Panel #3

“I was in a computer game.”

*Michel Foucault’s term “heterotopia” can be easily applied to the world of a computer game. The world is all about “a relation among sites” (Foucault) which is what Foucault claims is the dominant theme of the modern era. The notion of time is thrown out the window completely as the character moves from room to room, space to space, level to level, world to world. In a computer game world, the entire concept of time vanishes. Players can take as much time as they need to beat a game, and even if the game is time sensitive, the player can redo the level as many times as it takes to advance to the next space. However, the irony is that there is a linear, diachronic progression of all games towards a teleological end at which point the player stops, leaves the game, and time resumes again. The spatial and linear are emphasized while they cannot necessarily exist together. (THRY: heterotopias, time/space divide) 

“Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.”  

**According to the way Max characterizes the computer game, as ironic and horrible, he seems to be describing a dystopia, a world that is undesirable in every way. The question as to why this world is undesirable is somewhat answered by the content of the previous two panels. The displeasure at the mechanization of humanity and the unpleasant feeling of being deprived of agency and freewill are both sentiments Max describes in the second panel. Humans associate Hell with powerlessness, and resist the idea of a fate that is inescapable. (META: hell, dystopia, fate and freewill)