This is next installment of halloween themed post. I will touch on subjects in Deadman Wonderland, but there won't be any spoilers for the series. It is basically used as an example for the topic at hand because it is a good example.
Kill or be killed is the motivation for many who are introduced to the madness that is the survival game. Quite a few have been popping up every few seasons including Deadman Wonderland, Mirai Nikki, and the much more recent Btooom. I will be more focused on Deadman Wonderland since I've discussed things about Mirai Nikki last week and Btooom is just getting started.
The style that Deadman Wonderland takes for survival game is wholly based on the fact that the participants are incarcerated. The 'Deadmen', are people with these blood based powers, that are all unique along with their nickname, and they are all fighting for an early release.
The tournaments that all Deadmen participate in are normally a fight to the death, but if neither of them die, there is a punishment game for the loser. These punishment game are also no joke, it is basically a roulette of pain from getting one of your eyes ripped out to a less serious, but fairly rare ones like cutting their hair off. To top it all off, the prison has a sadistic nurse that performs these punishments and enjoys most of them, not including the hair cutting of course.
Even without all the Deadmen, these facilities are pretty corrupt from the top down. Since Deadman Wonderland is a privatized prison, they are incentivized to keep people locked up and not caring for the prisoners there. So we end up with power hungry guards and money hungry executives who run the prison.
Despite all the underhanded practices, we have an interesting cooperation between some of the Deadmen. Usually in these types of high violence and crooked way of doing thing, we would have more people being the same as the environment. However, in Deadman Wonderland we have cases where they work together against the puppet master that holds the stings to escape together. With that said, the overall goal can be accomplished easily compared to the others from the selection of survival games.
The contrast of different style of the dynamic make is pretty easy to distinguish between series even with such a basic concept of survival of the fittest. Which why I would like to see more of these kinds of survival games because it is a mix of violence and personality that makes my sinister side sing.