The Rules of the Game, the Burden of Narrative: Enter the Matrix

Much of the commercial success that Enter The Matrix has enjoyed is the result of its relationship with the Matrix trilogy, rather than the quality of play it offers. The game was released at the same time as The Matrix Reloaded (May 2003) and immediately became the fastest-selling title in its publisher’s history. The game is part of the Matrix franchise, but whatever its allegiances, it is a computer game. More specifically, it is an action adventure computer game. As is typical with such games, the action in Enter The Matrix centres on a characterised avatar (the game’s playable protagonist). The avatar is viewed primarily from behind as they pass through a series of spaces that are accessed conditionally, and in a particular order, while the player manages a variety of quantifiable resources (health, ammunition) and confronts various obstacles and adversaries. The avatar has a menu of moves – run, climb, drive, throw, shoot, punch, etc. These potential actions are strategically triggered by the player in response to stimuli (acts, events, situations) in the game. The game is made up of levels – sequential chapters, or episodes. Between levels are non-interactive digital animations that elaborate on the game’s narrative, relate background information, or set up the next mission for the player and their avatar. Enter The Matrix also incorporates short, filmed sequences at various points. These scenes are where the game’s close links to the Matrix series are most explicit, because they feature supporting actors and sets from The Matrix Reloaded. The central characters in Enter The Matrix are minor characters in The Matrix Reloaded. Similarly, the events portrayed in Enter The Matrix, play a supporting role to events in The Matrix Reloaded. This suggests that it is possible to trace differences in status between the game and the feature films, at a textual level. If these inequities are not acknowledged or accounted for, an analysis of the franchise’s enlistment of different media for narrative ends will remain incomplete. The borders between the game and the film trilogy are permeable, blurred by the inclusion of filmed sequences into the game, and by ‘game like’ qualities in the feature films, as well as by the memories and associations carried by users as they move between these texts. Aylish Wood proposes that ‘instead of thinking of The Matrix as a conventional film text that tells a narrative with a straightforward hero figure, perhaps it is more useful to think of The Matrix as equivalent to working through levels of a video game’ (2004: 127) and Sean Cubitt point to the referential stsructure as less ‘the cyberspace of internet than...that of computer games, constantly evoked in the use of mobile phones to guide protagonists through the mazes of the city’ (2004: 229). It is one thing, however, to recognise that these texts share ground, and another to assume that this sharing is unproblematic or that the territory in question is uncontested.