Hal vs. Stice, Steeply and deLint in the crowd — "for you it’s about entertainment and…"
for you it’s about entertainment and personality, it’s about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they’ll never be slaves to the statue, they’ll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade.
Context
Here the theme's cost gets itemized as corpses. To the audience the player is "the statue" — an entertainment, a personality to be looked at and poked at — and deLint's argument is that being a slave to the statue kills you two ways: you blow your brains out after winning, when the thing you were seen for turns out empty, or you dive out a window when the watching stops and the blossom fades. Either the attention arrives and hollows you or it leaves and hollows you. Spectation isn't neutral here; being the watched object is a lethal condition, and the whole discipline of the place is engineered to keep the kid from ever confusing himself with the statue the crowd came to consume.