Why Is The Future Full Of Bloodsport? | Capitalism and Spectacle

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:02]Have you ever wondered why we keep writing about deadly game shows? We've written stories of district champions, thunderdomes, and death races in stories of speculative fiction. But we've built these on the foundations of coliseums and kingly tournaments.

[00:00:18]The gladiators of the Roman Empire seem so far removed from our controlled rings and octagons, but we still gather to witness bloodied fists and choke holds.

[00:00:29]This month, I've been consuming a lot of media centered on murderous reality TV, wondering why we keep writing about it.

[00:00:37]And it all began with Rollerblades.

[00:00:41]I've been playing a lot of Roller Drrome, one of the coolest, albeit ridiculous games I've ever experienced.

[00:00:48]Allow me to summarize the gameplay for you.

[00:00:50]You are a woman in a red jumpsuit named Kara Hassan and you are competing in the titular roller drum, a televised competition that tasks you with eliminating house players as quickly and stylishly as possible. Your arsenal begins with two pistols. But you later unlock a shotgun, a grenade launcher, and a science fiction style chargeable rail gun, which you use to dispatch enemies with riot shields, laser beams, and baseball bats. And of course, you do all of this on rollerblades.

[00:01:24]You carine through the arenas, dodging mines, hanging air, and grinding rails in a spectacle of gunfire, smoke, and high score multipliers.

[00:01:33]The architecture is built to serve your extreme sport. And there's not many feelings like exiting a grind to a wall ride, dodging a sniper, and then entering bullet time to headshot one of your aggressors.

[00:01:46]And that's not even just for the purpose of looking badass. You have to do all these grabs, perfect dodges, and the flips because, and this is the dumbest and best part of the game, it is the only way to reload your guns. The gameplay mechanics are built around moving with style and inefficiency to fuel your bloodthirst.

[00:02:08]There were times that I would know I was tapped out of ammunition, speeding towards a mech walker, knowing that if I could just catch the right amount of air, I could combo into a heel grab and pop off that final shot before his flamethrowers could scorch me.

[00:02:24]As a piece of game design, it is genius.

[00:02:27]Tying movement to resource management is a great way to incentivize the pro skateresque areas of the gameplay where it would otherwise be ignored by highcore hunters and speedrunners.

[00:02:38]It would be easier to ignore the grind rails and halfpipes if the only barrier to our passage were the house players, but adding the trick loading mechanic serves to equally weigh the core mechanics of kicking ass and looking good doing it.

[00:02:54]But the showmanship of that core gameplay loop doesn't just serve to aid the game feel. It also serves the narrative, however light it may be.

[00:03:05]Roller Drrome is set in a not tooistant future where a humanitarian crisis has affected the cost of living and taken a toll on the most vulnerable.

[00:03:15]Meanwhile, and obviously related, a new sport called roller drum has been introduced where the Matterhorn Corporation will allow contestants to face off against hordes of their house players for fame, fortune, and failing that a decent life insurance payout.

[00:03:32]I'm sure you're familiar with the concept. It's reared its head in The Running Man, The Hunger Games, MadMax, The Running Man Again, Death Race, and on and on and on. And it's much the same here. The danger is real. The rocket fire pelted at us is in fact a very tangible threat to our character's existence. And the people we kill are only depicted as virtual to create a sense of psychological distance within the narrative. These are real people tasked with the same violence. As House players, they do not have the same individuality or power as us. Sometimes offered little less than a bat to defend against our whirlwind of axles and shotgun shells.

[00:04:14]And in companion to their defenselessness, they all look the same.

[00:04:19]There are no features that can distinguish between two riot guards. The reasoning is obviously a game design choice as there's no point giving the NPCs distinct voices or faces because we won't see them at our blistering pace.

[00:04:32]But that does tie into what I want to speak about the deprioritization of personhood in favor of entertainment.

[00:04:42]The faceless adversaries, arenas, guns, and even our footwear are present so that we can provide the most bombastic, bloodied display that we can.

[00:04:53]All of the elements of game design, our somersaults and face melting grinds are there for our entertainment, of course, but also for the cameras.

[00:05:03]Outside of this coliseum, there are thousands of screaming faces that we serve above all else. The spectacle that we provide is our sole purpose to the Matterhorn Corporation that pays our bills within the second to second gameplay. We don't feel the presence of Voyerism, but it is always there.

