I wanted to open up a thread for discussion about the Battle Royale genre, but in doing so wanted to highlight the novel/film _Battle Royale_ and the way it's themes have been exported into the now massively popular game genre. _Battle Royale_ could even be said to be responsible for an entire genre of dystopian YA literature (_Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent_, etc.) Much has already been written elsewhere about this so I'm going to present this information in a series of excerpts. The two below excerpts are from [Labor Games: Youth, Work, and Politics in East Asia](https://watermark.silverchair.com/pos233_01Lukacs_FF.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAu0wggLpBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggLaMIIC1gIBADCCAs8GCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQM15P5fWRODJlVzJf1AgEQgIICoE8QPp6vVwAi4wR-rx5WuCg9osJPbe4CecvHC379vhWnKuxhMw9dt7a5INdV0RkX_vy9jmw4pHrrKDwRwXPHDNYnwEAGPr2aOowjCkOQtWFWZG7cHZPmj-ktu0_y-7vANNQUiYkpq7fQWAwRMHRbk5LH0TbvqFl7sd0-3hr1dwR8t19vZLSPGODLA2sfSHvpCOQaY6ZYyqsRJu3Kg6FlDQtYnoESSYsvptvg54X78FrxZQqTozVs2QkJexNYlu1eFvlHVePJQpA4sz1CoVTRV1Ln6aem9HvvN4ZFXTyR4M-2eFmiaSc7Qu0Eb5U5ptqhng8FDEZMz0EnB-Fe3FtX1uyJQt4uemF6CYBBaRTUIaMky0iu3HIpQwl4TrRfrgRrN3Op2E63AgZJhw_nI8AlAUILU4FsASujJUIqVc-ObB6__P_--zQsl_htj3cV1sdhpsdKG_TpiUg-Z3fz4u05gH1d3bm3IbIWOmvk7UcAu2RUCheoUCmjH6uS3-V2_BFqkHSGx2nFNOMDJTtg4C84QHiUdjfOV9AKAlrMSAHG4b5Z8D443O8oX-2WZyMLTSaJXalKSuw4gGCTQyEuAzw53mSpZYe420uQtaHIp50HxwT-vBpJOoPkJKEvWR97rMNTIwkkUI-0VS9eR-FJQJ2CrPNly9DMjNtWctRrvJc48NY-9OT4Ej4z5B3xjSGb06pbsdVGCZs3Z4xuGh_XStMdncDpFOSpIvdov-VW7vR2vkz0pFycGlFKSKc5VaO8zw1CS74m0N60Zp9Mh3IlkoGADscnPHZ_JJysK48AZrA-itkx3OgdeamNscTHB-Jmoguu4CxHumhx6vkZBJv89C5ODVDWeJZUYv-uY2Y-6NEulBoz--AehZ2Hra6lR_lGnst8iQ)(PDF warning), a excellent 30 page academic article that goes into great detail about the situation in Japan that informed the work.
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Battle Royale (2000) has received critical acclaim worldwide. In Japan, it has become one of the ten highest-grossing films. The film’s engagement with youth bashing touched a raw nerve in recessionary Japan, where pundits relentlessly called young people spoiled and lazy, blaming them for Japan’s economic woes. The film resonated with young people’s experiences of the shifting expectations toward them. Certainly, young viewers did not see the film as science fiction disconnected from their everyday lives. Rather, they felt that the film bluntly spelled out what they were increasingly expected to do: to “battle it out” in conditions in which they were not equipped to win or even to survive. The film relies on military imagery to describe the cruelty of a neoliberal labor market that allows individuals only two options: win or lose. Ann Anagnost observes that the military imagery Battle Royale evokes is not unique to Japan. In this imagery, Anagnost argues, personal futures are intimately intertwined with national ones. It is not only individuals who fight for survival. “These military metaphors,” she writes, “resonate with the resurgence of hypernationalism in which the nation is seen as engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival.”
