The Hunger Games are coming to Russia
When I stumbled upon this article in the Guardian, my first thought was that it’s got to be a joke because the summary of this new Russian reality show Game 2: Winter sounds disturbingly similar to The Hunger Games book series written by Suzanne Collins: 30 contestants will fight in the Siberian wilderness at -40°C for a reward of $1.6m. In order to be the only remaining contestant and winning the money, the participants are allowed to get away with anything including murder and rape if they’re smart enough to escape the police. The show will be be streamed 24/7 over the period of nine months on the internet with five other countries already declaring their interest in broadcasting the programme.
Suzanne Collins refers to the concept of reality TV and violence in her book trilogy The Hunger Games: 24 randomly picked teenagers fight each other to death in an arena until only one winner remains while the entire country of Panem watches them die on a 24/7 TV broadcast. Collins’s initial goal was to criticise the exposure of children to violence in their own bedrooms, but her plan may have backfired. Games 2: Winter might not be broadcast on national TV in Russia, but the fact that it’s accessible online only aggravates the situation, making it even easier to access the programme on an international scale. While the producers stressed that contestants could be forced to leave the show after committing murder or rape when caught by the police, it won’t stop the violence from happening. And once seen, you cannot unsee it again.
The amount of violence on our TV screens has drastically increased over the last decade. According to this summary of multiple media studies, the average American teenager watches approximately 200,000 violent deaths on television before their 18th birthday. This number doesn’t include other violent acts, threats of violence of the appearance of guns and other weapons. And even American children programmes cannot escape the horrifying trend. 20 to 25 violent acts per hour occur on everyday children programmes in the USA, outranking prime time shows by far. It can be expected that someone who reaches the age of 70 will have watched 7 to 10 years of television in total, resulting in up to 17.5 million violent acts on TV alone. According to the media studies mentioned above, this regular exposure has a longlasting impact on our own tolerance of violence.
If children were exposed to a programme like Game 2: Winter, what kind of values would they be faced with? They would be confronted with the belief that it’s okay to kill and hurt others for money and fame and that the consequences of such actions would be ‘worth it’ and ‘okay’. Since no parent in their right mind would allow their child to watch such a TV show, children watching in secret would have nobody to talk to about it. Their adjustment to this new dangerously increased level of violence would probably go unnoticed for a long time which could turn into a dangerous trivialisation of violence. Studies confirm that suicide and homicide are two of the three most common causes of death among Americans from the age of 15 to 34 and that “in a given year, more U.S. children will die from gunfire than will die from cancer, pneumonia, influenza, asthma, and HIV/AIDS combined.” Wen can only imagine the statistics if broadcasting programmes such as this new Russian TV show were a common entertainment phenomenon.
The internet remains a grey area when it comes to laws and child protection. For every child lock, there’s an add-on to unlock content children were not supposed to see. Television, on the other hand, has very strict regulations when it comes to explicit acts of violence despite the shocking statistics I mentioned before. Of course, you cannot keep a child from tunring off the TV, but media platforms such as the ARD Mediathek take precautions by limiting access to shows with a 16+ raiting to a certain hour when it is unlikely that young children will still be up. It is utopistic to assume that this kind of protection works all the time, but it is certainly something to start with.
However, the affects of highly immoral shows such as Game 2: Winter are not only about children. How does such an online show affect a society in a world where wars are fought on a daily basis? Thinking in more abstract terms, Game 2: Winter is very similar to war. It only occurs on a lower scale between less fighting parties and with less effect on nations and countries. But the effect on a society? It might be just the same.