[00:05:23]There's this really weird blend of my experience as a player and the narrative of the game play. The woman in the red jumpsuit does as I command and her survivability is based on my performance as I view her from the distance of my living room. And that distance from danger is also present for the faceless audience that have tuned into the latest season of Roller Drrome. I hang extended air so that I can refill the ammunition of my pistols, but this woman does it so that she can survive. And the audience craves it just cuz it looks so [ __ ] cool.

[00:05:57]Roller Drrome was the game that inspired this essay. The narrative only exists in the periphery, and honestly, it's not that interesting.

[00:06:05]But I couldn't help view the game design choices as this strange blend that offers both me and the in-game audience a thrilling show. The House Players 2, devoid of personality due to costsaving, act as a reduction of the human experience to faceless pawn in a world built on the commodification of human life.

[00:06:27]Everything in the game functions to serve spectacle.

[00:06:30]Blood combo tokens and optional challenges create a distanced experience that plants butts and seeds regardless of the lives damaged in the process.

[00:06:41]And all in all, it's damn fine television.

[00:06:46]As part of the research for this essay, I decided to cave into the peer pressure presented on just about every short form platform I'm subscribed to, and I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dineman.

[00:06:58]If you haven't read it or have distanced yourself from the zeitgeist that pushed it onto my feed, here's what you need to know. The book, well, the series, but admittedly I've only read the first volume so far, tells the story of Coast Guard veteran Carl, an endearing, if not a little koginly fish out of water. He enters our story post breakup and caring for his ex's cat, Princess Donut. And for fans of the book, I'm sorry, but I did promise myself I wouldn't give her full title.

[00:07:27]Then, with minimal warning, the world is suddenly terraformed into an 18-le dungeon as the alien Borant Corporation mines Earth dry for its minerals.

[00:07:38]Okay, are you still with me? Okay. Carl takes Princess Donut and enters the world dungeon in hopes that he may survive and clear the dungeon for their own survival and perhaps to be granted Regency of Earth. Look, the book is dumb, but it but it knows that it is.

[00:07:56]It's full of gory violence, lewd humor, and any fans of solo leveling or sword art online will probably have a lot of fun with it. Carl Donut and the rest of humanity are lost and grasping when they enter the dungeon, and most will perish before they reach the tutorial and learn the nature of their imprisonment.

[00:08:16]But here's the run of it.

[00:08:18]The Earth is gone, and in its place is a dungeon labyrinth of goblins, giant rats, slimes, and all the general trappings of an RPG.

[00:08:27]But it's not for nothing. All of this mad science and transformation is in service to Dungeon Crawler World, a survivoresque reality TV show transmitted across the more advanced expanses of the galaxy for the entertainment of the masses.

[00:08:44]And success not only comes from the descent of dungeon levels, but also in the entertainment of sponsors and audience retention.

[00:08:53]Carl and Donut, Donut becomes sentient and capable of complex language, by the way, must navigate not only threats in the way of mobs, bosses, and other crawlers, but must do so with enough star power to gain the security of celebrity status.

[00:09:09]In Roller Drrome, we see a corporation reduce a relatively small group of people to spectacle, but now we see an entire planet, infinitely small, in the cosmos, granted, but entire cultures crushed and reshaped in the hopes of making some good merch.

[00:09:27]And you know what?

[00:09:29]That's not the worst thing to me.

[00:09:32]There's this moment in the book where Carl stumbles onto an early boss fight.

[00:09:38]The room is closed off and bags of trash litter the arena. Things are tense for a moment before a giant woman appears. She is postulated, bloated, and filthy as we invade her dwelling. But all in all, she appears human. Her name is there and she is labeled as the hoarder, an enemy that has been created from a distinctly human trope of mental illness.

[00:10:02]There's personality to her, and it's uncertain how much of her was ever a real person. But it becomes immediately apparent that this dungeon isn't just using minerals and components to be recreated for entertainment, but our experiences and faults, too.

[00:10:19]The book is rife with pop culture references coming from both characters we follow, as well as the AI narrator that contextualizes enemies and items.

[00:10:28]Mobs like orcs and wolves are expected in any media involving dungeons and experience points. But to see a bruiser boss be made out of a roided out gimbro is weirdly insulting as we see human culture reappropriated for violence.

[00:10:45]The idea of being so advanced that their technology is summarized as magic visiting us from the stars only to add us to a menagerie of fantasy fights and catchphrases is hilarious and belittling in the same breath.

