"456 wants to stop the game," said a Pink Guard way back in 2021, when Squid Game's Seong Gi-hun tried to call off the last round of the sadistic tournament that pits desperate people against each other in deadly children's games for a massive cash prize.
These turned out to be prophetic words: Gi-hun's entire mission across the subsequent two seasons became putting an end to those fatal games. But, looking at the wider entertainment landscape, Player 456 might be left a little crestfallen. This year, survival games have been unstoppable: on both the big and small screen, the genre has taken over.
Let the games begin
Not only is the genre extremely prevalent this year, but it's also extremely popular. Four years after Squid Game season 1 became Netflix's biggest show of all time, Squid Game season 3 set a new record as the biggest ever premiere for the streamer – and rumors of a US-set spin-off continue to gain momentum. The Hunger Games also remains a global phenomenon, with Sunrise on the Reaping selling 1.5 million books in the US in its first week alone.
"These stories capture the zeitgeist of modern life: whether in work, at school or even on social media, we are tested and measured against our peers every day," says Dr. Tom Boland, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology & Criminality at University College Cork.
He explains that, while 20th-century dystopias "focused more on totalitarian control and propaganda," today's dystopias "have a renewed focus on competition, where individuals are put to the test and stretched to the limit, and ultimately eliminate each other." There can usually only be one winner, after all.
"It's an exaggerated satire of contemporary capitalist society, but evidently it really grips people, because it reminds them of the conditions they live with and negotiate every day," he adds.
Of course, this phenomenon didn't come out of nowhere. The Running Man and The Long Walk are both adapted from source material that predates the likes of Squid Game and The Hunger Games by decades. "Capitalism has been a problem for centuries, not just decades," points out Dr. Boland.
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Indeed, capitalism and its myriad issues are these stories' lifeblood. The Running Man's Ben Richards signs up for the titular game – which has a 100% fatality rate – because he lives in crushing poverty and his child needs medicine he can't afford. Similarly, gambling addict Gi-hun's woes began when he was unfairly laid off, and he has no funds to pay for his mother's surgery or to fight for custody of his daughter. The young men of The Long Walk live in deprivation and dream of brighter futures, and The Hunger Games' protagonists are drawn from the impoverished District 12, in sharp contrast to the ultra-wealthy Capitol.
And, while some of these stories take place in a near-distant future or in an alternate reality, like The Running Man and The Hunger Games, some, like Squid Game, take place in our own times, demonstrating the genre's enduring relevance. "Dystopian fiction only works when it paints a satirical picture of our own society – it works by exaggerating things like the extent of propaganda or social control or the centralization of power," says Dr. Boland. "By re-imagining society through fiction, the audience becomes sensitized to particular elements – for instance, the extent to which systems pit us against each other. While it's always somewhat fantastical, treading a line between being credible or incredible, dystopian fiction ages very well – it doesn't seem dated like social realism, but can seem relevant to new audiences over time."
Winners and losers
It's not just critiques of capitalism that these properties have in common, either. Take a closer look, and you might find that the protagonists share similar traits. Ben Richards and Seong Gi-hun both join their respective games for their ailing family members, both reject a deal to leave the games with their lives (but not their morals), and both try to take on the games themselves, just like Haymitch Abernathy's attempts to destroy the arena in Sunrise on the Reaping, or Peter McVries's final act of killing the Major in The Long Walk.
As Dr. Boland says, these stories' protagonists are "usually given a moral test of some kind," and "they are forced to make ethical choices about whether to comply with the cruel logic of the game, or resist, at great risk to themselves." But, he also adds that one person making moral choices alone is usually not enough to beat the system, and collective action is needed for real change. "Part of the message of these films is that co-operation, even between strangers, which is tricky, is the antidote to relentless competition," he explains, pointing to Gi-hun's rebellion in Squid Game season 2.
But every protagonist needs an antagonist, and those who uphold the system share their own similarities, too. Some of them are figures of militaristic, totalitarian force, like the dictator President Snow and his army of Peacekeepers, or the foreboding US Army Major of The Long Walk.
