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Of all the gameworlds, The Matrix Online (MxO) most explicitly concerns the relationships between the virtual and the real, and the future and the present. It was based on three popular science-fiction movies – The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003) – that were so pretentious in asserting their artistic and philosophical quality that they were subsequently published as a set of ten DVDs including extensive commentary and videos of their own filming. The entire Matrix mythos depicts the way the present might be conceptualized by the future, and in so doing perfectly realizes Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the future City. Dystopian rather than utopian, The Matrix Online predicts a grim destiny for the human species with only a dubious prospect for salvation. Crucially, while the movies rely upon high-tech special effects, and the game exists only through fast computers connected to the Internet, they prophesy that computer technology will doom human freedom.

The first opportunity to experience the Matrix personally came in 2003 with the release of a solo-player videogame, Enter the Matrix. However, players found it gloomy, grim, monotonous, and confining. The Matrix: Path of Neo, was better received when it was released in 2005, but it merely duplicated the story of the first movie, and gave players little opportunity to explore the Matrix freely. As an experience, watching a movie is both passive and constrained. A traditional videogame is active but constrained, because the player traditionally is forced to follow a linear path predetermined by the game designers. Released early in 2005, The Matrix Online offered greater scope for personally-decided exploration plus opportunities for social interaction, from completing missions in teams to dancing together at one of the city’s many nightclubs, or even worshiping in a church together. The environment is huge and architecturally realistic, including parks and monuments as well as a vast number and wide diversity of buildings in various styles and conditions. However, players are still not free to escape the city, except when they log off the game. Quite apart from whether The Matrix Online realistically predicts the future humans will experience, it raises the troubling question whether anybody would really want to live under such conditions.

Mega City

All the action of The Matrix Online apparently takes place in a major city dated about the year 1999, but actually a computer simulation running on large machines two centuries later. I wanted my character to learn how to create virtual objects and abilities within this vast virtual world, so I called him Cosmic Engineer. When he entered Mega City, he was offered the choice of two pills, a red one or a blue one. As in the original 1999 movie The Matrix, taking the red pill gave him awareness that the city was unreal, and thus the prerequisite knowledge for gaining powers that would seem magical to anyone who did not understand the truth. Aside from other redpill players, the city’s virtual population is divided into three categories: bluepills who represent people who lack awareness that their world is a simulation, renegade artificial intelligence programs called exiles who pretend to be people, and agents of the computer system called the Machines that created the city to deceive and control human beings.

The city is divided into four main districts, each of which contains several neighborhoods, representing four levels of danger and difficulty: Richland (15 neighborhoods), Barrens (9), International (11), and Downtown (17). Cosmic Engineer entered the city in Richland, slums over which the computer system has lost control, and thus where agents cannot threaten. As he earned experience, rising slowly from level 1 toward the maximum level 50, he gained the ability to battle the ever more formidable gangs that roam the streets and infest the buildings. However, he was never able to defeat agents, who were at level 100, and the best he eventually could do was learn to avoid them and run away from them. Figure 2.1 shows a typical street scene, in which Cosmic Engineer is firing his virtual sub-machinegun at a Nightmare program around level 35, as his proxy program, a secondary avatar, helps him from the background.

Fig. 2.1
figure 1_2

A typical street scene, battling a nightmare, in The Matrix Online

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There are several ways to travel across the city, of which walking is the most fundamental but risks encounters with exiles and agents. Bridges provide connections between districts, but there is also a subway system, and elevated superhighways afford some protection from attack. Within buildings, stairs and elevators allow travel between floors. As in the movies, it is possible for advanced characters to leap great distances, but this hyper-jump ability must be gained over time. Also as in the movies, public phone booths can be used as teleportation points called hardlines, analogous to Internet connections given that travel is not very different from clicking on a hyperlink. However, one cannot teleport to a hardline unless one has first walked there, and Cosmic Engineer was proud that he was able to add the last hardline to his collection when he was only level 25. Outside Richland, agents can attack without warning, but the chance they will do so is reduced by hacking a security node in the particular neighborhood, which requires obtaining a key card from gang leaders in a lower-level neighborhood, and somehow getting to the node which may be guarded or difficult to find.