[00:10:59]The Borant Corporation takes everything that's human, reshapes it, and molds it into this strange devoid blob of homogeneous entertainment that patronizes us and distills everything we do to a raw figure all for ratings.

[00:11:18]The idea of equating individuals to tools and collecting them as numerical data has its roots in Marxist philosophy referred to as human commodification.

[00:11:29]It argues that under capitalism there is a system in place that reduces personhood to just another piece of machinery for monetary gain to the point that it is completely normalized.

[00:11:41]The idea that a person can be thought of as solely as investment is what comes to mind when I consider the question of dystopian blood sport.

[00:11:51]I think of Georg and his book the society of the spectacle a collection of short thesis where he ruminates not so much as the deep personifying of individuals into machinery or tools for the bourgeoa but rather how much of our experiences become commodified in a similar way.

[00:12:09]He believes that moments that represent humanity become reshaped into not exactly a lived experience but a representation.

[00:12:19]What he refers to as the spectacle. He believed that the consumption of glorified representations of human experience serves to devalue emotion and relationships as more implicit egregious form of commodification to package every element of human life as marketing.

[00:12:38]And of course, we see it. Reality TV offers us condensed conflicts on runways and islands, companionship sold as entertainment, and all to serve sales in some form. This idea of not only bodies and minds, but sociality and existentialism being reappropriated and sold to willing audiences is the thread I feel runs through the trope of Bloodsport, of the gladiator fights recreated for mass media when there is so much less of ourselves to sell. It's what we do when we dance the dance of violent rollerblades and roller drum.

[00:13:14]And it's what Carl refuses to be broken by when he must slay enemies made from his own culture.

[00:13:21]That is why I believe we write so much of Blood Sport. Because when we have taken everything else, we must sell what makes us us.

[00:13:30]And when I think of the diminishment of experience to spectacle, I think of a movie that violent as it is, ruminates how much of ourselves can persist in turmoil.

[00:13:44]One of the most influential pieces of media in the blood sport subg genre is of course Battle Royale by Kenji Fukasaka.

[00:13:53]Released in the year 2000 and based on the novel of the same name, the not too distant future presented is one that is reeling from the effects of a global recession that has entrenched Japan in poverty, crime, and an endemic crisis of juvenile delinquency.

[00:14:09]As a response to the youth crime crisis, the now authoritarian government of Japan enacted the BR act, which selects a class of high school juniors at random to compete in a battle to the death in which only one student will survive.

[00:14:24]The film stands apart from the rest of the text in this essay as the battle is not actually televised or spectated to the public, though it is distinctly gamified with areas of the map being classed as hostile zones seemingly at random to drive players closer together.

[00:14:42]I'm sure Epic and the entire AAA industry are thankful for the ingenuity.

[00:14:48]But there is one person acting a spectator though. An embittered ex-teer by the name of Katano acts as the welcoming party and referee of the game.

[00:14:59]He has complete disdain for the students and his driving ambition is to dwindle their numbers and instill ungodly fear in the youths. He remains sheltered from the elements and the other players, monitoring the explosive collars around their necks and listening to their conversations.

[00:15:15]He is separated from the violence that he perpetrates. And the ones that kill and cry are mere abstractions of disembodied voices and crossed off names.

[00:15:26]And the game is bloody and brutal as expected. The students are given backpacks that contain rations and weapons of various efficacy, ranging from an Uzi, a crossbow, or a hatchet, and their loot crates. The children's survivability in the first few hours is nearly entirely dictated by RNG.

[00:15:45]And I'm sure Epic and the AAA industry is thankful for the ingenuity.

[00:15:50]And the bloodletting does begin quick.

[00:15:53]One student is killed before the game begins, his collar detonated to demonstrate the stakes of descent, and the doorway of their reception leads into gunfire, confusion, and terror.

[00:16:05]The protagonist of the film is Nanahara, a young man whose life is dictated not by violent delinquency, but his difficulty processing his father's suicide.

[00:16:16]The death of his family was spurred by the collapse of social order. And now Nanahara himself is subject once again to the recession's threat on his livelihood.

[00:16:27]He fights for survival in a manner that his father couldn't. and their sheer indomitability in his refusal to submit as the adults around him succumb to their anguish or fail him entirely.

[00:16:41]That sense of himself that holds fast against the torrent of dehumanization can be felt not just in our protagonist but among almost all the combatants of the unfortunate class.

