Savage Theories

by Pola Oloixarac

  Dirty War 1975 could be downloaded for free from both Pabst’s blog and Kamtchowsky’s; there was also a webpage they designed specifically to distribute the game. Pabst saw Kamtchowsky’s idea as a massive sociological apparatus, one that was highly perfectible. Q, the project’s chief engineer, had added a bit of malware that infected the players’ computers and sent back information about their habits and preferences. (At university a few years later, Q would design a visual adventure game that consisted of killing students and professors from the Department of Natural and Applied Sciences in the hallways of Building 1.) Within a few weeks of launching the first prototype, the game’s creators had a robust data base from which to elaborate new theories and extract statistical tendencies.

  The data showed that forty percent of all players who played more than once suited up first for one side, then for the other; this produced fluctuations in the curve comparing performances and points scored. It was noted that of the growing number who started playing Pelado Flores and then alternated between Ranni II and Tigre Rosca, some twenty-three percent eventually settled on Vladimiro. Female players tended to begin playing Hilda on one side and Martín Romero Díaz on the other, but eventually switched to Lobo Bahndor or Che I. The Revolutionary Author lost out to the Rannis (especially Ranni II); however, it became clear that a majority of returning female players who’d begun with Jaguar Gómez also felt a special predilection for the Author. Eighty percent of all players chose either Ranni I or Ranni II at least once; some thirty percent were loyal to Che I or Vladimiro. A majority of the players who chose Susana and La Piba were men. A bit of code was rewritten to give Monsignor Faustino a large cross that shot death rays; Father Manuel, on the other hand, was given the power of coming back to life. Only a small percentage chose to play the Monsignor, but they tended to return to him faithfully. Most of those who played Father Manuel on one side alternated between Hilda and Che I on the other, with five percent switching over to Jaguar Gómez. La Piba was an extremely popular choice amongst the male players, and the development team received a number of emails requesting that they open the code so that players could give her more weapons and greater powers.

  What explained all these fluctuations? Given the evenly distributed (that is, non-existent) moral load attached to each character, it wasn’t easy to develop preference-based profiles; likewise, the motivational vectors showed no recognizable pattern. While it’s true that many MMPG players tend to choose weaker characters who offer more of a challenge, the fact that Dirty War 1975 was designed to confer equal chances of winning on all characters from both teams (a certain degree of poetic license allowed a molotov cocktail to have the same effect as a hand grenade) made short work of said guiding hypothesis. The Darwinian theory that each player chooses the character they think is capable of doing the most damage fell short as an explanation for the same reason. In general, the data gathered refused to allow for any definitive conclusions.

  The best plays—or at any rate the most significant in terms of earning points—were always a function of the tactical distribution of weaponry. All operations took place concomitantly, so whichever player brought the greatest quantity of violence to bear was the player who took home the spoils. The game’s creators counted on the fact that with the growth of the Internet, (both as a sort of public commons for entertainment and as an all-encompassing registry of, and space for, social and occupational interactions,) each player’s character could enter the virtual worlds of the future with their characteristics and acquired powers intact. The development of technology would thus lead to common gaming platforms wherein points earned in new MMPGs could be used in games still laboring under more primitive paradigms, such as World of Warcraft and Second Life.

  Little by little the game grew more sophisticated, thanks to the brilliant handiwork of Q and his friend Logical Backdoor, a skinny, diligently nerdy kid. As a child, Logical had seen the film War Games (1983) a million bazillion times. David, the film’s protagonist, used the same tactics as Logical: both had modems fitted with acoustic couplings, and both had a gift for writing war dialing programs, which are designed to dial all possible numerical combinations within a given set of parameters in the hope of getting someone else’s modem to respond. Once it did, Logical and David took control of the computers at the other end of the line, and used them as trampolines to vault themselves into other, still more powerful computers.

