Disclaimer: The Hunger Games and its world belong to Suzanne Collins. This story is not for profit and is merely speculative – and highly so.

This came out of my idle wondering whether or not Panem had videogames. I don't know what THG has in the ways of supplemental games for its story in our world – so consider this just "what I think they'd have in Panem." This tale is mostly about "those who play," anyway. We get only the barest glimpses of the Capitol in the books and films and, of the few fics I've read in the fandom, I've not yet read any that had a focus on Capitol-attitudes. This is a take on that.

("Katniss" and "Rue" are chosen on the character filters for exposure-reasons, but they aren't entirely themselves here). For fellow gamers, see if you can pick out the subtle references / Easter eggs in this.

WAR IN LIGHT AND PIXELS

A Hunger Games fan fiction by Shadsie

"I heard that if you save at the Cornucopia after doing three laps around the field and there are only the District 12 characters left, you can get the Berries Ending."

"No way!"

"It's what Julian told me, but he's probably lyin'. Just 'cause he gets all the new games ahead of us doesn't mean he's even finished it yet."

The children's voices echoed through the front room of the family apartment. It was a high-end place, even by Capitol standards. Midas was twelve years old and his little sister, Minerva, was ten. Unlike a few of his classmates, Midas was glad that he wouldn't be taking part in a Reaping like the District kids. He didn't think it was particularly honorable. Even the strong kids from the favored Districts looked scared on television during the telecasting of the real Hunger Games. Their eyes showed their fear and that made them pathetic. He was happy just to play the simulations that came out every year. His best friend in class, Julian, wanted to play the Games for real and storm in with a sword. Midas thought he was stupid. That stuff wasn't for the children of the Capitol.

Real power was what his dad did working for the government and the best kind of fame was the kind his mother had earned. "Middie" and "Minnie" peered into the entertainment room. Their mother was lounging on the couch, her bright-white hair done up in a modest hive. On a screen that took up almost all the entire wall in front of her was a burly, shirtless warrior wielding a burnished bronze axe against a great crystal dragon. The kids' mother enjoyed videogames, too. Her fluffy white tail curled around her ankles as the family's fluffy white cat relaxed on the floor beside her, rolling over on his wings.

Midas and Minerva's mother worked in cosmetic surgery and body modifications – both for people and for pets. Her work was famed although her children remained un-altered. Minnie wanted a fluffy tail like Mommy's, but was told that she'd have to wait until she was fifteen. Both Mother and the family cat served as living advertisements – tails were not as popular in their area of the Capitol as the surgical company wanted them to be. She'd done herself up just to show how painless spine-extension implants could be and how smoothly the robotic components took to nerve and muscle. As for Daedalus, he was no muttation, but as pure-bed as cats could come, with a pudgy body, a snub-nose and luxurious white fur. His bloodlines were ancient, tracing back from even before the great war. His wings were useless, implants for decoration. He was constantly injuring himself pulling out his own feathers.

The warrior on the screen fell in a spray of dark blood as the crystal dragon bit his torso in half. The familiar sound of the game over music for The Myth of Maven sounded as the woman on the couch started to curse and corrected herself with "son of a…jay-bird!" as soon as she saw her children in the entranceway. "You're home early."

"Daddy bought us a new gaaaame," Minerva practically sang. "Do you wanna play it with us?"

"Oh, go ahead," her mother answered, getting up. "I have so much to do! I really ought to get started on freshening up for your father's dinner party at the Hall. Are you sure you two will really be alright alone? I'm leaving Augustine for you, but I can call in one of the neighbors…"

"Why can't we come to the party?" Minerva whined.

"It's for adults, Minnie," her brother jumped in. "It's for Dad's political friends. We'd be bored."

"But there's gonna be great food there!"

"There will be great food here," her mother assured, "And you won't get so full you'll have to throw up. Remember how you didn't like trying the sick-drink at your Aunt Cygna's wedding?"

Minerva nodded.

"If you've got a new game with your brother, you should be fine. What did Daddy get you, darlings?"

"The 74th Hunger Games Game!" Midas answered. "That means that once we start it, you and dad can't jump in until we finish out a first run and reset. That's how they work."

"It's alright. You kids just go on and have fun, and listen to Augustine when he tells you to go to bed."