[00:16:54]And this is what I think sets battle royale apart from the projects that followed in its wake. The blades and bullets rip and tear through undeserving bodies like they do in the Hunger Games, like they do in The Running Man.

[00:17:07]But there's something so much more human about what happens here. When two classmates face off against each other, they do it in a distinctly adolescent manner. They squash beef, confess their unrequited crushes, or air out petty grudges as they mutually face their mortality.

[00:17:26]Despite the addition of murder, the social hierarchy is still at play here.

[00:17:31]There is death here, but it does not dull the impenetrable humanity of its subjects.

[00:17:37]This is a battle royale, a blood sport film, but it feels like a teen melodrama.

[00:17:45]The place of human experience in this film of love, angst, and the anxieties of adolescence are at the core of what makes battle royale feel so special.

[00:17:55]The idea that human experience can exist in a dehumanized space is beautiful in its own right.

[00:18:03]This may be an example of how the spectacle can aim to reshape and warp human emotion and experiences into a commodity.

[00:18:11]And perhaps it can be. We as viewers are spectators of the game and see humanity in ways that their perpetrators simply can't.

[00:18:20]They hear the voices and watch as disorder dissolves even within the microcosms of civility, but they do not see the shared looks.

[00:18:28]They don't see the tears or half smiles that can be found here. Battle Royale dehumanizes its contestants when they are numerized by class ranks. Katano distances themselves as he watches their vitals on a monitor.

[00:18:43]But in doing so, they tell themselves a half story, stripping away the souls of these victims. But there is that glimmer of personhood that cannot be squashed, an essence that cannot be extinguished.

[00:18:57]Battle Royale is violent and upsetting.

[00:19:01]But there is hope to be found in the resilience of humanity.

[00:19:08]And that idea of the indomitable human spirit is the grand appeal of the final piece of media that I would like to present. Roller Drrome offers us a perspective on how cheering crowds can become blind to the violence before them.

[00:19:23]Dungeon crawler Carl sees colonizers in the burgeois reappropriating culture and souls as tools for its mination.

[00:19:30]And battle royale displays that amid the most horrific violence, there is innocence to be found.

[00:19:38]But this last piece of media is perhaps one of the most violent pieces of Marxist spectacle I found. Where the near totality of personhood, their body, choices, and experiences are encapsulated so supremely that they are stripped entirely of agency and reformed into terrible and total spectacle.

[00:19:58]violent, but without shedding a drop of blood.

[00:20:03]The Truman Show, released in 1998, tells the story of Truman Burbank, an unassuming man living an unassuming life in an idealic 1950s inspired town. But, and I imagine you already know this, all is not as it seems in Sea Haven.

[00:20:23]The reality of this place is that everything that can be found in this quaint little town is there to serve a television show.

[00:20:32]Scripted actors, routine weather events, and product placement are all part of the machine of an invisible audience, except of course for Truman.

[00:20:42]He was selected at birth from an unwanted pregnancy and adopted by a media conglomerate.

[00:20:49]And since that day of haze and preconciousness, Truman has lived a life designed for entertainment.

[00:20:56]His identity and way of living are dictated by plot lines. Some, like his marriage to Merrill, are designed for story convenience, whereas others, like the death of his father, are written and delivered to shape Truman's psychology as a form of containment. Truman's environment is one of total control. He lives and breathes entirely for the masses. And we see the voyers that watch him for comfort and companionship, seemingly incredulous to the commodification of their fellow man.

[00:21:29]The creator of the show, Kristoff, barely masks his selfdeification.

[00:21:34]And he's not ignorant to the inhumanity of this.

[00:21:38]There are protesters that call for Truman's freedom, which he dismisses, stating that if Truman wanted to be free, he would simply take it. His ambitions are grand and he thinks of himself as a just and loving God.

[00:21:52]And he is gearing up for his grandest fabrication.

[00:21:57]Truman entered the world through the lens of a camera, learned to walk, lost his teeth, and fell in love. Surrounded by spectators, everything controlled and narratively satisfying.

[00:22:09]But Kristoff has his eyes set on creationism.

[00:22:13]To see the first ever televised conception, the creation of a being not just placed in a world of spectacle, but born to it.

[00:22:23]This is the greatest dehumanization of commodity fetishism. To have the world watch as the totality of human experience is repackaged and sold, only to see the creation of another to feed the audience. a replicating machine of reality entertainment.

