Newsgroups: workspace.g-deep_europe,
workspace.deep_europe


previous    top    workgroup    thread    next


Subject: Computer game Europa
From: abroeck <abroeck@v2.nl>
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 16:01:37 METDST

* * * * *

COMPUTER GAME EUROPA
by Cãlin Dan

Talking about EUROPE is a temptation I always fail to reject.
In that sense I am by no means better than the politicians,
civil servants, journalists, a. o. who made a profession from
exploiting this vague syndrome - the post-industrial EUROPEAN
identity. The reason for perpetrating an attitude that I
actually hate lies, I guess, on some 5 levels of
explanation: 1. I am too limited to find a more original
topic, and EUROPE is at hand anyway. 2. I am too stiff to
become more personal, and EUROtalks are not about
individuals, but about "History". 3. I am too lazy to be more
creative, and EUROPE provides an unexhausted collection of
interchangeable clichés. 4. I am too conformist not to enjoy
the commodity of masochism. 5. I am too oppressed by my
Romanian identity, therefore unable to avoid speaking about
it.

For those who ignore that part of the EUROPEAN history,
Romania is a country which found its modern political shape
around 1850. And started immediately a harsh debate about its
place in or outside EUROPE. The issue is still fresh some 150
years later and it didn't bring much to the country since a
lot of true EUROPEANS believe that the capital city of
Romania is either Budapest or Sofia. The capital city of
Romania is Bucharest (Bucuresti).
The love-hate relation Romanians have with their own country
has an equivalent in many other cultures who experienced
(episodes of) marginality. Exceptional here is not the tense
relation of the intellectual class (the professionals of the
S-M autodafé) with an ambiguous geography, but the extension
of that tension in other levels of the society, from the
political sphere to the mass of potential emigrants, which
are a high percentage of the active population.
Now imagine that on top of the Romanian identity (marginal,
post-communist, oppressive) you realize that you are also an
EUROPEAN. It's hard to be a Romanian but it's twice as hard
to be a Romanian in EUROPE .

*Geophrenia.* Arad, my home town is situated at the Romanian-
Hungarian border, in a region that some (still) name
MittelEUROPA. This should give a hint about the Eastern limit
of the continent, symmetrical to the Western one in relation
to the "Middle". The trouble is that MittelEUROPA isn't a
point, nor a line - it is an area of subjective shape and
dimension. Adding this to the unfortunate situation that
EUROPE is geologically bounded to Asia, we realize that the
object of so much fuss, recently, is very vague on one of its
margins. Pushed back and forth according to various agendas,
an important chunk of the continent could be better defined
as MittelEURASIA.

A common place that I like in EURObabbling is the use of
Europa's myth in order to present the continental gestalt -
feminine, abused, oriental, fertile. For those who don't have
a dictionary at hand, here are some useful details: Europa, a
beautiful Phoenician princess was kidnapped by Zeus,
disguised as a white bull, who took her across the
Mediterranean see in Crete. There she gave birth to three
sons, one being Minos, who later on will be involved in
another case of bull erotica (his wife Pasiphae will have an
affair with a true representative of that species).
When I was a kid in MittelEURasia, the courtyard story went
about late Empress Maria Theresa who was so greedy, sexually
speaking, that she needed a horse to fulfill her; it was even
assumed that her death occurred in connection with that
zoophiliac abuse. I was always fascinated by the cruel
nonsense, and also by the theatrical aspect of this
speculation; therefore a had a shock while discovering on the
facade of a movie theater from Bucharest the allegoric
illustration of the episode: Maria Theresa, nude but with the
unmistakable hairdo, lying on her back with a horse between
her legs. The horse is mounted by Death. I realized then what
all this was about: an updated version of Europa's myth,
where the daughter of Agenor became the symbol of
rationalized Power, undermined by its own lust for the
irrational. Maria Theresa was Europa in the geopolitical
sense (EUROPE) - fertilized but also killed by the horse, a
Shamanistic substitute for the nomad warrior and for his
eternal trade - revival through destruction.

*I am not an European.* Before 1989 all my life was confined
in an area that could be crossed in 18 and rallied around in
36 hours (by train). What was happening beyond that limit was
not to be seen, experienced or understood by me, ever. I was
supposed to live and die in my country, with no other
alternative, and I strongly believed in that fate, since I
resented emigration and I was not part of the privileged
class, who could travel.

