A *ed Text

This image is a screenshot from the video game Max Payne. The image is taken from Soren Pold's essay titled Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form.  I chose to star this piece of text for several reasons. Despite it's brevity, this text contains of number of interesting linkages and relations. The most salient theme is the similarity of the computer game in which Max finds himself to the teleos of a reality conceived of on the principles of metaphysics. 

This text is rich in that it contains diachronic connections that move the narrative forward towards a conclusion. At the same time, however, the text also contains synchronic layers of meaning. 

 

Diachronic:  

In the first frame, Max is presented with a problem. In the second frame, Max identifies the attributes of the world he is in, and then claims he has found the answer. In the third frame, Max reveals his moment of illumination to the reader about the world in which he finds himself, providing teleological closure to this text segment. 

Synchronic:

All at the same time, this comic strip also brings to mind programming reveal code, the process of realization of the Matrix Neo goes through in the film The Matrix, and the religious revelation that a numinous divine power that rules and orders The Universe.   

The linear linkages and references in this text also share follow a pattern consistent with that of a philosophical construct called The Game.

The Game is "an abstract concept. It involves no tangible objects, nor is it played on any physical medium. It exists in the minds of those who play it, and it never ends." (Definition courtesy of ILostTheGame.org). 

I include a reference to The Game because, based to its description, The Game sounds awfully similar to cyberspace. Like cyberspace, The Game is a utopia that is at once nowhere and anywhere one wants it to be, whenever one wants to invoke it. The Game is also shares an attribute with hypertext in that playing it emphasizes what Stuart Moulthorp  identifies as "the intertexuality of all life" (Hassan qtd. in Moulthorp para. 3) bringing us back again to the references embedded in the Max Payne screenshot. 

The codes I will use to star the allusions in this text are as follows: 

META to highlight the religious, metaphysical connotations

MATR for the cinematic implications

TECH for the correlations to technical programming 

THRY for the connections between the text and various intellectual theories regarding the digital age and the internet