Since Antiquity, entertainment practices involving bodily trials and confrontations have repeatedly transformed risk into collective performance. From Sumerian epics reliefs and the Mayan ballgame to Roman gladiatorial contests, these displays codified endurance, violence, and power into public ritual (Table 1).

With the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, spectacles of risk became associated with ideals of honour, religion, and political authority. Tournaments, symbolic trials, duels, persecutions, and executions transformed violence and justice into carefully staged public events (Table 2).

With the advent of radio and later television (Malnig 1995), narratives of risk assumed new formats, mediated through voice, imagination, and the staging of live endurance contests. The infamous 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds (Heyer 2003; Hilmes 1997) demonstrated the power of mass media to provoke emotion and panic. Cinema soon expanded this logic: from The Most Dangerous Game (1932) to Squid Game (2021–2025), violence and survival were reconfigured as forms of entertainment, with variations ranging from satire to sadistic performance (Table 3).

These examples reveal a trajectory across historical and cultural contexts: from the aristocratic ‘death game’ narratives of the 1930s, through satirical Japanese variations, to the globalised voyeurism of the 2000s. This trajectory culminates in contemporary works, where deadly challenges escalate under direct audience control, in the form of digital challenges.

In manga, the lethal game genre evolved through the combination of violence, psychological manipulation, and technology. From Gantz (1998–2006) to Kakegurui (2014–2019), the narrative shifts from physical combat to contests mediated by apps, gambling, and alternative worlds, thereby anticipating the digital challenges of the twenty-first century (Table 4).

Contemporary art has also pushed the human subject to its physical and symbolic limits. Performances have demonstrated how vulnerability may be transformed into an aesthetic and critical ritual (Table 5). This logic also resonates in digital challenges, where self-harm and physical risk are staged before digital audiences.

Religious rituals such as the Christian Passion, the Hindu Thaipusam, and the Islamic Ashura have also transformed suffering into a collective performance, reinforcing the notion that pain can generate recognition and glory. A similar logic is evident in sport, where violence is codified through rules and fans project identities onto players. These dynamics re-emerge in digital challenges, where individuals embody roles before networked audiences (Cooper 2022; Parkes 2021; Xygalatas et al. 2021).

This trajectory, from ancient arenas to contemporary media, demonstrates how the spectacularisation of risk has been continually recontextualised. In the twenty-first century, the phenomenon surpasses fiction, finding direct expression in viral practices such as digital challenges, which will be further examined in the Discussion section.

Digital challenges constitute a new arena for the spectacularisation of risk, in which peer pressure, virality, and algorithmic visibility supplant the physical stages of the past. Each viral challenge transforms the body into a site of performance and the audience into judge, reproducing logics of competition and exposure long familiar from fiction, yet now enacted on a global scale. These practices also exhibit cult-like dynamics: initiation rituals, collective imitation, and algorithmically mediated obedience, reconfiguring belief and submission as entertainment (Heřmanová 2023) (Table 6).

Lethal challenges did not originate on the internet but rather form part of a long cultural genealogy. From ancient rituals and gladiatorial combat to witch hunts, cinema, and manga, societies have repeatedly staged corporeal forms at risk as choreographies of exposure and control. Fiction has expanded upon non-fictional practices, functioning as a laboratory that anticipated today’s viral dynamics.

When adolescents participate in the Blue Whale or Skull Breaker Challenges, they are, in effect, re-enacting a symbolic tradition: from religious rituals of suffering to political self-immolation and reality shows, culture has long normalised the subjection of bodies to risk and control in the form of collective entertainment (Debord 1992; Foucault 1995).

Contemporary digital environments increasingly operate through mediated agency, in which decision-making is partially externalised to technical systems. Rather than acting solely from internal intentions or bodily impulses, individuals navigate environments structured by interfaces, avatars, notifications, metrics, and algorithmic feedback loops, distributing agency across human and non-human actors.