"But he's an Avox!" Minerva protested. "He can't talk!"

"You know what I mean, young lady. You know what signal he makes when you're to go to bed."

The children's' mother left them to the entertainment-room. While most of the televisions in the home were the holographic variety, the one they played games on was a flat screen embedded into the wall, though it was hardly embedded, being nearly paper-thin. A few months ago, the entire family was gathered in this very room taking in the 74th Hunger Games. The Victory Tour hadn't even started and the new videogame, fresh from one of the tech-factories in District 3, was already out. This year was only the second that Minnie had watched the Games. She wasn't allowed to before because she was too young and too easily frightened by violence. She'd handled it surprisingly well these first two years she wasn't sent to bed during the prime time footage-airings. She'd cheered for the District 2 boy, Cato, this year; because she'd thought he was the strongest.

There wasn't much competition for video games in Panem. There was only one kind of home console and one company that made home-games, all sponsored and regulated by the Capitol. Another company made holographic simulation games – but those were used by the military for training, in the Hunger Games training halls and in arcades that people visited to socialize as much as they did to play the simulators. Home console games were projected on a screen with the games firmly within their own little worlds. Midas popped open the console and inserted the disc for their new adventure. Placing it in, he ran his fingers over the words "Leave Luck to the Capitol" emblazoned in the plastic of the lid. He grabbed a wireless controller and handed one to his sister. He took a place cross-legged on the floor, while she took a seat on the couch.

"Mrrrow…"

"Hey, there Daedalus," Midas said, scratching the cat behind the ears and between his wings. The cat twitched them a little, which is all he could do with things he was given only for fashion.

The game booted up. Caesar Flickerman's voice came through the sound system. From what the kids had heard, the man had never re-recorded anything for the games-of-the-Games and barely knew they existed. His voice was just re-used from existing sound-clips and altered as necessary.

"We've gotta pick our Tributes," Minerva said, leaning over from her place on the couch. "Do we want to do this just with us and the AIs or do you want to hook up on the network and get other players?"

"I think it should be just us at first," Midas said, his eyes steely, his mental "gamer-mode" firmly on. "I want to see what the AI system on this is like. Besides, sometimes the AIs are more challenging than real players. If they set up this thing anything like what they had for last year, then definitely."

Minnie let her brother have first pick. He scrolled through the Tributes' avatars and profiles while the menu-music played. Their skills and weaknesses were listed, as well as base-strength and base-health. Weak characters – such as the boy from 10 who had low base-health, based upon an issue the real Tribute had suffered with a crippled leg – provided an extra challenge for players who were good at gaming and wanted to challenge themselves.

"I don't want to deal with network players because almost all of them pick the brutes," Midas complained. "They're uncreative."

"They also give you game overs really quick."

"That, too. Besides, we need to give you a shot."

Minerva stuck out her tongue.

"This is strange," Midas said as he stopped on the slowly spinning avatar and stats of the female from District 12. Below "KATNISS EVERDEEN" in all caps and the reading of her age and "Skill with Bow" were statistics that the boy found highly remarkable. The young gamer scratched his sandy hair. "Victors usually get better stats than this."

"Didn't you say that all of the games ramp up the Victors, 'cause it's 'canon' that they won, which makes them like bosses?"

"Yeah, they do. Why does she have such a low base-health? And her hunger, thirst and stamina meters are set for a quick-drain. She's not as bad as the boy from 10 and the girl from 11, but, still. Peeta's got better stats than her. Some of the kids who bit the big one on the first day have better character-stats."

Midas clicked the button for "Choice." A digitized version of one Katniss Everdeen responded by firing a silver arrow from a silver bow at the screen. She quickly vanished, leaving the choice-dial, absent her, open for the second player.

"Why did you pick her?" Minerva asked. "You said she has bad stats and you don't pick girls! You're a boy!"

"I want to see what's up with her," Middie answered. "Something weird is up. I wonder if they made the Victors extra challenging this time because there's some kind of bonus. Like they gave us a Hero Mode or something."

"Hmm. Whatever. Maybe the game-makers just don't like her. She won in a bad way with those berries."

Minerva scrolled through before settling on the girl from District 11.

"Rue?" her brother asked, incredulous, "I thought you liked Cato."

