The Eschaton debacle — "Besides being real sensitive to any…"
Besides being real sensitive to any theater-boundary-puncturing threats to the map’s integrity—threats that’ve come up before, and that as Pemulis sees it threaten the game’s whole sense of animating realism (which realism depends on buying the artifice of 1300 m.2 of composition tennis court representing the whole rectangular projection of the planet earth)—Pemulis is also a sworn foe of all Penns for all time […]
Context
The narration's own gloss on why Pemulis erupts: the game lives or dies on everyone "buying the artifice" — 1300 square meters of court standing for the planet's whole rectangular projection — and any puncture of the theater's boundary kills the realism that makes it a world at all. The book stating the map-vs-territory stakes in its own analytic voice, one paragraph before the famous scream. ("m.2" stands in for the print superscript.)