earlier, with some utopian hopes for revolution or resistance. The titular ‘Hunger Games’ are a spectacular propaganda effort orchestrated by an authoritarian regime, whereby teenage ‘tributes’ from subordinated districts are pitted against each other in a fully televised elimination struggle. Held annually in a commemoration of a rebellion quashed, the games’ singular winners are guaranteed a subsequent life of comparative luxury, although survival is more traumatic than triumphant. Similarly, ‘Squid Game’ involves a fight to the death, but among contestants enticed into participation from contemporary South Korean society, generally by exploiting their indebted or desperate situation. These ‘games’ are deadly innovations upon commonplace children’s games, orchestrated by a shadowy underground organization with plutocratic backers. Herein, I analyse how these dystopian games represent their protagonists as undergoing tests, trials and transformations. Familiarity with both texts is assumed here, with a ‘spoiler alert’ that many plot twists are revealed herein (for a more extensive elaboration, see Kim and Park, 2022; Ruthven, 2017). Within this analysis, both texts are taken as dystopias, although the world of Squid Game only has a shadowy underworld of illicit murderous contests rather than state-level of domination and oppression like The Hunger Games in keeping with classical dystopias.

Herein the precise categorization of genres is less important than understanding how these texts foreground the problem of games, tests and transformations. Broadly, both texts could be described as Critical Dystopias, painting a fictional portrait of a world which resembles the present and foregrounds problems within it (Sargent, 1994). These bleak visions are not hopelessly pessimistic however: while these ‘games’ cultivate violence and corruption even from key protagonists, there are utopian glimpses: In The Hunger Games these culminate in revolution, but hopeful gestures are evident in how players resist power or co-operate rather than compete, making ethical decisions in terrible circumstances. Central to this dystopian genre is a vision of how people can be transformed and corrupted by powerful regimes, but the utopian possibility of transforming into a resistant subject remains. However, in the analysis which follows, the distinction of dystopia and utopia is bridged by the emphasis on tests and transformations, providing a fresh diagnosis of modern society as ‘experimentalist’ – a theme which will be explored further after close interpretation of the texts.

Explicitly defined games, with rules, aims and competition with deadly consequences are a central part of both narratives. These games are imposed upon the protagonists and orchestrated by powerful and ideological figures as one might expect from a dystopia. Eliminating other players through the game is required of the protagonists, and therefore the eventual reward for victory, while bountiful and ‘life-changing’, is a poisoned chalice – that is, any moral protagonist or hero-figure can only win by violence and betrayal, even against erstwhile allies, and thereby is either traumatized by their experience or transformed into an amoral game-player. Crucially these dystopian games are part of the appeal of the texts, drawing readers and audiences into the struggle, as games ‘. . . serve as a form of staging, encountering, processing and testing experience and reality in the twenty-first century’ (Jagoda, 2020: xi).

While explicitly called ‘games’, both the Hunger Games and Squid Game are evidently competitions, not mere play, but a contest (Huizinga, 1955). They occur within a clearly defined ‘game-space’, and test protagonists’ skill, wits and strength, through direct threats but also by exposing them to competition with others, whereby defeat means death. While many games have a defined time and space, with stakes that matter only within the game, like tokens or just bragging rights, these dystopian games have consequences for life outside them – principally death for all but one victor who instantly becomes rich; thus, the games have a transformative quality – both at their end, but also through the process of competing. Yet the ‘meaning’ of the competition appears to reveal the truth of reality – even transforming society; for instance, reactions to the 74th Hunger Games prompts resistance and rebellion. By extension, the narrative of these ‘dystopian games’ is widely taken as revealing something about society, and maybe even transforming audiences.

Beyond the formal game, life within these dystopias is rendered as a test, that is, the quality of the competitive game suffuses everything else, a fictive form of ‘gamification’. Indeed, this imposition of not just danger but the game frame is articulated in Peeta’s line; ‘I just don’t want to be another piece in their game’, expressing resistance to the demand for a competitive battle to the death. Outside the arena, this game frame pervades the entire narrative, in obvious occasions such as the training ground where contestants might make alliances or intimidate or mislead opponents, but even at the Reaping when Prue is selected as tribute for District 12 and Katniss volunteers herself as a substitute. While a very human and moral self-sacrifice, within the game-frame this is both an exchange of a contender with no chance of winning for one who has a slight chance, but also a manoeuvre which might serve to garner public sympathy in the larger game of creating a persuasive spectacle.