"Cato died," Minnie answered in a blunt manner that only a ten-year old could muster.

"So did Rue, and she died first!"

"Yeah, well," Minerva explained, "She's cute and a girl and little like me, and she and Katniss were allies so maybe we could cooperate."

"Cooperative play?" Midas said, raising an eyebrow. "Us against the AIs instead of after each other?"

"You always keep killing me in games when we compete!" Minnie whined. "Now you have to play nice to me because if you make Katniss kill Rue, you're gonna feel reeeeally guilty!"

Rue's animation was rather strange. She smiled at the camera and spun a small knife in her hand before the opening stages of the game. Short tutorials flashed upon the screen detailing the fact that item satchels at the Cornucopia were random and that Sponsor-drops were random. The save points, located at certain trees and stones, were marked by etchings in faint light that resembled the console's saving-cards. Subtle light and what looked like dust motes danced around them. Even experienced video-gamers rarely could finish out a Hunger Games based game in a single sitting. Middie and Minnie had a bedtime that was strictly enforced. Augustine would not let them stay up past eleven if he had to drag them to bed himself.

Minnie knew that their family-servant Avox liked her and her brother, though he did not like Mom and Dad. She saw him glare at them sometimes, when they were not looking, but his eyes always softened around her and Middie. She once asked him, when they were alone, if he'd known a little girl like her before he came to serve the family. He couldn't answer in words, but tears streamed down his face. She gave him a handkerchief to clean up and told no one about it because they'd both get into trouble.

"Why should I feel guilty?" Midas asked. "It's not like they're real people we're playing."

"But they are… kind of."

"Yeah, the avatars and skills and everything are based on real people, but they're just District-people and it was their chance to shine. If they blew it, they blew it. The dead don't care about anything anymore, so why not play them the way I want to?"

"You cried when Rue got killed on TV. I was on Mom's lap. You kept squirming and trying to hide it."

"Okay, sheesh! I won't kill you this game, okay? I mean, unless we're both at the end and I'm gonna have to, but I don't think you'll make it that far."

"I wonder what will happen if I pick up an axe or something," Minerva asked, watching the screen and waiting for the game's beginning count-down. She positioned her character in a targeting-position to a group of satchels on the ground ahead.

"You'll use it." Middie explained, "Just like the Tributes would have in the real games. Katniss was great with a bow, but she didn't get one right away, she had to kill Glimmer to get it off her. You remember last year's game when I taught you to play it. So far, this is the exact same kind of setup, except we're in the woods arena."

"But it's weird to imagine a little character that didn't kill anyone with a huge battleaxe or a sword or something like that."

The Games on the screen in videogame format were distinctly unreal. Some of the leaves on the trees were blocky and there was slight pixilation to the edges of the waving grasses. The characters all looked human enough, but were not photographic. There was just a tiny touch of the uncanny to them all, enough to de-humanize them. Little touches like that truly set a game in its own world. None of the Hunger Games videogames had ever been done in the first-person format. It was not only something that some players of the home-consoles found disorienting (as opposed to playing with holograms in the social arcades), there was a certain detachment required in running through a Hunger Games while being a citizen of the Capitol. The real games were a spectator-sport and the participatory alternate-universe version made a strong attempt to mimic that feel.

The message was: This is not reality. These people are not real and never were. Of course, they were not like Capitol denizens, pure in their blood like the well-bred cat on the carpet, or like the children that joined the small beast. District-cats were vermin-eating, scrounging strays and District children were bred to serve. The authentic people kept their bloodlines pure. The rest were bred to serve or scavenged as strays.

And avatars upon screens were meant to serve their masters behind the controls. The Hunger Games: The Game, year after year, reminded those it entertained of that.

Minerva sent Rue running to the heart-pounding musical score that started up. The onscreen Rue grabbed a satchel and Minnie steered her toward the treeline at the edge of the field beyond the Cornucopia. The various AI-controlled characters did just what they were programmed to do. The scene was a bloodbath, just like the real thing had been; only Minnie remembered on television that the cranes picked up the bodies. Here, slain characters faded away.

As she opened her satchel to find a bow and arrows and a full bottle of water added to her inventory, Katniss, as steered by her brother, fought through the AIs. It was a blatant disregard for what had really happened with this year's Victor, but the game was all about creating an alternate experience, anyway. By the time Midas had gotten Katniss to the woods, she'd slain the boy from District 5 and the girl from District 10 with the double-edged sword in the random satchel she'd grabbed.