Research in social psychology and media studies shows that digital representations actively shape behaviour. The Proteus Effect (Liu 2023) demonstrates how individuals internalise avatar traits, allowing virtual characteristics to influence embodied conduct beyond the screen. Likewise, the Media Equation (Reeves and Nass 2003) explains why interfaces, avatars, and algorithmic agents elicit genuine obedience and emotional response, as users unconsciously treat media systems as social actors.

This redistribution of agency is further intensified in transreality contexts, where digital scripts spill into physical space and embodied action (Benford and Giannachi 2022; Lin et al. 2024). In these configurations, the boundary between virtual instruction and corporeal execution becomes porous, anticipating forms of mediated control enacted through living bodies rather than symbolic avatars.

Recent enactive accounts of autonomy suggest that such mediation transfers the sensorimotor basis of self-regulation from the organism to the system, progressively scaffolding decision-making through external infrastructures (Pérez-Verdugo and Barandiaran 2023). Algorithmic environments do not merely assist cognition; they actively shape the horizon of possible actions by reinforcing certain behaviours while suppressing others (Wang 2025).

This lens is central to interpreting both Gamer and contemporary digital challenges. In the film, agency is explicitly overridden through neural interfaces that impose external command over bodily autonomy; in everyday digital platforms, similar redistributions occur more subtly, as interfaces guide behaviour through incentives, prompts, and visibility rather than coercion.

A second analytical lens concerns the transformation of spectatorship into an operative force. Within digital culture, audiences no longer merely observe; they participate, intervene, and co-produce outcomes. Metrics such as views, likes, rankings, and real-time feedback convert spectators into distributed operators whose collective actions shape behaviour, visibility, and value.

Research on participatory spectatorship and shared-avatar systems shows how collective audiences can exert control over individual actions, collapsing the boundary between viewer and performer (Akşit and Nazlİ 2020; Emmanouloudis 2022; Lessel et al. 2022). This dynamic extends the logic of gamification beyond explicit play, embedding competitive and performative structures into everyday practices.

Within this framework, risk itself becomes spectacle. Dangerous or extreme behaviours are no longer marginal deviations but valued performances within attention economies. Digital challenges exemplify this logic, as bodily exposure and performative risk are rewarded through visibility, engagement, and algorithmic amplification. These environments are further shaped by online disinhibition (Suler 2004; Stuart and Scott 2021), whereby anonymity, distance, and reduced accountability loosen social restraints and normalise behaviours otherwise inhibited in face-to-face contexts.

This lens directly informs the reading of Gamer, where violence and bodily risk are staged as entertainment governed by audience demand and commercial metrics. The film amplifies a logic that now operates routinely within platform-based environments, where spectacle functions as a regulatory mechanism rather than a mere aesthetic form.

The third lens examines how control increasingly operates through behavioural modulation rather than force. Digital platforms frame guidance and regulation as motivation, care, or play, encouraging users to align their actions with system-defined goals. Gamified incentives and algorithmic prompts normalise external regulation as participation rather than domination.

Studies on gamified environments and algorithmic nudging demonstrate how individuals willingly submit to behavioural frameworks that reward compliance through visibility, engagement, and social validation (Bassanelli et al. 2022; Xu et al. 2022). At scale, such mechanisms function as infrastructures of behavioural influence, in which design choices, reward systems, and temporal constraints condition habits across large populations without recourse to direct coercion (Niknejad et al. 2024).

This distinction is crucial for understanding the transition from dystopian coercion to everyday digital practice. Whereas Gamer depicts enforced submission through technological command, contemporary digital challenges rely on voluntary participation in performative risk. Individuals consent to exposure, danger, and self-modulation in exchange for recognition, belonging, or economic opportunity.

These dynamics also intersect with processes of Affective-Erotic Substitution (Batista and Warzecha 2025), in which desire, attachment, and intimacy are increasingly mediated by digital systems. From virtual characters to influencer performances, bodies become surfaces of projection and control – a logic radicalised in Gamer, where the avatar is no longer a fictional construct but a living human body rendered operable at a distance (Koren, Polak and Levy-Tzedek 2022).

