In The Hunger Games, twenty-four children are forced to kill each other while the elites applaud. It was sold as dystopian fiction. The trouble is, it is looking more like current affairs with every passing news cycle. The real world, too, is structured like a zero-sum game—where one person’s gain must be another’s loss. There are no mutual wins here, only trade-offs, casualties, and very profitable illusions.
This article contends that global power operates not unlike the Capitol’s arena: a ritualised battleground in which marginalised regions—Gaza, the Congo, Yemen, Ukraine—are sacrificed to maintain the illusion of order and the comfort of hegemony. The names change. The rules do not.
Zero-sum mechanics in The Hunger Games
Let us begin with the game’s structure. The Capitol hoards everything—resources, weapons, even the narrative—while the districts are left to starve, scrabble, and applaud their own destruction. Violence becomes theatre. Public punishment becomes prime-time entertainment. And the tributes? They are not merely victims; they are trained collaborators. Career tributes emerge as the privileged enforcers of the system that will eventually discard them.
The parallels are not exactly subtle. Gaza is District 14 in all but name—boxed in, bombed out, and reduced to a siege economy. Every airstrike becomes a viral video. Human suffering is edited down into clips suitable for dinner-time viewing. Ukraine, meanwhile, has become a heavily armed tribute, sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical spectacle. Whether the profits flow to Washington, Brussels, or Moscow hardly matters; the dead are always local.
Real-world arenas: zero-sum politics
Move past the metaphors, and the mechanics remain. The Congo holds over 80 percent of the world’s cobalt supply— essential for phones, laptops, electric cars. And yet, miners there often work in conditions best described as pre-industrial hellscapes. These are literal blood minerals, extracted for the comfort of those who would rather not ask where their batteries come from.
Data, too, has become a form of tribute. The poor hand over their privacy for the illusion of digital survival. One signs up for free services; in return, they are monitored, measured, and monetised. It is not so much surveillance capitalism as digital feudalism—serfs trading data for relevance.
Then there is the old imperial standby: divide and conquer. The sponsors of modern conflict are not always hiding. The United States and Europe have mastered the art of funding both sides. Israel and Palestine. India and Pakistan. It makes one wonder whether peace is simply bad for business. The media, of course, play their part. While famines unfold, one is offered royal gossip and celebrity scandal. The Gamemakers have learned to distract the masses with a steady drip of irrelevance.
Breaking the game: is non-zero-sum possible?
Hope, like Katniss herself, tends to appear when least expected. There are rebellion strategies, even now. Mutual aid networks in Gaza, for instance, operate as quiet acts of resistance—communal kitchens feeding people where governments fail. Elsewhere, boycott movements, divestment campaigns, and whistleblowers like Snowden attempt to sabotage the spectacle. These are not revolutions in the Hollywood sense. They are quieter, and far harder to market. But they matter.
Still, the system has its limits. Foreign aid, that noble-sounding concept, often functions more like a debt trap. Loans from the IMF come with austerity strings attached—liberalise this, privatise that, sell your future for spare change.
And what of those who win? Ukraine, for example, may yet be welcomed into NATO, only to discover that victory comes with reconstruction bills, lost territory, and a traumatised generation. The Victor’s Curse is very real: even the “successful” emerge maimed.
To turn a zero-sum game around from the bottom up, one must first stop playing by its rules. This is not about asking the gamemakers for a kinder arena.
Refuse the premise
The first step is recognising the game for what it is. A zero-sum setup insists that your gain must be someone else’s loss. The trick is to step outside that framing. This is not wishful thinking—it is strategic deviance. Cooperatives, commons-based economies, and mutual aid networks work precisely because they do not play the scarcity script.
No one wins when everyone hoards. Unless, of course, your victory condition is everyone else’s ruin. But most of us are not hedge funds or defence contractors.
Build horizontal
Top-down revolutions tend to replace one elite with another. The game simply resets with new jerseys. The alternative is horizontal organisation: local food sovereignty, community-run infrastructure, cooperative tech platforms. These do not need permission from a centralised authority; they just need people to stop waiting and start connecting.
Build networks that cannot be bought off or decapitated. Think funghi, not monarchs.
Disrupt extraction
If the Capitol runs on blood minerals, rent-seeking, and data mining, then interruption is power. This can mean civil disobedience, or subtler forms of sabotage (e.g. privacy tools, data poisoning, supply chain resilience built from below). The point is to choke off the flow of value from periphery to core.
You are not supposed to notice that you are the product. Noticing is step one. Redirecting is step two.
Reclaim narrative
Gamemakers thrive on distraction. Every celebrity scandal is another smokescreen. Every crisis without context is another spectacle. Reclaiming the story means making space for inconvenient truths, structural analysis, and remembering who benefits.
This is not about “raising awareness” into the void. It is about using language and story to unmask the game, to make it visible, and therefore—breakable.
Make the invisible visible
Zero-sum games depend on keeping the scoreboard hidden. Who pays the price for your phone? Who cleans the water for your city? Who dies so that supply chains remain ‘resilient’? The less visible the sacrifices, the easier they are to justify.
Making visible does not fix the game—but it puts the lie to it. And a game with broken rules is one fewer people are willing to play.
Practice refusal
Participation is not neutral. Opting out of parts of the game—where possible—is more than symbolic. It slows the machine. Whether it is refusing surveillance tech, rejecting exploitative contracts, or simply declining to be productive for an economy that extracts more than it returns—each act of refusal makes space for another way.
You do not have to win the Hunger Games. You do not even have to play.
Solidarity, not sympathy
Feel-good campaigns come and go, but solidarity builds power. It means shared risk, not charitable pity. It means standing with, not speaking for. When Palestinians, Congolese, or Indigenous communities fight extraction, they are not asking for your tears. They are asking whether you will block the bulldozer, refuse the contract, pull your data (and financial investments) out of the mine.
Final word
You will not fix the game by winning it. You can fix it by not playing their game all the time, and playing our own non-zero-sum games as much as we can.
The Capitol, ultimately, is not a city. It is a mindset—complacent, self-righteous, and allergic to consequences. The games only continue because we keep watching. The tributes only die because we keep betting on them.
The Capitol does not fall in one grand gesture. It withers as more people stop feeding it—stop trading humanity for proximity to power, stop applauding the spectacle, stop betting on tributes.
When Katniss shot the force field, she proved that even the most rigged game depends on players. Refuse the spectacle. Stop choosing sides in a game designed to break them both.