The bodies faded away, but the system-rendered blood remained upon the grass for a little bit longer. The music calmed into something almost pastoral. Midas pumped his fist and held his controller up in the air, very much like he was holding a sword. "Booyaka!" he proclaimed.

Minerva made Rue climb a tree that had the light and dust around it. She saved her position and pointed at the screen. "You ought to save your position too, soon, or you'll game over."

"Huh?" Midas asked. "I just went totally badass there! Better than the real Katniss on her first day."

"Maybe so, but look at your stamina meter. You're also wounded."

"Oh, crud!"

The screen split as "Katniss" wandered far from "Rue." A map at the bottom corner of the screen showed little red dots denoting surviving AI – Tributes and dark blue dots for themselves. The inventory in Katniss' satchel contained an empty bottle. Midas wasn't as lucky as his sister was to get the full bottle. He made his character's way to a pond to revive her thirst-meter. Resting brought up the stamina meter, but it dropped by increment. Flashing red, having appeared below his meters was a zigzag tear-like graphic reading "Injury!" Unfortunately for Midas and the virtual Katniss, there were no bandages or vials of morphling in the satchel to add to the inventory and use.

Midas found a cleft of rock with the saving-chip-like image burned into the face with light. He made Katniss kneel before it to save before pressing the Quit button. It was time for dinner, for a bath, for a cartoon show that both of the children liked and never missed an episode of, and for bed.

When Middie and Minnie resumed their game after their studies the next day, Katniss was asleep before the saving-symbol, holding her sword lazily over her knees. Rue was curled up in a branch and yawned adorably. The AIs resumed movement. When players paused, so did they.

"Katniss would have never slept on the ground like that for real," Minerva commented. "Good thing this is just a game and the other Tributes have to pause when the game does."

"Son of a bitch!"

"Middie?"

"Katniss is sick."

The "Injury!" warning and gone dark green and become the much more serious "Disease!" warning, complete with a biohazard symbol.

While movements of all Tributes stopped when the game was not in play, random status-ailments still showed up. The Hunger Games-games were notorious for being tricky with their health-statuses, so as to mimic the dangers of the actual Games. There was a hunger-meter and a thirst-meter. When they were low on a character, the controls for that character would become slow and even jerky when the condition was severe. If a player had the game set to one-player, the screen would go blurry if their Tribute was nearing death. The blur-feature was nixed out for multiplayer-mode if there was more than one player on one's console. The thirst-meter always ran out before the hunger-meter, but losing health on ether one was to be avoided. If the hunger or thirst bars ran out completely and stayed like that for too long, the character would fall and not get up, and the stamina meter would rapidly deplete to zero, causing a game over.

The general stamina meter served to show how tired a character was from running, climbing and fighting. It also served as a general health-gauge and could run low if a character was wounded and not treated. A vial of morphling was usually all it took to bring a character back to health. Bandages brought the character back up to half-health.

Random illnesses could occur if any of the meters were compromised. It happened most often if a character was left for a long time with an untreated injury. There were different types of illnesses, as well, that had different effects. "Dysentery" and "Cholera" screwed up the hunger and thirst meters. "Tetanus" and "Staph Infection" affected the general stamina and health-meter and slowed the character's movements.

Midas scrolled through Katniss' mini-menu to see what she'd contracted. "Staph Infection," he groused. "It's not as bad as Pneumonia, at least."

"Why is Pneumonia so bad?" his little sister asked.

"It's like in real life – what grandpa had right before he died," he said. "In this game, it will kill your Tribute dead within twenty minutes of gameplay if you don't find any morphling."

"Grandpap took morphling for pain. It didn't cure him."

"Videogame logic," Midas said. "They can't make this too realistic, or it would be no fun to play. Why do you think Victors have to take some time off before the Victory Tour? They're total wrecks!"

Minerva cast her gaze to the floor sadly. "Poor Tributes…" she said.

"Remember, they're District-folk." Midas reminded her. "Doing this with them is the only way to prevent war. That's what Dad says. They're ruffians who have to be kept in line. They'd kill you and me if they got the shot."