Objectively speaking, I belong to a historic time when one
half of EUROPE was rejecting the other. And even more, I
belong to the rejected part - I am obsolete. By coming to
live, in another time though, in the rejecting half of the
continent doesn't necessarily give me a new identity, but
helps me to get rid of the old one. It doesn't free me from
the new mechanics of power, but it exorcise the previous
ones, still sheltered in the dark corners of my brain.

Therefore EUROPE is for me an object of trade, not a matter
of identity. I started to discover that outside in the most
natural way for a Mitteleurasian - as an outsider. And I
became instantly mesmerized not by the reality, but by the
unifying concept in which the insiders wrapped it - EUROPE.
One of the most resistant ideological products that I
experienced through the years, and I guess that my experience
was vast in that sense. The oppressive side of this product
might be elusive for the inexperienced, but the efficiency of
the EUROPEAN slogans looks impressive at a more careful
survey of the media.
When the Cold War status quo was abolished, the most
embarrassing effect was the drop in the quality of the spy
movies and novels. John Le Carré, one of my unholy heroes,
started to have problems of content since a vacuum appeared
in the procedures of the EUROPEAN collectivism, which kept
until then the West, respectively the East on the two sides
of the Iron Link. The brief next hysteria - the "House of
EUROPE" - with its shallow discourse about integrationism was
of no effect. And now we are back at the rationalization of
EUROPE into halves through the monetary union. Which is
implemented with a haste and persistence meant to hide the
lack of preparation and the despise for the human factor in
favor of always-bigger agendas. It actually reminds me of the
urge and determination which defined the launching of each
new "five years plan" in my home society, somewhere at the
critical margin of the EUROPEAN time.

I am not demonizing the East-West conflict. If there is guilt
involved in the installation of the EUROPEAN schizophrenia,
it is too old and too diffuse to make any judgment
productive. I personally believe in geopolitical
determination, and in that sense the EURasian psychotic
division-through-union is at the root of the other, more
internalized continental divorce (West vs. East, North vs.
South, NW vs. SE, etc.).
I also reject the offended attitude of the ironed half of
EUROPE against the velveted half. I do not think that the
rich are indebted to the poor and the happy few owe to the
unhappy many.
But I also resent EUROPE - a tool meant to repress the danger
represented by the many poor to the happy rich. A cover for
controlling the individuals through always-renewed stories of
common concern. A transformer of dubious topics into emergent
priorities. A resource of revenue for a political oligarchy.
A rude celebration of cohesion which embarrasses the
excluded. Everything has to be EUROPEAN and in the interest
of EUROPE: the art, the politics, the education, the
production, the markets, the money, but mainly the
celebrations and the crisis. The English contaminated beef,
the child abuse, the drug connections, even the Bosnian
genocide are not events involving people, but failures of a
certain image of EUROPE. EUROPE is obsessed with itself - and
that might be a prove of insecurity and guilt feelings.
If we get back to classic mythology, I guess that two other
episodes would be useful here. One is about Narcissus,
punished by the gods because of his arrogant refusal to make
love to either the nymph Echo or the boy Ameinias (the
posterity is divided on this detail). The punishment
consisted in falling desperately in love with his own image,
reflected in a water. In psychoanalysis, narcissism is "a
morbid condition in which the subject is intensely interested
in his own body.
The other one is about Procrustes, a brigand who was
practicing a curious taxation system on the travelers
crossing his path. They were compelled to lie on an iron bed
and then they were, upon case, either stretched or chopped
off in order to fit the bed's length.

*Comment peut-on être EUROPÉEN?* The peculiarity of the
EUROPEAN condition becomes obvious mainly when contemplated
as an isolated case of the human condition itself.
First a question - what is so special about EUROPE in order
to invest such efforts for keeping together the "continental"
image and infrastructure? Then some other - is the Asian ego-
mania lesser? Are the Americas less obsessed with their split
"identity"? Is the African unity less necessary than the
EUROPEAN one?

But, after all, how can one be an EUROPEAN?

This question must be understood in relation to the one les
Parisiens were asking Rica after he proved to be socially
correct by adopting the EUROPEAN dressing fashion.
Montesquieu realized in this episode of his Lettres Persannes
(letter 30) the most effective (to my knowledge) cut into the
dilemmatic absurdity of the continental self-consciousness.
The question Comment peut-on être Persan? is a cover for the
repressed obsession with one's own troubled identity; and it
should be red actually Comment peut-on être EUROPÉEN?! (with
amazement) one hundred times every morning, on an empty
stomach, until the patient gets over the anxiety of not being
EUROPEAN enough (or the other way around).

