32 Heroes Who Must Play A Deadly Game — Or Die!

Everybody loves playing games — except when you're forced to by aliens, or your futuristic prison warden, or superpowerful beings. This Friday, Gerard Butler's forced to play and/or die in Gamer. But here are 32 other deadly-game stories, with clips.

Thanks to Graeme McMillan, Meredith Woerner, Annalee Newitz, Lauren Davis, Briana Cavanaugh, Chris West, Jeff VanderMeer, Andrew Liptak, Pete Gofton, James McGirk, Dennis Woo, Rachael Parker, Brian Williams, Rina Weisman, Chris Hsiang, Jessy Randall, David Fraser, Tim Todd, Chris Newman and Kiriko Moth, plus anyone I missed.

Tron

This is the all-time classic of trapped-in-a-game stories, and it's the first type of story that you see a lot — hero gets sucked inside the digital/computer world, and turned glowy or avatar-y. In this case, the evil Master Control Program is trying to keep the users from monitoring its functions, because it wants to gain absolute power. So when Flynn challenges its rule, the MCP digitizes him and then forces him to take part in a series of deadly disc-throwing, bike-racing, tank-battling games against computer programs.