Markedly, the Hunger Games is not just a game but a spectacle wherein public performances matter. This is most evident in the TV interviews between Katniss and Caesar Flickerman before the Hunger Games, supposedly occasions wherein the ‘authentic’ person is revealed, become a contest where each protagonist attempts to sway popular support. Following Huizinga’s (1955) classic formulation, this moves the game from a ‘representative contest’, to a ‘contest over representation’, or art. Indeed, the attempt to persuade audiences through dramatized performances is central both to the plot, and to the diagnosis of contemporary society, as The Hunger Games satirizes reality TV, celebrity culture and political rhetoric.

Each public appearance by Katniss, from parades to interviews to the later propaganda reels to bolster the resolve of the Districts revolting against the Capitol is markedly a test. There is a tension between strategy and authenticity, for instance, Katniss cannot deliver a scripted message but thrives on spontaneous performance, which presents her as genuine and hard to corrupt. Equally, the subversion of expected or dominant scripts by performances is a contest between the resistant protagonists and the dominant powers, most prominently, the ‘suicide pact’ between Katniss and Peeta at the end of the first Hunger Games, whereby their performance of love overcomes the demand for brutal violence. Evidently these are utopian gestures against the dystopia, where love conquers all, but also a contestation whereby ‘gamification from below’ overcomes ‘gamification from above’ (Woodcock and Johnson, 2018). Nevertheless, this and other such performances are still modes of contestation, game-playing, presenting a trial of resolve to the spectators and game-makers. Yet, from the subsequent narrative the reality of this truth and transformation is doubtful, so the gesture is evidently a test, a risk, a wager.

While multiple readings of the Hunger Games are possible, they can certainly be understood as critiques of liberal competitions, in education, the labour market, social media, where hostility, trolling and hot-takes proliferate. Of course, these critiques of civilizational corruption and the vulnerability of youth is part of social critique since Rousseau at least (Koselleck, 2002: 236–247). Yet there are other more ambivalent elements; the theatricalization of violence is opposed through a counter-drama, but still a spectacle; the test of violence is opposed but through another trial of character. Furthermore, while the Hunger Games explicitly transforms tributes into killing machines and its spectators into bloodthirsty voyeurs, The Hunger Games is also about the transformation of its protagonists. Thus, theatre, tests and transformations are problems running through both the problem diagnosed and its solution. Within the heroic revolutionary melodrama, there is a dichotomy of good and evil within these games, but perhaps this is too simplistic (Tompkins, 2018).

The performative presentation of alternative values to contest power contains within itself a theatricalization problem (Szakolczai, 2015). Even ‘unmasking’ and ‘resistance’ might well be facades or pantomimes, a perspective intimated by Debord’s work on ‘spectacles’ or Baudrillard on ‘simulacra’ or equally depicted in dystopias; for instance, Black Mirror’s ‘Fifteen Million Merits’ turns resistance against a nightmare of televised talent-shows and celebrity culture into a manufactured critique – scripted, orchestrated and politically neutered. Critical suspicions that ‘everything is socially constructed’ (Felski, 2015), even social movements against oppression, transforms even political action into a game of performance.

Thus, The Hunger Games highlights how modern life is transformed into a competitive game pursued performatively, altering protagonists through their theatrics, before spectators who are vicariously transformed by these tests (Butler, 1997). Evidently this is no light-hearted or joyful game, because the spirit of play has been traduced into relentless and limitless competition, making everything – even love – part of the contest (Thomassen, 2014). Certainly, these dystopian games do not provide clean alternatives somehow disentangled from the problematic world they depict. In short, the logic of tests, trials, transformations and performances runs through both our society and our cultural critiques.

While Squid Game is only spectated by its administrators, guards and a select audience of billionaires who fund it, the copious records of previous iterations discovered by Detective Jun-ho indicates that it is equally subject to surveillance and evaluation, perhaps of less a spectacular than experimental character. Although the relationship between the games, the funders and the purpose of these detailed records is unclear, indubitably the set-up of a game or test is deliberately cultivated. Indeed the ‘ideal of fairness’ is explicitly invoked by the Frontman when he discovers cheating and collusion between players.