Etre EUROPÉEN is both as weird and as dull as being no matter
what other kind of excessive minority. Because the EUROPEANS
are a minority, and if the political class developed from
this complex an irritated attitude on both home and global
matters, we - the average EUROPEANS - should try to
experience it without such a ridiculous intensity.
More relativism concerning one's origins could do only good.
And reversing the aggressive question from the other to the
self should be an exercise of polite(ical correct)ness not
only for the EUROPEANS but also for other fundamentalists.

When I rejected my condition of Romanian, it was altogether
with its EUROpackage; one can't trade an ideology with
another in just one life time. Shifting ideologies are handy
for those able to travel the whole spectrum, from the right
to the left and back. I am just a Persian, born in
MittelEURasia and established somewhere in EUROPE. For those
who want to know how can somebody be a Persian, a look on the
map would help: Persia isn't there any more.

*AAAA.* When you start learning your alphabet, first come the
vocals - A, E, I, O, U. When learning your continents, first
comes Africa, then America, then Asia and Australia. EUROPE
is the last one, after a long line of A's. When you look at
the global map, things appear to be different: the 5
continents are actually more (not to speak about the unclear
status of some islands as big as EUROPE), America is two
continents in one and EUROPE does not exist as an entity
separate from Asia.

The two main fears of EUROPE are America and Asia, precisely.
In the oppressed codes of the EUROcolonialism, "America"
means the USA, and "Asia" means Russia. Since 1945, America
means NATO and Russia means all the Central-Eastern EUROPE.
Asia ends near Vienna; America is everywhere.
Of course EUROPE cannot cope with the idea that it became a
colony of its former colonies. And while EUROcolonialism has
been replaced by EUROcolonization, the metropolitan obsession
remains strong on the continent. The only change consists in
the efforts to suppress internal competition for improved
external efficiency. The EUROpoliticians try to enforce the
continental position by: federalism vs. "American" dominance;
and economic union vs. (EUR)Asian nomadism.
The united states of EUROPE are not about cohesion, but about
isolation from the old enemy - EURASIA - by adopting the
model of a lesser enemy - the USA. The failure of this policy
in the near future is guaranteed by the main specificity of
EUROPE, which is defined by division, regionalization, war.
In the EUROPEAN mentality, everyone desperately wants to be
the First, and it is hard to believe that millennia of
individualist politics will be abolished in just a few years
of systematic demagogy. It might happen that the future will
be decided by the conflict between the perversity of
globalism and the paranoia of provincialism.

I remember my grand mother speaking about times when from her
Transylvanian town till Venice, or Ljubliana, or Vienna she
was traveling with the same passport, using the same
currency, referring to the same administration. She was a
citizen of the Königliches und Kaiserliches Empire, in the
times when federalist theories were trying to save a peaceful
EUROPE. Shortly after the Big War came, and the federalist
dream was abandoned for some more realistic solutions of
atomization. The risk in the present revival of federalist
dreams is that they might end in the reverse: a severe
division of the continent, even more radical by reaction than
the previous one.
EUROPE remains just a time bomb accumulating oppressed energy
until it will explode - around the Millennium, as it suits to
all prophesied catastrophes.

*KartenDämmerung.* The symbolic confusion between geography and
nature is a recent disease of the human psyche, and it
started with the production of maps.
Before, say, the 16 century, mapping was a remote, random,
also secret activity. It kept its esoteric side even
afterwards, as an instrument of political control in the
economic warfare. People started to visualize their
environment within the abstraction of mapping very late, when
the mass extension of education made geography a compulsory
object of study.
From that period lasts, I guess, the oppressive
identification of the humans with a context large enough to
be out of the body scale - the disembodiment through
geography. Try to figure the life of the EUROPEANS before
maps were part of the daily communication system. Imagination
and consciousness were two opposite elements at that time.
Inventing spaces was a stronger component of daily life than
it is now, and identifying spaces was almost null. The few
travelers were the exceptions virusing this remoteness, but
their influence has to be imagined as punctual and generally
benign, like the influence of story telling on the childhood.

