Unveiling Truth: A Digital Exploration of District 12

Introduction

In the dystopian world of “The Hunger Games,” District 12 symbolizes oppression, resilience, and rebellion. But what if deeper connections existed between this fictional district and historical events? This digital humanities project aims to unravel these hidden threads by intertwining Suzanne Collins’ captivating narrative with the tumultuous history of the French Revolution. A short blurb at the end of the story covers the importance of this, so please enjoy the story in its full! Before reading the rest of this page, I highly encourage playing through the game.

Creating an Interactive Adventure Through Twine.

Using Twine, you step into District 12. As you explore its streets, and hidden corners, you’ll encounter echoes of both past and present. Twine’s non-linear format allows us to create an interactive experience, where your choices force you to become engaged with the story and its themes of resistance. Inspired by other Twine stories as mentioned in one of the class required readings, I wanted to hint to the reader how those who are oppressed may feel stuck in their situation, and any clues or ideas for escaping that situation can simply feel impossible. As much as revolution is exciting it is horrifying as well. The story relates events that happened during the Hunger Games novels to the French Revolution, using digital storytelling methods to make exploring the parallels more exciting for a wider range of individuals. Drawing parallels between District 12 and revolutionary France, we delve into themes of inequality, sacrifice, and defiance. Oppression and revolution continue to be of importance with recent world events such as the ongoing war in Gaza and the totalitarian government of North Korea. As much as it is important to recognize signs of oppression and fight against it, I wanted the player to sympathize with those who are trapped in these situations. I chose to use the French Revolution because similarly to the Hunger Games, you can analyze the major and complete events that occurred during this time. Current world events such as the previously mentioned war in Gaza and the oppression of civilians in North Korea have unfortunately yet to see a resolution.

Before coming to this conclusion, I began a few Twine stories relating to general war and oppression. The story originally took place during the beginning of the Hunger Games novel allowing the player to navigate their way through the first novel. After beginning this, I found the themes I really wanted to focus on were muddled in such a large and already existing story. There was no point in simply adding a choice to a story already made. I settled on the idea of the player searching through their father’s office, only to find some odd papers as I found my ideas were more clearly presented through this method. I worked hard to keep the story relatively short to attract a wider audience, which worked well for my project.

Mapping as a Storytelling Tool

For my project, I wanted to seamlessly integrate my digital timeline within Twine. Figuring out how I wanted to do this was somewhat difficult, however, I finally decided it would be one of the “pieces” you stumble across in your journey. This was a bit difficult to implement, and with limited knowledge and skills I was only able to hyperlink it as opposed to having it be embedded into the story passage. I also wasn’t able to force open a new tab when the hyperlink was clicked, at first, but as discussed in my next section, AI software helped me with some coding issues.

AI’s Role in Illuminating Insights

Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically Copilot, played a pivotal role in my research. By analyzing vast datasets, AI algorithms identified patterns, cross-referenced historical texts, and highlighted thematic intersections. For this purpose, I used the RTRI approach. Natural language processing allowed us to extract meaning from primary sources, shedding light on hidden truths and connections between the French Revolution and the Hunger Games I may have missed. I also used Copilot to assist with adding my timeline into Twine, and it helped me with the code for force opening a new tab when clicking on a hyperlink.

Additional Resources

• Explore the Twine Cookbook for practical tips and advanced techniques. This is a resource I had to look to many times for assistance in adding images, changing text colour, and having options labelled differently lead to the same outcome.
• Discover AI additional applications in humanities research through Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence.