It seems fairly obvious that life has been turned into a "game" through the use of a technology embedded into humans. On another level we can see that the man has lost all ability to interact with the world normally. For example, having left the game, the act of cooking becomes another game. The same is true of his interactions with the woman in the restaurant. There is a degree of ambiguity here. Whilst engaging in a game in his interactions with the woman we also see a degree of social control as he uses the game environment to interpret what he should do. This social control is ultimately exposed at the end of the film where we discover that the man can actually control the woman because she has had the same system implanted within herself. This opens up questions of determinism and instrumentalism which do not admit of any easy answer. For example, to some degree the man is controlled by the gaming environment and yet he uses the environment to get what he wants. The woman believes herself to be free but is in fact determined by the technology that she has accepted. There is a power dimension to the determinism. The man has the power as an engineer in the gaming environment. The woman has none because made the choice to be implanted with the technology.
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