But that was before the organized transformation of
populations in masses of conscious producer of value. The way
maps were dealt with ever after speaks about the ability of
ideological agendas to hide the non-linearity of history.
Flat projections of fulfilled (or frustrated) desires, maps
freeze into patterns of dominance a reality based on
approximation and change. Territoriality, although a multi-
dimensional concept, has its ultimate expression in the
abstraction of mapping, a symbolic act of imprisonment.
The questioning of maps is considered an attack on the
survival of the human species - advertised both as a settled
configuration of power groups and as a dominant intelligence
able to control the environment by quantified information.
Maps are beyond doubt, as is the knowledge of the scientists
who draw them and the goodwill of the political class that
controls the instrument of borders.
Monuments to the utopia of stability, maps should never be
presented in series, unless for illustrating a Darwinist
vector underneath historical processes, since progress is
cherished as the supreme logic of change. Thinking otherwise
means aiming at disorder, and finally at war.

Computer game EUROPA In the spring of 1995 I became
fascinated by chaos, as a reaction against my new condition
of immigrant, I guess. Anyway, the combination between chaos
theories, my exit from MittelEURasia and the pressure of the
Amsterdam computer environment brought the idea that chaos
could be applied to the political history of EUROPE, in order
to define the strange attractors which determine the dynamics
of the borders behavior. And eventually to foresee the future
developments of the continent in that respect.
I was busy for a while figuring out an argumentation of my
intuition, and also giving it a visual consistency. Finally I
got stuck with a 10 pages essay and the idea of a web site
where the political map of EUROPE was moving towards the
future in a fortune telling way. My convictions about the
continent being pessimistic, the whole was dubbed "Happy
Doomsday!"
The disproportion between the research effort and the final
result was deceiving, though. For anyone familiarized a
little with the EUROPEAN scenarios, the process of gathering
enough borders information in order to feed non-linear
equations, and then put the whole into graphics, etc. was a
redundant effort. After all, who cares if Doomsday is happy
or not? Important is that it comes.

But then, I had a revelation. Looking at the structures of
the power discourses I realized that I was wrong in two
aspects: 1. the belief that "The zeitgeist seems to be, at
this moment of the 90s, a converging trend starting in the
computer based art and ending in a certain area of scientific
research." If there still is such a think as a zeitgeist,
then it definitely is the screen based GAME. There is no
issue that cannot be itemized as a game, since there is no
issue too complex not to be compressible into information,
therefore easy to manipulate towards entertainment.
And 2. - looking at the chaos aesthetics without counting in
the human factor. If we remember the first chaos
representations realized by Mandelbrot and followers, and
compare them with the developments of the computer games in
the 90s we see the distance between the frozen and the
dynamic aspects of kitsch. And that distance can be measured
through a human factor, called INTERACTION.

But introducing interaction into a chaotic pattern is a
conclusion to which I was drove by the example of the surfing
class. The term of ruling class became outdated during the
80s, in a rapid process of inflation which increased the
number of "rich" people and decreased the age level of
becoming millionaire. The nouveaux riches are belonging
ssmainly to the computer and to the media connected
businesses. They combine the managerial status with other,
more punctual skills, and with a charismatic, New Age
oriented attitude. Their real decisional power is hard to
evaluate at this moment; but the surfing class is definitely
the remote controller between the power centers and the
billions oriented markets, the indicators of the purchase
behavior of the masses, the dandies of the 90s, when the
fashion moves the populations into a fever of teens
consumerism. The surfing class might be already in power, it
still is not the ruling class of older times. It is a
transitional phase, in a longer game.

According to the teachings of the surfing class, exhibited
seriousness is not a productive attitude in our infantile
environment, where everything has to be wrapped playfully in
order to pay off. Therefore, EUROPE can't be a chaotic model,
but might be an INTERACTIVE GAME. Needless to mention this in
the post-Gulf era: all games converge into war games. Their
structure depends on what is the significance of the war
parameter in the user's psychology.
A user-friendly war is a war that rewards in an obvious way
the skilled warrior.
Skill is something connecting the neurons to the muscles, in
the same way that the mouse (the joystick) is connecting the
software to the screen.
Skill cannot be internal or even remote, without developing
into a frustration.
Skill has to be exhibited tri-dimensionally.
Through skill, physical effort survives in the computer game
era as the ultimate approach to entertainment.
While territoriality remains (still) the maximum war-game
reward, although it is obsolete in the post-industrial real-
war protocols.

To close the circle of those speculations, "Happy Doomsday!"
turned into a game hopefully for the benefit of all
interested parts.