[00:22:41]But the control does falter, allowing for rebellion to bleed through.

[00:22:48]When we meet Truman, he is battling with an existential crisis.

[00:22:52]He has been given a life with little to want for, but away from the eyes of Merrill and hopefully the adoring public, Truman pines for Sylvia.

[00:23:04]She was an extra in his high school sweetheart arc that shared an impassioned and completely unscripted kiss with him before the producers caught wind and fired her. They send an actor playing her father to detain her and unknowingly alter Truman forever when he tells Truman that they are moving to Fiji and Fiji becomes the obsessive escape for Truman. The majority of the plot revolves around his itchy feet, booking flights, boarding buses, all in the search of Sylvia.

[00:23:38]And of course, he is thwarted by formulated happen stance. The bus breaks down, the flights are over booked, and radioactive leaks bar his passage.

[00:23:48]And Truman does persist. Of course, he does not yield, and he will not be broken. There is life beyond the waters of Sea Haven that he craves.

[00:23:59]encapsulated in that romantic tropical archipelago.

[00:24:03]But the promise of Fiji does in its own way betray Truman and illustrate just how smothering the spectacle can be.

[00:24:16]Because Sylvia is not in Fiji, the collection of islands do not hold his beloved. They are mentioned purely for plot purposes to hold internal consistency within the narrative. A real place, sure, but the psychological merit of escapism they hold are entirely fabricated.

[00:24:39]Obsession born in Truman that forces him to scrutinize and rebel against the media mogul that imprisons him are in themselves products of his imprisonment.

[00:24:49]Fiji exists only to tie up loose narrative threads.

[00:24:54]Even Truman's yearning for freedom are the consequence of sloppy writing. The ending of the movie does see Truman escape. He takes to the waters despite his debilitating phobia, and those that profit and dictate him create calamitous winds and waves to stand against him.

[00:25:14]And when he faces Kristoff, the producer says to him, that he's seen everything, that Kristoff knows Truman better than he knows himself.

[00:25:24]And Truman says, "You never had a camera in my head."

[00:25:29]It's a self-proclamation of defiance, an act of rebellion against an unknowable foe, a statement that there are parts of Truman that cannot be controlled.

[00:25:41]But I don't know if I believe him.

[00:25:44]We see Truman succeed to gain his freedom and take a final bow before journeying into the great beyond.

[00:25:52]But was it his idea?

[00:25:55]Had those that compress his life not faltered, had Fiji never made its way into the script, would he be here? The Truman Show can be read as a parable for the human yearning of freedom.

[00:26:08]But for Truman, even that ambition was instilled through content creation.

[00:26:15]This is why I will vehemently argue that The Truman Show is perhaps one of the most violent films of all time. One of spectacular inhumity devoid of gunshots, bloodied fist, and death.

[00:26:28]But with something so much worse.

[00:26:31]The Truman Show sees the discarding of agency where every fiber of this man becomes product and image. merchandised and dramatized.

[00:26:40]Truman is so commodified that unlike the students of Battle Royale, I find myself critical even of that spark of rebellion within him.

[00:26:50]Those moments of vulnerability that incite change are the unintended consequences of his own exploitation.

[00:26:58]Here we see that the entirety of identity and being, even the craving of freedom can be formed through the commodification of human spectacle.

[00:27:07]This is what I consider to be the most upsetting example of blood sport in media beyond the Hunger Games Thunderdome and The Long Walk.

[00:27:16]We write of Blood Sport inserted into our future fictions because we know that structures we build require so much of ourselves of our time, bodies, and mental well-being. We know that the flow of capital is dependent on machinery of flesh and minds. And we can only see a future that calls for so much more. The society of the spectacle is one where the effort we can offer to the masses extended not just to our sweat and hours but our fundamental personhood.

[00:27:49]Where emotions and expressions become catchphrases, gasps, and memes.

[00:27:54]We write of Bloodport because it is not a future that is terribly outlandish.

[00:27:59]When we live in a world where millionaires watch Squid Game and say, "Doesn't that seem like fun?

[00:28:06]But this dehumanization comes not just from the powers that be. The Truman Show Dungeon Crawler Carl and Roller Drrome televised to adoring audiences.

[00:28:17]Battle Royale opens with a bloodied champion flooded by a crowd.

[00:28:21]We write of Blood Sport not just because it is terrible and harrowing.

[00:28:27]We write about it because we would watch it.