The games of death

By Varela

They say one can do in a video game what one has never done in real life.

The first video war games were against Nazis and zombies but were quickly replaced by the Russians.

The United States was never able to do battle against real Russians during all of the Cold War. But they beat the Russians – in the games.

Even though a special program about the military was shown on TV – a serious program – that said that one Spetsnatz can cut a Green Beret in half in combat.

In the war games, dozens of Spetsnatz were killed by Green Berets.

It was like the cowboys-and-Indians movies of the 1940s and ’50s, where Hollywood got even for Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn.

Then came another game where the U.S. Marines invaded Teheran in a lightning raid and defeated The Immortals, those millenary Persian troops clad in black who wiped out Leonidas and his 300 Spartans and have kept the Pentagon still for eight U.S. administrations.

Well, now a game comes out where Fidel Castro is slain. The only statesman who has been clinically dead and has resuscitated.

And the young-at-heart geezers in Miami, like blogger Val Prieto from Babalú Blog, have been playing and giving thanks in The Miami Herald to the producers of the latest game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, for allowing them to do in virtual reality what they never could do (because they lacked the gonads) in their serene, sedentary and gray real lives.

The way things are going, in Part 2 of the game, to be released in 2011, the Americans will finally terminate Osama Vile Laden in his custom-made cave with a methane flame-thrower and will march victorious, lighting their Cohiba cigars with the same flame-thrower (using the little methane that remains, because in the games they always give you a little extra when you kill a lot of baddies), strolling through a free Havana, as the people stand on the sidewalks, welcoming them with cheers, confetti and streamers.

Question: Where will the people of Cuba find the paper for the confetti and streamers?

Answer: It’s virtual reality. It’s a video game.