Everyone is equal while they play this game. Here, the players get to play a fair game under the same conditions. Those people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we’re giving them the last chance to fight fair and win.

This ‘game frame’ stretches beyond the formal games, for instance, when vicious fighting breaks out in the dormitory, a competitive elimination struggle is imposed by stronger gangs pursuing their advantage. There is no respite from the ‘game’, which becomes a way of life and a competitive test of the strength for each player.

Yet, there is a more subtle, insidious infiltration of games and tests into everyday life. Before being enticed into Squid Game, Gi-Hun is an inveterate gambler, who makes the occasion of his daughter’s birthday into a challenge which he can succeed or fail at depending on his wits and luck, robbing his mother along the way, clearly unconcerned at the fate of others. In-between actual bouts of the deadly children’s games, the protagonists negotiate alliances and attempt to gain any possible competitive advantage. These involve more than just tests of skill or luck but imply tests of character. At stake is not just life, so often described as the ultimate value, but honour, friendship, morality and meaning. In the climactic Squid Game between Gi-hun and Sang-Woo, the former refuses to deliver the killing blow, despite his apparent victory, which might well lead to his elimination for refusing to follow the game rules. The emotionally wrought Sang-Woo then commits suicide to prevent this, perhaps redeeming himself for prior betrayals of the trusting Ali Abdul and repudiating the callous, self-serving strategic player he became through these games. To an extent, this reflects the utopian hopes within these dystopias, the idea that human values of self-sacrifice or friendship might overcome the corrupting effects of the game. Yet, this noble redemption is still figured as a ‘test’ of character, a competition with something at stake.

Quite clearly, Squid Game foregrounds co-operation as much as competition, with the former providing utopian glimpses within the grim dystopian set-up (Kim and Park, 2022). The dark picture of humanity fostered by the games wherein each contestant will compete ruthlessly at the expense of all others is countered by hopeful gestures. For instance, Ali Abdul catches Sang-Woo when he is about to fall and therefore be shot in ‘Red-light Green-light’; through co-operation and listening to Oh-il Nam’s voice of experience, the physically weaker team win a tug-of-war, and Ji-Yeong chooses to allow Sae-Byeok to win the game of marbles wherein each loser is immediately shot, preferring half an hour of honest conversation to the contest. These alternative strategies could be considered as attempts to escape the game logic of reaching for strategic tactical advantage, or even as ‘counter-games’ with different stakes and rules and goals to those imposed. Yet, they are nonetheless contestations.

Broadly, Squid Game has been interpreted as a satire on capitalism, as it foregrounds the hyper-competitive world of work or the labour market which pits people against each other, and because of the theme of debt, reflecting high levels of personal indebtedness in South Korea – and elsewhere. Hoping for a sudden stroke of good fortune, at whatever ethical cost, whether by lottery or by sudden market success or becoming ‘internet famous’ is also part of the ‘cruel optimism’ of the game. Importantly, neo-liberalism should not be understood simply as unlimited competition, but as a political project which demands marketization within limits, assured by the state which serves as regulator or rule-keeper (Schrape, 2020). For this political project, the ‘economy is basically a game’ (Foucault, 2008: 201). While typically considered as sceptical anti-utopia, neo-liberalism arguably should be understood as an attempt to create a new, more perfect world of free market competition. Thus, Squid Game is both a dystopia and an ‘anti-utopia’ targeted at the dominant ‘utopian’ project of our times. Within its satire, playfulness gives way to the ordeal of no-holds-barred competition, with deadly results for the losers and moral degeneration for the winners. Market worth, career milestones, social media metrics; these are our Squid Game.

