What would convince people to solve disputes with a deadly card game?
Let's consider that the card game needs to be played, and equipment that may even kill you if you lose (via blades, electric shocks or the like, it could also even kill people by summoning supernatural forces to anyone who were to lose the game). Less damage than the death of the person can also be regulated.
The point is that both people need to agree on playing the game. If one starts and the other doesn't then no duel happens. But once started, it must finish with whatever the initial rules were that were set: death of the person, physical damage, etc.
This would turn it somehow similar to a sword or pistol duel if it were to happen, where both enemies have previously agreed on the conditions on which they fight.
But duels where everything is agreed are the rare case in solving a dispute. People would likely use things that are more direct and not that have to be agreed beforehand, so things like bombs, guns, swords, or even direct physical fighting would be much more likely to be used than entering a duel with a card game.
What could bring people to use such a method more often than using "direct methods"?
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1 answer
Money - a very macabre version of streaming
You could for example make a live television show that sends every duel happening across the world. Think about it like Twitch where you can watch people who have the equipment to film their gaming experiences and watch how they fight against others.
This is just a rather macabre version of Twitch where the players can get hurt if their characters are hurt. Maybe it all started with a second company that wanted to get into the market of streaming, but for a more niche group of people watching - they wanted small electro shocks to make the fights more intense. Every time you lost you would get shocked a bit. Not more than when you rub a balloon on your hair for a bit and then touch a doorhandle. Just something that makes people squeek a bit, which the intended target audience thought was funny and would make the player try harder to be better.
The company was growing ever more successful and at the same time the target audience grew more and more bloodthirsty.
Soon people started to give more money the higher you put the thing that was inducing a bit of pain. More pain = more money.
In the end this leads to death matches being possible.
That means that people who had a rather brutal dispute changed to this system. Laws were changed because there was so much money involved and if both people agreed you could suddenly have a legal death match. And the best thing: there was a lot of money involved, most of which would go to the winner of the match.
This means it's a lot easier to have rather brutal fights if you want to hurt the other person, while it's perfectly legal and if you think you are better you can easily make a lot of money. The only regulation (for now) is that there are only one game that is allowed to go up to death matches, which is why it became so popular.
There are a few different modes though - you could ride a motorbike, or fight in certain armor pieces, or have the cool new hologram augmented reality stuff make you go to the battlefield yourself, some variations involving dice is coming out next week, ...
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