Often, though, we learn more about the bad guys, which might even provoke unexpected sympathy. Squid Game season 3 followed Kang No-eul, a Pink Guard who'd lost her family in North Korea and who violently opposed the games' black market organ harvesting ring. "I don't want to say it's justification for those Pink Guards who are standing on the wrong side of the system, and not all Pink Guards are like her, but for my character, No-eul, she holds on to that minimal amount of humanity that's left in her," said No-eul actor Park Gyu-young earlier this year.
Similarly, we witnessed a flashback to gamemaker the Front Man's past, in which he took the murderous deal Gi-hun refused (just as The Running Man's hunter Evan McCone took the same bargain Ben Richards refused). These people might uphold brutal systems, but they're human, even if they make the wrong choices – and that, too, reflects our own world.
"As a satire on society, a dystopian film must explain itself: its villains can't just be monsters, but [they must] have a back story which explains their character, like Snow in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes," says Dr. Boland, referencing the Snow-focused Hunger Games prequel, which depicted his twisted love story with District 12 tribute Lucy Gray Baird. "In the latest Squid Game series, we learn a great deal more about the pink guards, which humanizes them. So, those people who run the games are the people who have been formed by the games, which helps us to think through how capitalism forms people; you only make it to the top by being competitive and ignoring any ethical dilemmas in the game."
Play it again (and again)
Another way these stories mirror our reality is by spotlighting suffering as entertainment, as well as our own complicity as voyeurs of pain and spectacle. Suzanne Collins was famously inspired to write The Hunger Games after channel-surfing threw up a particularly grotesque juxtaposition. "I was flipping through images on reality television where these young people were competing for a million dollars or whatever, then I was seeing footage from the Iraq war, and these two things began to fuse together in a very unsettling way, and that is the moment where I got the idea for Katniss's story," she explained.
In The Running Man, protagonist Ben Richards regularly addresses those watching at home in his taped dispatches, and the whole game is explicitly packaged as televised entertainment. "The gamification, even of individuals, you see how individuals find followers, or find an audience based on a very specific thing that goes viral or whatever, and they just keep doubling down on it," Ben Richards actor Glen Powell told us of the survival games genre's popularity earlier this year. "You start to realize what humans are capable of when they're trying to chase followers or an audience. And you look at The Running Man, it's like how this Network literally will put human beings chased and hunted down by the entire world for an audience, in order for ratings, and all those things. I think it's a very universal idea, and, unfortunately, I don't think it's too far off of where we are."
Squid Game season 3, meanwhile, was even more meta with its critique; Gi-hun aims his final statement against the games straight down the camera, at both us and the observing (obscenely wealthy) VIPs. Earlier in the season, the camera is positioned over the shoulder of a VIP as he watches the jump rope game, as if we're seated next to him.
"One thing which distinguishes all these new dystopias from earlier efforts is that the action is hyper-visible, not just spied upon by some secret police, but broadcast for a mass public or a select few. And this dynamic of visibility feeds into how the protagonists perform for their audience," says Dr. Boland.
"Partly, this is about being complicit: the collective appetite for spectacles, from violent sports which create life-long injuries, to exploitative reality-TV, to media frenzies around the personal lives of celebrities, to porn which harms performers – these are all morally dubious. But it’s also about our contemporary sense that we're always being reviewed, always visible, always performing for the camera, the audience, the followers on social media. That's the key contemporary mechanism through which our lives are turned into competitions; there's a ratings metric for everything nowadays – including for this article and for academic commentators!"
In Squid Game season 2, when Gi-hun makes his mission known to the Front Man, the Front Man informs him that "the game will not end unless the world changes." It seems that's true of real life, too: the survival games genre will thrive as long as our world stays the way it is. Sorry, Player 456, but it looks like you lose.
For more on this year's biggest releases, see our roundup of the best movies of 2025 and the best TV shows of 2025.
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