The narrative ‘game-frame’ of Squid Game is less undermined than it is reconfigured by the final episode wherein Gi-Hun encounters Oh-il Nam, whom he thought dead. Rather than the kindly man who self-sacrificed himself in the game of marbles, Oh-il Nam emerges as one of the orchestrators of the game, who participated in the games after receiving a terminal diagnosis to feel the thrill of the competition. This undermines the ‘fair test’ quality of many of the games, consider the gleeful way he advances in ‘Red-light, Green-light’ while all other contestants are terrified of being shot. Before dying, Oh-il Nam bets against anyone helping a homeless man freezing to death on the street. Effectively, this wager against humanitarian solidarity personifies the ‘game frame’ of Squid Game, the assumption that individuals are selfish and competitive. As it shakes Gi-Hun out of the depressed inertia which followed his hollow victory in the games, there is a utopian transformation afoot, with the series finishing on a hopeful note whereby the protagonist appears to resolve to remain in Korea rather than emigrate to America, presumably to resist or oppose the nefarious Squid Game, somehow.

According to the dialectic of utopia and dystopia, critique and ideology (Jameson, 1982), there are opposing impulses within these texts – co-operation and competition, fair play and cheating, love and violence. Yet, across these dichotomies there are commonalities: The games imposed upon the players demand competition, and the counter-strategies improvised from below contest power; these trials reveal the strengths, qualities or even the truth of individuals – whether in a positive or negative key; the test can be transformative, for good or for ill. For instance, the current Front Man of Squid Game turns out to be Hwang In-ho a former contestant who clearly has been corrupted by participating in the competition, as he kills his own brother, Jun-ho. When Peeta is captured by the Capital after the second Hunger Games, he is subjected to tortures which might transform him, and thus his character becomes literally a piece in the game, something to be contended over, for strategic and symbolic victory. Trials, truth-tests and transformations in their utopian and dystopian valances permeate these narratives.

Experimental Analyses

Beyond the critique of capitalism, ‘dystopian games’ allow us to explore some key elements which constitute contemporary culture (De la Fuente, 2007; Váňa, 2020). Clearly, within neo-liberalism, the economy is posed as a game (Foucault, 2008), and gamification and tests pervade the contemporary market and governmentality involves relentless trials and evaluations (Stark, 2020a). Drawing from classic dystopian tropes and contemporary genres of reality TV and computer games, dystopian games reveal and satirize these pervasive forms of contest and competition helping us to understand the social experience of our ‘performance culture’ of constant experimentation (Stark, 2020b).

If indeed we live in a ‘performance complex’, wherein the worth and reality of all things are subjected to tests and rankings, simultaneously, ours is a ‘performative’ culture, wherein politics and society are transformed by symbolic acts (Alexander, 2013). Earlier I have outlined how games and tests are ‘performances’, not just in the sense of theatrical role-playing but as performances which transform characters – either through ordeals or experimenting with facades and impressions, which reshape people (Butler, 1997) What follows experimentally explores how our culture of tests and ordeals orchestrates both ‘truth-telling’ and ‘transformation’. Rather than celebrating the ‘transformativist’ experimentalism of modernity, the attempt here is to understand it, in a dialogue between dystopia and social theory. While the foregoing analysis has strongly foregrounded tests, trials and experiments, these emerge from the ‘game-frame’ within the texts, both the explicit contests and the symbolic struggles between power and resistance. Perhaps various forms of tests and trials exist in any society (Thomassen, 2014), but crucially in modernity, they serve to produce the ‘truth’ and transform individuals and society. Transformations which reveal the truth, and truth which effects transformations – all occurring through tests. What is at play here?

Obviously, the word ‘truth’ here comes in scare-quotes, following Foucault’s work on ‘truth-production’ and his longer genealogy of modes of ‘truth-telling’ (Foucault, 2005). Thus, ‘truth’ is not a matter of accuracy or factuality from a philosophical position of objectivity nor merely subjective, but instead socially produced. For instance, in the market, price arrived at through bargaining is the mode of veridiction which decides on value (Foucault, 2008). This ‘market-test’ described by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) as a specific ‘order of worth’ among others – for instance, caring work generally has a low market exchange value but a high symbolic value (Lynch, 2022). Similarly, the true character of Katniss or Gi-hun is unknown, to the public and to themselves, until they undergo the ordeal of the game. Without the test, the truth is unclear, yet modernity also insists on further testing, re-evaluation, more thorough and rigorous exploration and experimentation. Furthermore, what is tested is not just the individual resolve of particular characters, because these protagonists stand symbolically for humanity, or for the oppressed: their struggles, temptations to corruption and persistence matter. Indeed, hopes for collective futures narratively hinge on the fate and choices of these figures. The truth which emerges through these contests matters, within the fictive frame of these dystopias and beyond.