  Then David runs into a mysterious mainframe. When he guesses its password, the computer takes him to be its creator, Professor Falken; it welcomes David, and invites him to play a game from a list that includes Falken’s Maze, Chess, Poker, Guerrilla Engagement, Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare, and Global Thermonuclear War. The movie takes place in the 1980s, so naturally David chooses Global Thermonuclear War, and maps of the world’s two superpowers appear on the screen:

  United States.

  Soviet Union.

  The computer asks David which side he wants; he says, “I’ll be the Russians,” and chooses Option 2. The U.S. map then fills with potential targets, and he chooses to attack Las Vegas and Seattle. Of course, he isn’t aware that he has just infiltrated NORAD, the United States nuclear defense program; his innocent game is in fact taking place on the cruel grounds of the “real” adult world. When the FBI captures him and accuses him of international espionage, one of the adults in charge says, “He does fit the profile perfectly. He’s intelligent but an underachiever, alienated from his parents, has few friends. A classic case for recruitment by the Soviets.” Logical possessed these same grim characteristics, and had spent years fantasizing about the moment the Russians arrived to take him home. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Logical, then thirteen years old, had control of the network connecting all U.S. hospitals, and was capable of hijacking satellites.

  The film contains three pearls of morality: 1. There are no human villains (the one omnipresent “character” is the impotence of humans faced with the futility of total war); 2. It uses the terminology of logic to discuss the ethical problems of war (e.g. calculations of acceptable losses); 3. David knows from the very beginning that the system is learning how to play. “It’s not just some machine,” he explains to his friend Jennifer (daring, lively, athletic). “The system actually learned how to learn.” In the film’s final climax, after having examined all of the possible variations of a negative-sum game with no dominant strategy, the NORAD computer famously comments, “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.” David’s logical intuition has saved the world from complete annihilation; congratulating him, one of the adults pointedly ruffles his hair. The film was criticized for the lack of sexual tension between David and Jennifer; shortly after, the groundbreaking film The Goonies, (its screenplay written by the same person who wrote Gremlins,) dealt decisively with the sexual awakening of young nerds through the French kiss that transpired (braces notwithstanding) between Mikey Walsh and the vivacious Andy, the cheerleader girlfriend of Mikey’s big brother, Brand.

  In Dirty War 1975, when a guerrilla characters dies, you hear an urgent, melodious off-screen voice say, “Compared to the melancholic Argentina of today, these bodies, these Montoneros who have ascended from their earthly city to the City of Heaven, represent the Argentina that was promised us, the Argentina that God intended to be born of their silence and their courage.” This is an excerpt from the speech that Father Carlos Mugica gave at the Requiem mass for two guerrilla leaders. The recording was extremely well-known, and could (hypothetically) have provoked any number of kamikaze decisions amongst the game’s players. Pabst criticized this feature, arguing that, given how compelling the little scene featuring Mugica’s voice had turned out to be, one of the two teams now had more reason to die than the other, which affected the balance of team play, and thus the integrity of the statistics.

  Another added feature widened the spectrum of what could be obtained with the points earned at the end of a successful
mission: players could now buy uniforms and win medals. For example, a player who killed Martín Romero Díaz while keeping watch on a dark street corner would be rewarded with enough points to acquire either a set of new adepts or a replica of the uniform introduced by the Montoneros in the spring of 1975.

  Fortunately, thanks to the aforementioned law of co-participation, many of Pabst’s obsessions did not make it into the final version of the game. A scene showing the four Little Ponies of the Apocalypse, (their faces replaced with that of Elias Canetti, the audio consisting of excerpts from Crowds and Power read aloud) passed with the barest majority; the moment Pabst got distracted by something else, Q cut the scene without a word. Pabst muttered a bit in protest, but decided to let it go. He knew that at times it was best to take one’s lumps and shut one’s mouth.

  In another way, these weren’t actually defeats as such: they helped Pabst to feel controversial, to entertain himself with feelings of self-pity. As Marshall McLuhan once wrote, “The poet, the artist, the sleuth—whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely ‘well-adjusted,’ he cannot go along with currents and trends.” In fact Pabst felt terribly inspired; he couldn’t stop posting on his blog.