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By the late 1980s, economic growth had faltered, and the burst of a speculative asset bubble between 1986 and 1991 pushed the country into a long recession.14 The institutions that safeguarded the high-speed economic growth (high growth) period—the developmental state, large corporations (keiretsu),15 and the system of lifetime employment—started to crumble. The government was under growing pressure to further the deregulation of the national economy, including the domestic labor market. Steven Vogel argues that although Japanese corporations were under mounting pressure to slim down their workforce and replace their system of lifetime employment with a system of merit-based pay, they did not abandon the postwar labor contract.16 This is true. While corporations tried to preserve the system of lifetime employment for their older employees, the prolonged recession forced them to hire new employees on flexible contracts if they were not forced to freeze hiring altogether.
(emphasis added)
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The timing of the book’s release coincided with Japan’s descent from an all-consuming economic high. Japan was in the midst of its “lost decade” (失われた十年; Ushinawareta jūnen) following the crash of the bubble economy in 1990, earmarked by the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo sarin gas attacks perpetrated by Aum Shinrikyo cult members (地下鉄サリン事件; Chikatetsu sarin jiken). The horrific 1997 Kobe child murders (神戸連続児童殺傷事件; Kōbe renzoku jidō sasshō jiken) brought to light a rising spate in violent juvenile crime. Then Takami comes along with Battle Royale. – Battle Royale: From Dystopian Thriller to Cult Classic
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“I wanted to write about the trapped feeling of living in Japan I’ve felt clearly since childhood…and that’s what I attempted to do. Here in Japan, being different from other people makes you a potential scapegoat when anything goes wrong…. Even if a rule is clearly ridiculous, nobody will speak out against it, because people think, “If I say something, others will think I’m different,” and the rule continues unchanged.” – Takami Koushun, Author of Battle Royale
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The genre of games doesn’t just borrow its gameplay conceits — deserted island, random weapons, dangerous parts of the map, sole survivor — from the movie Battle Royale, it also enacts the same crisis of meritocracy, where there are not enough rewards to go around. Around 2017, when the games first took off, it was clearer than ever before that American meritocracy had broken down. The institutions that had once, however imperfectly, facilitated social mobility, particularly higher education, now promise only endless debt. The lucky ones — the influencers — seem closer to us than ever, their lives floating impressively by on our social media feeds. Yet most of us live much more constrained lives, as we watch our hopes for a prosperous, stable future evaporate. And then there is the constant threat of random, meaningless violence: fires, shootings, riots, the pandemic.
>Battle royale games are the stories kids tell themselves about this culture of cutthroat competition. Just like the real world, in battle royale games only the one percent win. But these games are a fantasy in which this unequal outcome is produced transparently and equitably, albeit violently, a fairy tale about how the meritocracy should really work. Though it is tough, brutal, and difficult, it is fair; and though you have only a small chance of winning, the forces that oppress you are not unseen — they are clear and distinct. The decks are not stacked: everyone has the same health, the same armor, the same access to weapons and upgrades. You’ll probably die. But you will live and die on your skills alone. – Meritocracy and Battle Royale
At it's core, Battle Royale is about children competing against each other for scarce resources. While it sprung from a period in Japanese history where competition was rife among students for prized employment opportunities, the metaphor can be extended. What I think makes it the perfect game genre for the Anthropocene is that it's not just a Man VS Man conflict, but a conflict set against Man VS Nature. The constantly decreasing map size driving players into conflict with each other, could be seen as a metaphor for climate change, as soon the earth itself will have smaller "habitable zones" where people will compete for natural resources like water.
As to the "Free to Play" and "microtransaction" aspects of games like _Fortnight_, I want to highlight Tim Roger's old insert credit article ["who killed videogames? (a ghost story)"](https://web.archive.org/web/20120128084303/https://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/), about the dark machinations behind addictive "social games" of the Facebook era.
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“The players will come for the cute characters, and stay for the cruel mathematics.”
I open up this thread to discussion of all things Battle Royale, including and especially the games that have taken their inspiration from the novel.