Strikingly, the terms ‘test’ and ‘testimony’ share a Latin etymology, as witnessing, attesting to an experience or conviction. Caution in terms of cultural generalization must be taken here, and Foucault’s exploration of ‘truth-telling’ is quite specific to ‘the West’ and strands within that: ‘Rather, every Christian will be called upon to regard life as nothing but a test’ (Foucault, 2005: 464). With respect for cultural differences in Squid Game, Battle Royale, The Platform and many others, a generalized ‘test-orientation’ nevertheless permeates modern society, expressed within capitalism as the meritocratic and competitive market system, and a governmental ‘imperative for evaluation’ (Schrape, 2020). Indeed, these economic games are mirrored within dystopias, with their orchestrators propounding the cynical view that the strong defeat the weak, mercilessness and viciousness are winning strategies and that selfish competitiveness is optimal.

Beyond ‘tests’ which measure ‘indicators’, modernity is suffused with cultural modes of ‘revealing the truth’, particularly examinations and ordeals (Dean and Zamora, 2021). Disciplinary power produces examinations, from psychological assessments to confessions – indeed the prolonged torture of Winston in the latter chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four is an inquisitorial examination. Many dystopias, and utopias before them, culminated in an extensive examination of a protagonist and their ideals, for instance, Gulliver being challenged to justify England to the Houynhims. Sometimes these examinations occur within these game-based dystopias, for instance, the interviews with Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games, occasions of strategic theatricalized examination (Szakolczai, 2015). However, the more prominent truth-test here is the ‘ordeal’, a risky situation which a protagonist must negotiate, which tests their fitness to continue or even survive. These are the mainstay of Squid Game, The Hunger Games and many other films where protagonists are challenged and win through by strength, wits, co-operation or even moral character. While ‘ordeals’ like trial by combat or witch-trials are antiquated, they return in contemporary economic competitions – for instance, repeated job-seeking in a labour-market full of short-contracts, internships, probation periods for new employees and a whole gauntlet of projects, assessments, internal reviews, sales targets and key performance indicators (Lynch, 2022; Woodcock and Johnson, 2018). Whereas the result of an examination can be successful or otherwise, rewarding or stigmatizing, the very process of an ordeal can be harrowing or injurious. Through the crucible of being ‘put to the test’, ordeals can be transformative.

Particularly in ‘Young Adult’ genres, transformation is a leitmotif, drawing from bildungsroman traditions of ‘coming-of-age’ stories, wherein characters not only learn about themselves but are changed (Koselleck, 2002). These are imagined as ‘liminal’ transitions between different statuses, which not only reconfigure an individual’s position within a structure, but transforms them (Thomassen, 2014). Crucially, not all conceptions of ‘transformation’ are the same; an individual may simply add experiences or skills to their repertoire, or they may undergo complete metamorphosis, shifting shape or character, perhaps becoming completely different from what they were before (Bynum, 2001). Between these moderate and extreme versions of change there are two major cultural models of transformation – epistrophe and metanoia (Foucault, 2005). The former effectively means ‘awakening’, somewhat overlapping with the modern sense of ‘enlightenment’, but with antecedents like the biblical ‘the scales fell from his eyes’ or the Platonic journey out of the cave to see the light. It is transformation through seeing the ‘truth’. The latter is not just a change of perception, but a ‘change of heart’, whereby an individual is either purged of previous characteristics, or unfolds and develops what was within, perhaps refined by undergoing an ordeal. Both epistrophe and metanoia pervade contemporary culture; a narrative where people do not see things anew or become transfigured by their experiences is a rarity.

Personal transformations are central to The Hunger Games, narrated directly by Katniss as turbulent, even traumatic experiences. From having to become a hunter to support her family, to taking her sister’s place at the Reaping, being trained as a warrior, learning to perform for the public spectacle, falling in love and taking political action, she is continuously transformed, but generally uncertain, vacillating between doubt and commitment. Implicitly, these transformations rid her of inhibitions and develop her self-knowledge, allowing the potential within her to emerge through courageous choices. Similarly, Gi-Hun is transformed by the Squid Game, from being a compulsive gambler to being deliberately kind to other players, developing hatred towards Sang Woo, but then sparing his life. This heroic bildung then slips into inertia and depression after victory, until he realizes that the games were rigged, perceives the continued existence of Squid Game, and resolves to oppose it.