This framework also clarifies the relevance of emerging neural-interface technologies. While current Brain-Computer Interfaces are framed within therapeutic and rehabilitative discourses, they extend the same logic of mediated agency and behavioural modulation. The ethical tension lies not solely in technological capacity, but in the economic and cultural systems that determine whether such mediation serves emancipation or exploitation (Chen et al. 2025; Ienca, Valle and Raspopovic 2025; INBRAIN Neuroelectronics 2025; Lavazza et al. 2025; Lebedev and Nicolelis 2017).

Released in 2009, Gamer depicts a dystopian society in which incarcerated individuals are remotely controlled through neural interfaces for public entertainment. Human bodies are transformed into programmable avatars, executing actions dictated by external operators who experience agency, pleasure, and power at a distance. Although the film predates the widespread emergence of contemporary digital challenges, it is read here not as a historical artefact but as an anticipatory model condensing socio-technical dynamics now embedded in digital culture.

The article’s primary focus is not the film itself but the contemporary ecology of digital challenges as practices of mediated risk, behavioural modulation, and networked influence. Read retrospectively, Gamer functions as a heuristic device, condensing mechanisms that now operate beyond fiction, as contemporary digital challenges illuminate how its dystopian logic has migrated into everyday platform-mediated practices.

In this sense, Gamer allegorises a form of networked control in which agency is redistributed across technical systems, audiences, and interfaces. Control operates less through direct coercion than through mediated participation, visibility, and the promise of recognition (Pérez-Verdugo and Barandiaran 2023; Wang 2025), positioning the film as a conceptual lens for examining contemporary risk-based digital performances.

Several elements of Gamer render visible mechanisms of control and spectacularisation shared by both the film’s dystopia and contemporary digital challenges. Central among these is the transformation of the body into an interface: physical actions are overridden and modulated by remote commands, collapsing the distinction between body and interface and revealing how agency can be externally scripted while remaining experientially embodied.

Equally significant is the role of the spectator as operator. In Gamer, audiences do not merely observe violent performances but actively command them, mirroring participatory cultures on digital platforms where behaviour is shaped through metrics of visibility, engagement, and reward, and where collective control transforms individuals into shared or distributed avatars (Akşit and Nazlİ 2020; Emmanouloudis 2022; Lessel et al. 2022). The film thus anticipates a cultural condition in which observation itself becomes a distributed form of control.

Finally, Gamer stages violence and risk as marketable spectacles embedded within entertainment economies. Risk is engineered and calibrated for engagement, rather than accidental, paralleling contemporary digital challenges in which extreme acts are incentivised through algorithmic amplification, social validation, and the promise of visibility. The film thus reveals how spectacle operates as a regulatory mechanism, aligning bodily risk with economic and symbolic reward.

Read alongside contemporary digital challenges, Gamer functions less as speculative fiction than as a diagnostic model. Both rely on distributed spectatorship, behavioural conditioning, and the externalisation of responsibility across networks of users, platforms, and audiences. Although participants in digital challenges appear to act autonomously, their behaviour is shaped by platform architectures that reward risk through visibility and engagement, often framing modulation as motivation, care, or play (Bassanelli et al. 2022; Xu et al. 2022).

The crucial distinction between the film’s dystopia and contemporary digital practices lies not in structure but in the modality of participation. Whereas Gamer depicts enforced control over incarcerated bodies, digital challenges normalise voluntary submission to performative risk, as participants align their actions with platform logics and transform danger into participation and self-exposure.

In this light, Gamer does not merely anticipate contemporary phenomena but clarifies them. By staging an extreme version of networked control, the film makes visible mechanisms that now operate more subtly in digital environments, as digital challenges emerge as non-fictional continuations of its logic, where spectacularised risk, mediated agency, and audience participation have become infrastructural conditions of digital culture.