  Now he stood for a moment to scratch his nose; it was atrocious, the amount of bullshit he was capable of producing. He turned his head left and right, but couldn’t quite get his neck joints to pop. He caressed his balls, flirting with the thought of rubbing one out. He closed his eyes to try out a few scenarios: girls from his primary school; humiliations suffered at the Club de Amigos, a camp at what used to be the Circuito KDT. He often found himself caught in a burst of metatheory as regarded the meaning of jerking himself off. Any given bit of mental content could self-activate and self-animate thanks to the introspective powers—the ability to manipulate the subtle substance of thought—of Pabst, Puppet-Master-in-Chief. Ultimately, all content was at the service of the ecstatic will of semen, the protein of pleasure. Detumescence at hand! he sighed happily. Then he noticed that he’d just said that out loud, and Andy was staring at him.

  –Here you go, drink this, down in one.

  Pabst’s face was paralyzed with repressed fury. He hadn’t moved a muscle to signal his thanks, and didn’t plan to. He almost gagged when he felt Andy’s big hand patting him on the shoulder, always more masculinely than was strictly necessary.

  –Come on, drink up, it’s good.

  Pablo held the glass the way a little kid holds a bowl of chicken broth, drinking in sips. He was instantly drunk. Andy helped him to put on a wool sweater; the weather was still warm, but it was likely to cool down later on. Pabst glanced at his crotch on the way out—zipper closed, and no embarrassing stains. He asked aloud where his Kamtchowsky might be. Andy ignored this, and flagged down a taxi. It took them up Figueroa Alcorta to the gardens of the Planetarium.

  Under a black sky shot through with lights, the Planetarium’s sphere looked like an enormous tarantula. They had arrived at a massive open-air party; the human hordes writhed in all directions, powerful strobe lights spun, the bass notes made the ground shake, and the shadows of the surrounding trees were lost against the blind shapes of the sky. The event was sponsored by a beer company and a telephone company. The full measure of Andy’s chemical artistry had gone into whatever Pabst had drunk; he couldn’t do anything except stare in all directions, fascinated.

  Andy exchanged handshakes with a number of young men and women, all of whom were extremely happy to see him—the customary delivery of pills. A guy in a Hare Krishna tunic walked mechanically toward them; he stood blinking in front of them for a few seconds, then walked away. Pabst pulled on Andy’s sleeve, and Andy shrugged.

  Pabst floated along beside his friend like a balloon filled with happiness and bewilderment as they left the Planetarium party behind and headed toward the lake. There weren’t many ducks around. Pabst suggested throwing rocks at them, but Andy, the big brother, assured him that they would come back later.

  –Are we going into the Rosedal now, at night? asked Pabst, his voice that of a kid on a field trip. Andy shook his head, walking slower and slower. The music from the party came to them as a murmur, mixed with the engine noise of passing cars. Andy winked, shot him a crooked grin. Pabst dreamily accepted that it didn’t matter at all where they were headed, and pretended that the looks his friend got from everyone who drove by were meant for him as well.

  A black car passed them, pulled to the side and parked. Andy examined the vehicle with a certain severity; he told Pabst to wait, and walked over to it. Calm and smiling, Pabst considered vomiting while Andy was away. He took a few stuttering old-woman steps toward the closest bushes, and laughed at himself.

  Blurred in the shadows of the trees, Andy stepped to the car’s open window and spoke with the driver, a sexually hybrid being—a sexual homo faber, Pabst laughed to himself, trying to calm down. Georgie got out of the car and started flirting with Andy. She had her boobs hanging out of her schoolgirl clothes, and her face, close-shaven, wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Andy and Georgie talked as if they were old friends; Pabst assumed that he was selling her pills. Georgie didn’t have a purse; her high heels were precisely those insisted upon by the Western canon as established by Playboy and Penthouse. It was common amongst homo faber (with faber here conserving its naughty connotation of “tool”) to pick an English nickname with which to clad the socially acceptable modality of their glamorous gay selves. “The martyred saint of urban sodomites is the gemsmith Oscar Wilde, but the world’s leading exporter of fairies, and of university-level fairy slang, is actually France,” thought Pabst, on the verge of happiness as he fired back up. To entertain himself he cast about for additional conclusions based on his observations of Doña Faber, but none were forthcoming. Andy was taking his time, and Pabst started to feel uncomfortable, as if he were acting in one of those unjustifiable scenes that do nothing but add local color, the kind of scene that appeared in so many of the plays by contemporary poets he despised so much.

