Looking at SENTA I experience a bizarre form of cognitive dissonance. What I see is a real life version of ''Call of Duty'' (CoD), the first-person shooter series published by Activision. This war game simulates the infantry and combined arms warfare of World War II. Players engage in virtual combats in European scenarios, painstakingly recreated on a screen. In the most recent incarnation of the game, episode 3, the fights take place in small villages that present the same cardboard quality of SENTA, models of models.

The common denominator of these simulations - SENTA and CoD - is the uncanny lack of civilians in spaces specifically designed for civilian use. I move my character through empty houses, desolated fields, and ruined farms. There is no sign of villagers. Not even corpses.

The maps - the term conventionally used to define levels or scenarios where the multiplayer battles are simulated - are mere playgrounds of destruction. To be, in Call of Duty is to have a gun, or, better, to be a gun. I ''am'' my own gun.

I fought many battles on the most disparate/desperate fronts. I have been running around the simulated villages for so long that I have started to inhabit these spaces. They look familiar and yet foreign. Predictable but dangerous. CoD is 'what the game journalists call a realistic game. I believe in Cod. Problem is: killing quickly becomes boring. These days, rather than obliterating my enemy, I find myself spending more and more time exploring the empty houses, fields, and farms, looking for signs, traces, and fragments of lives that never were because somebody did not code them. Ghosts in the machine?

As I maneuver my gun through the desolated two-floor homes of Cod3, I glance at the fake photographs on the walls, I see bookshelves filled with books that cannot be read, and I admire furniture that exist only to be destroyed or to be used a shield. In simulations, everything is functional. As I navigate these hyper-real spaces, I find myself amazed by the appalling lack of historical weight of scenarios that evoke Past events (i.e. WWII) with unprecedented level of accuracy (that is, the accuracy of cinema mixed with the precision of combat simulations, a winning combo).

Truth is: I do not care that much about History-turned-into-a-game. I really want to know the stories-of-game characters that presumably fled these spaces. I wonder if the virtual villagers that once lived peacefully in these maps were evicted by the game designers. If so, where do they live now? Most likely, in Second Life.

No time for questions: the simulation must go on.

- to be continued -

Mynydd Epynt: A serendipitous encounter from Ireland