These transformations are unexceptional, typical of character development across many genres. Yet rather than celebrate transformations, dystopian games also provoke caution about how transformations are constituted through trials and ordeals, which might reveal the ‘truth’. Both Christian theology and earlier Greek philosophy emphasized this relationship of truth and transformation: ‘It postulates that for the subject to have the right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself’ (Foucault, 2005: 15). Against the valorization of transformation through fiction – echoed across a vast range of human sciences, from education to psychology to sociology – there is also a negative valance of transformation. Dystopias from classics to contemporaries highlight how totalitarian or capitalistic regimes transform people, perhaps into docile puppets or vicious competitors. For Fisher’s (2009) ‘capitalist realism’ these ‘realisations of change’ might well be pseudo-transformations, exhorted by dominant neo-liberalism, poor substitutes for social change. Troublingly, ‘games’ transform protagonists – tests reveal the truth of characters, whatever the performance – whether it is a pantomime or a life and death struggle. While the ‘game’ of public stage and private authenticity within The Hunger Games explores the ways in which roles taken on as artifice can transform individuals, which is an older trope (Szakolczai, 2015), but within dystopian games, playing in a competition is equally transformative.

Why do these ‘dystopian games’ of tests, truth and transformation matter?

Critical dystopias which focus on tests are a fruitful avenue for investigating modern culture, with certain strengths and weaknesses – they are popular and resonate with enormous populations, which might suggest many reasons: qualities of the narrative like action, thrill or comedy rather than the tension of tests. Analysing fiction entails tricky interpretations, which is not so much subjective as it is socially situated in an ‘interpretive community’ (Fish, 1982), albeit that is equally true of other qualitative research, including genealogies of truth and intellectual history. Thus, with caveats and hesitations, dystopian games intimate problems not just with neo-liberalism, but the wider modern ontology of truth-telling and transformation which ranges from popular culture to governmentalist social-policy to academic disciplines. Strikingly, total change in the form of revolution is the quintessential utopian project, which sought to reveal the ‘truth’ of history (Koselleck, 2002). Modernity is an experiment, but after centuries of change, the dystopian intuition that transformation may be a poisoned chalice rather than revealing the truth resonates strongly.

Experimentally, this analysis suggests that modernity proceeds on an ‘ontology of transformativity’, meaning it posits selves, states and society as malleable, subject to change through events and the working out of their inner logics. Modernity as an experimental project proceeds on the assumption of the contingency of all circumstances and the potential for transformation. Such ‘transformativity’, while always interminable and incomplete, is interpreted as an indicator of the truth; a change is not random, contingent, hybrid or promiscuous but figured as a ‘becoming’ which has significance. To be clear, this analysis is not an endorsement of ‘transformativity’ or an insistence that it pervades society; just as Butler’s focus on ‘performativity’ has frequently been misunderstood, the resonance of the phrase ‘transformativity’ might seem to endorse and encourage all forms of change, but as dystopian texts demonstrate, change can be an excruciating ordeal. Whether described as emancipation or oppression, utopian or dystopian, the assumption of transformability deserves further rumination and exploration as a philosophical ontology, immensely varied, but also pervasive through modern society and culture.

While generally an inchoate idea, modern institutions from education to the market deliberately cultivate tests which transform and reveal the truth; effectively we know ourselves through examinations and ordeals. Stasis indicates nothing. Change is indexed to a deeper process. Something of this dynamic is captured in Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) work on ‘tests’ of strength and truth, where the imperative for justification requires everything be measured against criteria. However, what emerges from dystopian games is that an endless series of games and transformations can be nightmarish. According to these dystopian visions, the proliferation of evaluation and competitions which transforms people and sutures them to the truth of their performance is the contemporary problem of power, every bit as dystopian as the classic problems of ideology, oppression or even totalitarianism. Alongside critiquing this regime of tests, trials, transformation and truth-telling as neo-liberal gamification or governmental interference, it is necessary to recognize how it animates our own thinking.