"I don't think Katniss would want to kill me," Minnie said. "On TV, she's kind of charming."

"Well, I might be getting a game over. All her meters are down. I'm barely into this game. How pathetic!"

"Maybe you should beg for Sponsorship?"

This was an option of the game, too. It was as random as the disease-drive. You could hit a button on the character's mini-menu and inventory to "Beg a Sponsor." Whether or not one received any care-packages was completely dictated by the AI of the game, though one could increase one's chances depending upon how many other characters one killed.

Midas received a gift of morphling – in game, a one-shot cure-all, presumably because it erased all pain. In real life, it was a drug forbidden to all but the very sick in the Capitol hospitals, though there were addicts who managed to get the stuff through clandestine means.

As Minerva was steering Rue through the woods, she picked off Tributes from 6 and 9 with her bow. She thought of how strange it was to be having Rue, the "innocent" of the real Games do a thing like this. That was when she remembered how Rue had helped Katniss find the tracker-jacker nest that killed a few Tributes. She decided that Rue wasn't as innocent as she was writ and thereafter did not feel as weird playing her for killing.

"You know, since I have a bow and you have a sword," Minerva suggested, "Maybe we should meet up, drop our weapons and exchange them. Then we can play together."

"That's actually a good idea, sis," Midas agreed. "Katniss is clunky with this sword. If she had her skill-weapon, she'd be much better."

The two made their characters to meet in a small clearing in the woods. Rue dropped her bow. Katniss dropped her sword. They walked past each other and picked up the respective weapons. They then walked toward one another and Midas pressed the menu button to include "Rue" as "Alliance." Minerva did the same with Rue. This ensured that they could receive sponsor-drops together, could share inventory and would not harm each other with "friendly fire" unless they were the last two Tributes left.

Middie and Minerva shared some laughter at how stupid some of the AIs were. A fire-event happened over the south portion of the arena. They avoided it. The AI of Thresh walked right into it.

"He's going in like an action hero!" Midas exclaimed, "He's not even blinking! It's like it's not even there!"

The in-game cannon sounded for the blundering glitch. The brother and sister found another glitch in the game after they'd managed to lure the District 5 girl into a swollen patch of river and get her swept away. "Katniss" fell into a hole when Midas wanted her to explore a patch of discolored ground. She disappeared from existence.

"Hey? What the Hell?" Midas pressed his controller furiously. "I didn't just die, did I?"

"The canon would have sounded and you would have gotten a game over screen," Minerva said. She took Rue over to the same patch of ground and had her fall in. Suddenly, the game-screen flipped upside down. "Katniss" and "Rue" stood upright, side-by-side, in a weird, half-formed brown-gray world. It was like the landscape of the Arena, but chunkier. Katniss and Rue, themselves, looked like they were made of a series of colored blocks, unfinished, unrefined.

Of course, the children explored this Bizarro World thoroughly.

"What do you think this is?" Minnie asked.

"I think it's a glitch. It's a bit of unfinished game-landscape they probably dummied out. It might even be the remains of the Arena in last year's game. Sometimes, programmers build atop older games."

"Let's go back," Minerva said, finding the hole again.

"I think we'll call that the Dark World," Midas said.

In coming days, the siblings explored both the "Light" and "Dark" worlds of the videogame version of the 74th Hunger Games Arena. They found that the moon went to the "dark" part during the in-game time the Arena was on daytime. The "Dark World" had proved useful to hide in when a pack of AI Tributes needed to be avoided.

Their numbers dwindled, as with the original Games, although not with the same people. Middie and Minnie found that a "group of weird moving blocks" on the glitch-side of the game-world were scraps of programming for mutts – which were released randomly into the Arena. They took out several remaining AI tributes, including Glimmer and Clove.

Peeta, the boy from District 12, in a move almost echoing the actual boy's, stumbled into a patch of poison berries and ate them. The AIs, as it turned out, could choose and eat the wrong food to fill their hunger meters just like player-controlled characters could.

"That's sad," Minerva remarked as she heard his canon and watched his slowly fading body on the screen.

"How come?" her brother asked. "I actually didn't know it was so easy for them to do that."

"The real guy, I mean," Minerva explained. "He's alive because Katniss kept him from eating bad berries. And he and she are gonna get married. There's no way to make any of the characters mourn in this game."

