Squid Games, The Hunger Games, Death Games, and Everything Else With the Word Game

Emerson Rhodes, ‘24

In 1868, John Stewart Mill said the word “dystopia” for the first time. He was addressing the House of Commons, in regards to the government's proposed Irish land policy, when he remarked “It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dystopians”.However, it wasn’t until the 1920s that this word became the genre of literature that we care about. In 1921, Yevgeny Zamyatin published We, which is not the first dystopia ever written but sets up one of the most defining tropes we currently associate with dystopias, the totalitarian government gone mad. From We emerged almost every popular piece of 20th century dystopian fiction; Huxley’s Brave New World, Vonnegut's Player Piano, and Ayn Rand’s Anthem all cite Zamyatin’s We as an influence. The most popular novel to emerge from this era of dystopian fiction of all time was George Orwell’s 1984, which borrows themes of totalitarianism and surveillance stated directly from We.

From the foundational period of dystopian fiction comes a dystopian revolution, if you will. In 2008 Suzanne Collins published one of the most defining pieces of teen fiction ever written, The Hunger Games., Like Twilight before it, The Hunger Games and its sequels sparked a new genre to emerge, “Teen Dystopian Fiction.” It would be wrong to say that The Hunger Games was the first teen dystopia; I think that accolade goes to A Wrinkle in Time. But it accomplished something that A Wrinkle in Time didn’t: it became really popular on Tumblr (I’m only kind of joking here). Regardless of your thoughts, it is undeniable that The Hunger Games became an incredible cultural phenomenon. Its fame was bolstered by the movie starring Jennifer Lawrence; The Hunger Games movie adaptation, it should be noted, is the second highest-grossing Lionsgate film of all time, second only to Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the sequel. Without touching on the lore of The Hunger Games or the culture surrounding it, its influence cannot be understated. I would go as far as to say that almost every single teen dystopia published since has drawn at least a little bit from The Hunger Games.

Unfortunately, none of them copy the defining part of the book, the thing that made it so shocking to read for teens the first time around -- the death game.

Squid Game, in a lot of ways, embodies the gap left by The Hunger Games, The raw gore that drew teens to The Hunger Games was never quite recreated in an era of content so saturated with dystopias. I can’t speak for everyone, but when I first read The Hunger Games, I was really drawn to its violence. It was that first book that felt “adult” to me, especially me reading it as a kid, which was incredibly exciting. Unfortunately, the teen dystopia did not run with that part of the book as the genre-defining characteristic, instead choosing to hark on lackluster heterosexual romance.

Anyway, Squid Game is a lot of what I think the teen dystopia should have been back then. It’s a fast-paced and violent critique of society. It is emblematic of a new phase of dystopia, death games. As previously mentioned, death game genre content has existed for years. Some of the most popular titles from the genre are the anime Sword Art Online, The Hunger Games, the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale, and the notorious horror franchise Saw. Not to forget the Netflix show Alice in Borderland, which has a plot incredibly similar to Squid Game, and was released in 2020. However, out of these new contributions to the genre, Squid Game seems to have achieved the most global fame, in the vein of The Hunger Games or George Orwell.

A death game is, as the name implies, a game in which loss equates to death. However, two other parameters usually define a death game; one, it’s a battle royale-style conflict, meaning there can only be one winner; two, it has to be for the entertainment of the “elites”, elites here being a broad term for people in a high social class, whether from wealth or power or funky hairstyles, is story-specific.

Zamyatin’s We set another precedent within dystopian literature’s critique of society. Moreover, to understand dystopias, we have to understand the societies that create them and vice versa. We was written in the post-World War I Soviet Union. Its critiques of totalitarianism directly reflect the fear that a lot of Russians had, which was that the single-party state of the USSR would control and dictate every part of people's lives. Much of the dystopian literature of the 20th century follows a pattern of fearing totalitarianism and, by proxy, communism.

It wasn't until the early 21st century that we started to see a shift in the content of dystopias; a) because dystopian literature started catering to a younger audience and b) because communism wasn’t seen as the threat it once was. The Hunger Games ultimately is not a critique of a particular system but of social media and reality TV, two very new concepts that have come to dominate the lives of young people. Katniss's survival in The Hunger Games is ultimately due to wealthy people in the Capitol who like her; she’s kept in the games to increase viewership. Every subsequent teen dystopia is some riff on The Hunger Games, but unfortunately, none of them have the same level of social critique as the original. Many of them fall back on the tropes of the 20th century dystopian genre with a new fresh teen twist; in essence, “Government bad! Teen rebellion time!!” and the few that don’t fall into this category are, generally speaking, loose metaphors for racism with the persecuted “race” being teenagers with mind powers.

However, with Squid Game, these themes start to shift back to 20th-century dystopias, but instead of the big totalitarian big-brother looming, it’s wealthy capitalists. Korea, in particular, has been ravaged by the effects of capitalism. Among OECD countries (OECD stands for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD countries are highly developed countries that are usually compared to set standards for developing nations), Korea ranks in the bottom three regarding relative poverty rate and ranks dead last regarding relative poverty rate for those 65+. Young people have it rough, too, with a youth unemployment rate of 22%. At the same time, a group of Korean elites, dubbed “chaebols,” hold Korea in an economic chokehold. The government essentially ignores the corruption of these chaebols due to their "importance to Korea's economy." The top 10 of these elites own 27% of all Korea’s business assets. Koreans satirically refer to this phenomenon as “Hell Joseon,” as a reference to the Joseon dynasty that was incredibly hierarchical. It should be mentioned that the second episode of Squid Game is titled “hell.”

From this, it doesn’t seem far off to say that the plot of Squid Game is a fairly apt allegory for the ways in which capitalism works; hundreds of destitute, working-class citizens being thrown into a deadly game for the delight of the uber-wealthy, motivated only by the prospect of being able to move up in society. Squid Game's success, I think, is partially driven by the fact that a lot of people relate to the protagonists, Gi-hun’s, struggle to survive and the danger he and every other participant puts themselves in to get out of debt. Due to the pandemic, people are slowly realizing that their jobs suck. In the US, for example, 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August alone; in the week of October 18, almost over 100,000 workers went on strike from companies like John Deere and Kellog, while Hollywood narrowly missed a strike of 60,000 production workers. It would not be deceitful to say that there is a sense of unrest within the working class and their conditions, and Squid Game is an honest reflection of that.

It’s also interesting to mention that many popular dystopias throughout history have existed as either alternate universes or alternate timelines, but Squid Game exists in our timeline. As a result, there is less of a separation between the characters' reality and our reality. Which, in the context of its critique of capitalism, makes it much more transparent.

These dystopias are ultimately reflections of the societies within which they were written and created. Like the fear of surveillance in We and 1984 and the forced performance of children in The Hunger Games, Squid Game not only represents a new shift in dystopian fiction, but a shift in the world. Hopefully, people will get better jobs in the future, and hopefully, in the future, the plot of Squid Game will seem unfathomable. Until then, I hope that Netflix doesn't cancel the show.