I had serious trouble organizing my thoughts while writing this, partly from confusion induced after watching eXistenZ, but here are a few of my thoughts the movie and book together.
The difference that I saw in between eXistenZ and Snow Crash was in the great divergence between both the means of entering the Metaverse vs. eXistenZ and the nature of the physical and moral dilemmas that both sides face. Snow Crash had both viral and moral dilemmas in the Snow Crash virus itself and the underlying religious purposes behind it. eXistenZ had the moral problem of substituting an entirely realistic ‘false’ world for the real one, in a fashion very near to The Matrix, and the corporeal problems of the creation and use of the different ‘game pods.’ However, unlike The Matrix, in eXistenZ, it was largely impossible to discover who indeed were the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys.’ The mix of never knowing what was or wasn’t reality and everyone having different, rapidly changing motives gave this a mystical depth that I think surpasses that of both Snow Crash and The Matrix.
To the Realists in eXistenZ, the world that the game programmers create (if they even exist at all) is a threat to morality in that not only does it make the real world less important, it gives its players a world in which there is no real consequence for their actions short of ‘losing’ the game. This parallels the moral standpoint of video games making players more violent, but to such a realistic extent as to make the ‘real’ violence and the ‘game’ violence indistinguishable. A sort of paradox similar to the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy is created for the player, in that whatever they think they are doing by their own free will is in fact merely advancing the plot line. For example, when Jude Law stands up in the Chinese restaurant and yells, “eXistenZ is paused!” he appears to wake up in the room they entered the game from, when in fact later we learn they have only shifted scenes within the game. I suppose what I am trying to get at here is that since the players can never be sure they are out of the game or not, they can go one of two routes. They can act as they would in real life, not doing anything major to disrupt the social structure, or they can act on impulse and do as they please (i.e., shoot the waiter.)
After watching eXistenZ, I attempted to think of anything that would seem as weird to people in the past as the game pods appears to us, and I honestly could not think of anything close. There are similarities in robot prosthetics, but even then, only some of our most advanced prosthetics can use our own nervous systems to recreate natural movements as close to our own, and none can draw all of their power from the body itself as the pods do. They struck me as technically nothing more than parasites or symbiotic organisms to the human body, only without even any function on their own. No free will, no purposeful movement; only memory storage.