"It's just a videogame," Midas groused. "What we're playing didn't really happen."

"But it did!" Minnie squeaked. "Not like what we're doin', but the Tributes were all real people." She shook her head. "Playing this game makes me not ever wanna be in the Hunger Games ever."

"You won't be. We're Capitol-children. The Games are how the Districts redeem themselves."

Minerva sighed. "They don't even get to watch children and play with kitty-cats like Augustine can. He's alive. Don't you think it would be really neat if the real Katniss and Rue had discovered a secret like we did? You know, a flipside to the world they weren't supposed to see?"

"I guess so," Midas said with a shrug.

"Rue" was put on duty spying on both kids from District 3 while "Katniss" set out to eliminate their land-mines and take their food.

"Why's the District 3 girl acting so funny?" Minerva asked.

"Programming," Midas explained. "You'll have to really watch out for her. We didn't see her too much on TV, 'cause she died early, but if I remember her right, she was supposed to be an intuitive."

"Intu-it-tive?"

"Yeah. District 3 has a lot of the, so I've heard," the boy went on. "They're employed in the weapons factories, mostly. They don't think straight, like you or me, but they can sense stuff and are very observant. It's said that they can sense things before other people can, like danger – like if a bomb is about to go off. They wind up keeping saner people from doing stupid stuff. You saw how she shimmied up a tree before the pack of mutts came through her area. The programmers tried to reflect what she could have been in the Games."

Well-placed arrows, courtesy of Katniss' skill, took care of both mines and Tributes.

The day the game ended, the match up was highly strange compared to what had really happened. Rue watched from a tree while Katniss and Cato duked it out with swords. Midas had chosen to re-take the sword for this fight, for the sake of "coolness," leaving his sister's character with the bow.

Health bars lowered with every clash and parry. The fighting was quite sloppy – no finesse. The characters' heels slid in the mud. Katniss had a quarter-bar of health left while Cato was down to a sliver. That's when the Cato AI preformed a thrust-move, sending his sword in a bleeding spray through Katniss' abdomen. The health bar was depleted to zero immediately and a short version of the Panem National Anthem played.

"Katniss, no!" Minerva screamed, having gotten her mind entirely into the game. She looked at Midas, who'd set down his controller with a sad smile. "I will avenge you!"

And that was how Rue, the girl from District 11, the smallest and weakest of Hunger Games Tributes, sent a forest of arrows through career-fighter Cato and ended the game. The anthem played in strong, upbeat tones. Rue was presented clean, upon a stage. A sound-byte, taken and spliced from the girl's real voice, congratulated her player. A crown of laurel-leaves, dipped in 24-karat gold, was placed upon her head as the character raised her arms in praise of the Capitol.

Minerva just stared.

"Are you done with your little game?" the children's mother asked as she watched the screen and heard the cheering. "You can turn it off now. There is a special on television."

"Yes," their father said, taking a seat upon the couch and turning the game screen over to the television-feed. "The first speech from the first stop on the Victory Tour is today."

"Where are they stopping?" Minerva asked.

"District 11," her mother answered. The little girl grabbed Daedalus and sat on the carpet before the couch. She could see Augustine out of the corner of her eye at the edge of the room, standing tall and silent. He was like furniture.

"I can't believe you won," Midas pouted.

"Nyeeh!" Minerva said, sticking out her tongue.

The Victors of the real 74th Hunger Games took the stage for all of Panem to see – and all of Panem was watching. Over the staging area were banners representing the fallen Tributes from District 11.

Minerva found her eyes fixated on the banner for Rue – and upon the family standing beneath it. The speeches began, droning, lulling, until Katniss – the real Katniss, began talking about seeing Rue, her friend, in the flowers and hearing her in birdsong…

The television gave a slightly bluish cast to everything. The live feed made everything just a little bit pixilated at the edges. It was just a little but unreal, uncanny.

A few minutes before, Rue as a Victor had stared at little Minerva from the screen, her face not quite right, uncanny.

The image in the banner… it was also uncanny.

The living Victors spoke off-script, against their programmed dialogue.

They weren't real. They weren't supposed to be.

Yet, they were.

END.

Thanks to Sailor_Lilithchan for bouncing ideas with me.