Conclusion

Making conclusions about modern culture and capitalism based on ‘dystopian games’ is a dubious enterprise, obviously because of the limits of generalization from cultural analysis, and ironically, because the whole idea that the ‘reality’ can be ascertained through the test of a cultural interpretation is itself experimentalist. Obviously, fictive dystopias are implicitly too stark, overly negative and pessimistic, warning of what might be less than what has already come to pass (Suvin, 2016). Nevertheless, thinking through modern culture through the lens of dystopian games we can probe ambivalences around tests, truth and transformativity.

Concern proliferates about how social media or digital devices are transforming our personalities and even our neural circuits yet, conversely, contemporary politics are strongly oriented towards transformations of consciousness and conduct (Zuboff, 2019). Who is enacting the transformation upon whom and for what purposes are salient ethical questions here. Yet, the idea of ‘transformativity’, the sense of modernity as an ever-evolving experiment, and of society and subjectivity as infinitely malleable also deserve consideration. Post-structuralist dismissals of any claims about human nature granted, what matters is to recognize that the assumption of ‘transformativity’ runs through modern thought – from pop-psychology to identity politics to human sciences including economics and sociology, and these are implemented through state governmentality, market actors and even social movements. Perhaps the assumption of malleability operates as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ – changes are anticipated, enacted and recognized by those undergoing them in a self-confirming circle. This poses two considerations: First, that transformation is over-emphasized, and that change might occur more by reconfiguration of situations rather than the actual alteration of elements; second, that there may be limits to ‘transformativity’ – even with CRISPr, gene-editing human biology may have limited capacity to change, and ‘society’ may not be infinitely elastic, indefinitely capable of change or perhaps even eclipsed by transformation, becoming merely a ‘network’ or just a game!

The ‘sociology of tests’ (Marres and Stark, 2020; Pinch, 1993; Stark, 2020a, 2020b) draws attention to a landscape of tests, evaluations, rankings, trials, and performances, which proliferate within modernity. Rendering society as a competition can have invidious effects, both on the losers and winners of these tests (Lynch, 2022). Here modernity emerges as an experiment; both an attempt to prove something and a venture to create something new (Koselleck, 2002). Clearly, dystopias render these experiments as cruel spectacles to be resisted and overthrown. Yet, beyond this drama, the diagnosis they offer of these staged games provokes ambivalent considerations. The experiments of The Hunger Games and Squid Game are designed to prove something about humanity, to reveal a Hobbesian primal violence and self-interest – the final wager of Oh-Il-Nam is a bet against human kindness. Heroes resist, proving themselves to be caring and co-operative, yet what remains is the logic of the experiment, subjected to certain conditions the truth emerges, through transformations – supposedly. Regardless, everyone will continuously be subjected to tests and experiments, to measure their strength and transform them – under neo-liberalism everyone must seek to achieve their full potential. Any settled form of ‘being’ is displaced by ‘becoming’ in perpetual uncertainty and change with no settled grounds.

Lexically, ‘proof’ as proven by experiments is linked to processes of proving, in the sense of purifying or ‘improving’. Here ‘truth’ is not conceived metaphysically as an essence, but as a social production through cultural modes of ‘truth-telling’ and institutionalized ‘modes of veridiction’ (Foucault, 2008). The imperative to discover the truth behind performances drives a ‘hermeneutics of depth’ or even a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Felski, 2015) whereby all phenomena and events are indexed as proxies or indicators for a ‘truth’ which is obscured, perpetually emerging and evolving. Such ‘truth-quests’ drive utopian projects in modernity, from science and social policy reform to political visions, each of which have dystopian sides. Of course, the trope of the revolution gone awry is commonplace in classic dystopias, but dystopian games have a further twist; the demand for contests which would reveal the ‘truth’ becomes a spectacle or even a pantomime of transformation. The ‘true’ victor and the ‘truth’ of humanity is delivered through cruel tournaments, so that the process of determining ‘reality’ is torturous, driving participants beyond their limits and transforming them. The protagonists of The Hunger Games and Squid Game are redeemed by withdrawing from the game. Perhaps retreating from proving the truth and transforming ourselves, even intermittently, is the warning that challenges us in ‘dystopian games’.