The Girl Who Was on Fire by Leah Wilson

Author:Leah Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pop Culture
ISBN: 9781936661596
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2012-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

How Games Change

A game or competition of any kind, from a children’s board game to a national election, does not exist in a vacuum, and the rules and penalties of the game require and encourage players to think strategically. For instance, though we like to think every citizen’s presidential ballot counts equally, because of the rules of the electoral college, you commonly see political strategists arranging campaigns to appeal to particular areas (like swing states) where they know their efforts will be rewarded most. Because all of this strategizing and counterstrategizing, the way a game is played can change over time.

The game of baseball, for example, is very different today than it was sixty years ago, and not just because of rule changes (i.e., no spitballs, designated hitters, etc.). Pitchers throw much faster (making it harder to hit) because the practice of bringing in a relief pitcher is now common and starting pitchers don’t have to conserve their strength for nine innings. Additionally, over time, players, coaches, and other baseball experts have seen the value of base-stealing, and it’s twice as common now as it was in the mid-twentieth century. We see similar changes in other sports: basketball is no longer the passing game my father played in college in the late sixties; now it’s all about the pressure defense and the showy dunks.

One of the most impressive feats of worldbuilding in the Hunger Games is that Suzanne Collins took into account how the rules of the Games would play out over the course of the seventy-plus years that they were played. As a result, the characters act like people who have watched these Games every year. Katniss often refers to past Games where she saw tributes using various strategies in order to win. When she makes decisions, she makes them based on what she knows has or has not worked in years past—and, moreover, on the fact that she knows the other players have watched the exact same videos she has. For instance, she is aware that the Gamemakers often announce “feasts” in order to draw the players together for a bloody showdown, and she gets the idea of using the apple bag to set off the land mines after remembering how, in a past year, a player accidentally set one off with a small wooden ball.

Additionally, like with athletes in the real world, the nature of the most advantaged Hunger Games players has changed over the years. Richer (and possibly more savvy) districts knew that their best chance to win was not to allow their tributes to be chosen at random or from the pool of poor or starving candidates who increased their chances of selection by trading extra tesserae for food. Instead they trained “career tributes” from a young age to be skilled in combat and killing. This strategy not only helped them in the short run—during the Games itself—it was also a smart long-term strategy. If you were more likely to win the Hunger Games, your

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