A rather odd film where in a dystopian future, the world has been desensitized to killing and death. A competition where two people are assigned as either a hunter or a victim. The hunter is shown a picture of the victim's face and is on an active search to kill them. The victim is unaware of the looks of the hunter but is able to kill the hunter when found out. The story is about a woman who needs to win one more game to gain wealth and retire. Her last game becomes complicated as she becomes romantically involved with her victim.
As I have read Battle Royale, it doesn't surprise me that this type of genre is popular. Movies like The Hunger Games that has recently come out supports this idea. I found La Decima Vittima quite interesting, painting a similar but unique dystopian future to those of the two above.
The relevance of La Decima Vitimma isn't so much the dystopian aspect as the fact that it inspired an interest in assassin-type games across North American university campuses in the mid 1960s. The change in political climate following the destruction of the World Trade Centre has led to games of this type being labelled "irresponsible", and we looked at several examples (eg it was reported in the news that British Transport Police called "Street Wars" "irresponsible"; American police thought the Mario cubes that appeared in Ravenna, Ohio, might be a "terrorist threat") and we also looked at "Cruel to be Kind", a game devised by Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost as a way of circumventing concerns associated with assassin-type games.
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