  Andy opened the fly of his trousers and brought out his elegant member; Georgie promptly captured it in her mouth. As fellatio begun, Georgie had a look around, and her eyes met Pabst’s. Pabst instantly let his gaze fall to the ground. His shoelaces were undone. He heard a voice ask, “Is that your little friend?” and looked back over. Georgie was staring at his crotch. He thought about waving to her from where he stood, as if it were daytime, hoping that his innocence would exculpate him, the way you’d let a good boy go just this once.

  Andy, still standing in place, turned toward Pabst and shouted, “Pull it out! Georgie says to pull it out!”

  Under other circumstances, Pabst would never have done what he did next. Under less stressful circumstances, he would have been able to ejaculate some relatively well-articulated argument into the ether. Generally speaking, such moments of personal splendor were what guaranteed his autonomy. But here and now, his usual burst of self-awareness petered out, and humiliation erased his memory.

  His throat dry, Pabst spit on his penis and started tugging at it. The car’s hazard lights blinked on and off, on and off, hypnotic. He could feel Georgie’s eyes light up. He spit on his penis again and started tugging even harder. He thought of Celan’s idea of poetic moments that consist of not knowing how to speak or what to say, because the world has fomented a revolt amongst its own contingencies. Then he imagined the face of Althusser. Andy continued to pump loads of organic material into an individual inside a car; Pabst contented himself with vomiting.

  Now Andy came walking over, relaxed, almost triumphant. Pabst shivered. Andy wouldn’t look him in the eye. Pabst considered issuing a clarification—that it had only been the sudden appearance of Althusser that had made him throw up.

  –What just happened? he asked.

  –Happened where?

  –Just now.

  –Nothing! Georgie’s a friend.

  – . . . />
  –Really. We used to play tennis together as kids.

  –Enough! What happened? I mean, syntactically.

  Andy scratched his head. As he thought, the light came to nest in his blond hair, making it glow exquisitely.

  –Yeah, well, someone undertook an action that was followed by another action which was in turn followed by yet another.

  –This is really unpleasant.

  –Why?

  –Please. I feel gross inside.

  –There is no inside, Pabst.

  –Of course there is, and don’t call me Pabst, said Pabst, beginning to pout.

  Andy slid a few bills into the hollow of Pabst’s palm. Pabst, terrified and histrionic, threw himself down in the grass and sat there trembling. He wanted someone to rub his head while the time machine went into reverse and put the error back in its place, in the dimension of unconjugated verbs, in the one true Neverland.

  –Of course there is an inside! he shouted, kicking at a pebble.

  He got up, put his hands in his pockets and hunched his back in that scoliotic posture he had made his own–the cutest little outcast nerd. At least nobody had touched him. That would have been impossible to bear. And at least no one had made fun of him. He quickened his pace, then stopped as if suddenly sensing the meaning of the black trees that surrounded him.

  He wished he had his notebook with him. He would have jotted down that the idea of Personhood is unquestionably linked to the idea of property, to the extent that the notion of that which is mine, understood as a value, interacts with the world at large. Acts are one’s own to the extent that subjectivity signs an ownership contract with a given situation or fact. He started running, dodging the tree trunks of the woods of Palermo, headed toward Libertador. When he saw the cars, he was overcome by a strange certainty: the only possible property was ontologically interwoven with moral responsibility. He shuddered. The idea was neither particularly wise nor beautiful, and yet it shone inside him as if suddenly bathed in something peculiar, plausible, brightly gleaming.