the Eschaton debacle
Hal finds himself riveted at something about the degenerating game that seems so terribly abstract and fraught with implications and consequences that even thinking about how to articulate it seems so complexly stressful that being almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress.
Context
Spectation as anesthesia, discovered by the watcher in real time. Hal doesn't just watch the violence engrossed — he registers that the absorption itself is a refuge, that "being almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress" of what he's seeing and not doing about it. Watching becomes the drug that numbs the conscience the watching should be troubling; the more disturbing the spectacle, the deeper the anesthetic absorption it induces. The scene pushes this to its eerie limit when Hal, unable to tell whether he ought to be wincing, "feels at his own face to see whether he is wincing" — spectation has so hollowed out his responses that he has to check his own face for evidence of a reaction he can no longer locate from inside. This is the passive viewer's terminal condition rendered in a thirteen-year-olds' game: so absorbed in the screen that you've lost contact with your own reactions to it, present only as an eye.