*Temple of Anxiety.* I go to a fitness club every second day;
when I am depressed, I go daily. The club is called "Splash",
and has a logo inspired from the famous engraving of Hokusai,
called "The Wave". Looking at the image more closely, Hokusai
and Mandelbrot seem to have used the same non-linear
equations for building their foamy fractal graphics.
Two elements that I consider crucial for the post-industrial
mentality have a direct expression in the world of fitness. I
already mentioned them before in other connections -
infantilism and masochism.
The paraphernalia of body building looks like coming both
from a baby shop and a sex store; the fitness environment
provides a radical shortcut through the psychoanalytical
"ages", from oral to anal to sexual, all in the same person
and at the same time.
Fitnessing people wear baggy clothes, clumsy and easy to
dress, they dry and oil their skin constantly, use bandages,
drink from feeding bottles, take vitamins and diet, measure
their weight periodically.
But, at the same time, they develop a lust for self inflicted
physical pain, which combined with their fragmented nakedness
gives an indication about the kind of libido working out in a
gym. In the autistic environment of reflecting walls,
connected by sophisticated bondage to the prosthesis of the
machines, the people who suffer and compare, pull and push in
front of a mirror are externalizing their sexuality like the
warriors did in previous times, while penetrating alien
territories. The American fantasy of the male cyborg and the
Asian nostalgia of the nomadic invader meet in the fitness
room, where a subculture dominated by anxiety tries to
recuperate its corporal identity and keep under control
hidden pulsions of the collective psyche.

The mass of energy that frustration can displace in one day
is amazing. On the other hand, there is never enough
attention paid to the techniques of exorcism - and fitness is
one or them, sublimating the nomadic pulsions into exhaustion
and relaxation. It is interesting also to watch the shift
from fitness to "wellness", a new trend which emphasizes the
training of the cardio-vascular system and not necessarily
the body building. The cult of physical challenge seems to
loose pace in front of a concern for the basics of survival
and the socializing through performance is displaced by a
sort of individual hedonism. More and more people seem to
resume training as a guarantee for a healthy future (somehow
in the same manner they have bank savings), and less for
cultivating a spectacular change in the shape of their
bodies.
A new period of rationalized sedentarism seems to begin in
the mid 90s.

*Adio, EUROPA.* The tragic split in the Eurasian continuum
brought among other consequence the loss of Shamanic
coordination in social behavior, and with that the
disappearance of a magic aspect which made existence more
complex, but maybe also more integrated. The infantilization
of aggressivity in mass hysteria (see pop concerts, soccer
games), the transgression of the hunter in serial killer and
outlawed robber, the transformation of human sacrifices in
media executions, the substitution of the magician by the
charismatic political leader, the encryption of natural
aggressivity in social adaptability, the codification of the
natural chaos into ecological equilibrium - all those are
aspects of a progressive psychosis, installed in the
civilization with the loss of Shamanistic self-
consciousness.

In the summer of 1994, obsessed by those ideas, I tried to
experience the Shamanic trip on my own. Since marijuana and
hashish didn't appeal to me, I performed a home dance: with
my Hi 8 handy-cam taped on the forehead (and pointing to the
floor), with all kind of spoons, knives and pans hanging on
my belt (to produce the noise which chases away the evil
spirits), I turned around myself for almost an hour, locked
in the bathroom. My wife, who had a sneak view of the
performance, considered it intensely funny and so relaxing
that she almost fell asleep. Still, she forbade me to repeat
the event afterwards. Although offended in my magic pose, I
couldn't disobey, because my dark Eurasian beliefs are always
weak in front of her white magic of Western good sense.

Nevertheless, my conviction that Shamanism was the only
opportunity humankind had to experience chaos in a non-
mediated way and also to control chaos via ritual practices
is underlining the process which ended in "Happy Doomsday!".
And if the heroes of this game are just failed warriors with
skinny legs and pumped upper bodies, the change from nomads
into muscled office managers is just a detail which doesn't
influence the crisis of the present and the substance of the
future .

I am not implying here that Shamanism has nowadays more
healing powers than other New Age options. But, although it
is the least trendy one among them, it obviously belongs to
(and defines) the deepest strata of human nature, where the
modern ethics are abolished for more general impulses. And
since the EUROPEANS were its most fierce oppressors (via
Christianity, but also via other media), we can say that
paying attention to Shamanism means also going beyond this
propagandistic invention - EUROPA, into a more confused, but
less rigid environment.