Text chat may be used to communicate with other players, but there also is a system that communicates with the avatar’s operator, a non-player character who guides the player remotely through the missions. Especially important are text-based communications with representatives of the three factions: (1) Zion, which is the revolutionary movement of the redpill humans, (2) the Machines who seek to regain control over the city, and (3) a group of exile artificial intelligence programs led by the Merovingian. Cosmic Engineer joined Zion, and his contact was a programmed woman named Tyndall whom he never actually met within the city. He also obtained a total of 240 missions from independent exiles found in most neighborhoods that sometimes provide insights into the mythos comparable to those obtained from critical missions for the factions.

When the beta version of The Matrix Online launched in 2004, Wired magazine’s reviewer reported, “…the game’s setting is tediously repetitive. The endless parade of grungy city streets and leather-clad hooligans gets very boring very quickly” [1]. Arguably, all parts of the city are boring, but only Richland and Barrens are really grungy. However, on close inspection the filth makes a philosophical point. The streets are strewn with garbage, and occasional pieces of trash paper blow across the streets. From a distance, one of them looks like a religious tract, because the printing on it forms a cross. From nearby, it can be read: “The system is a lie.”

Thus, the dismal nature of the slum neighborhoods is part of an allegory critical of real-world social arrangements, designed to teach the player philosophical and political lessons. Education, as many educational game designers have learned to their distress, can be unpleasant rather than fun. The original 2 hour movie was remarkably popular, despite its intellectual depth, but after dozens and even hundreds of hours doing repetitive missions inside the virtual city it became extremely boring. Most of the philosophical messages are communicated in early missions, many below experience level 10 and about all by level 25. I continued past that point in order to develop Cosmic Engineer’s coding skills and to do missions for the local exiles. At level 35 he was able to program everything I thought was at all interesting, and on level 38 he had completed the missions for all but three of the exiles.

Given that I was doing research I probably progressed more slowly than the average experienced player, for example taking 6,458 screenshot pictures to document everything. Teaming up with other players would have speeded things up, but few were online this late in the gameworld’s history, and they would have been frustrated by all the extra time I invested in collecting data. At the end, I saw it was taking 10 hours to ascend each experience level, doing very repetitive assassination missions that gained no information, and the three full work weeks required to reach the top level of 50 seemed better invested in one of the other worlds described in this book. While I could be accused of laziness, my fatigue and ultimate resignation provided a pessimistic insight: Perhaps the real human future will not really be worth living, either.

The Matrix can be taken as a fable of modern, alienated humanity, in which capitalist corporations promote unhealthy consumerism and discourage creative thought, or it can be seen more profoundly as an existential critique of the inescapable human condition. In one sense or another, traditional religions treated the world as an illusion, postulating a fundamental supernatural reality, but in a post-Christian culture we cannot expect God to define reality for us. However, about half way to maximum experience level 50, a message from Zion’s Commander Lock praised Cosmic Engineer for being “someone whose priorities and judgment are grounded in the real world, and not some far-fetched philosophy.”

Yet, The Matrix Online suggests that philosophical enlightenment can liberate people from oppression, and the world is not what it seems. The Prima MxO guidebook states this insight clearly in its description of the player’s starter district:

Though official maps label this area as Richland, most people simply refer to it as the Slums. Set against the south shore of the river that bisects the City, the Slums are rife with criminal activity, urban decay and random violence. However, this is a lesson in the deceptive nature of the Matrix. Though the area is among the poorest and least desirable to the populace of the City, it is a desirable holding for those who understand the nature of the Matrix. Indeed, many powerful Exiles compete for control of its resources [2].

When Cosmic Engineer used one of the common desktop computers in one of the hundreds of offices around the city, they sometimes displayed advertisements from Metacortex, the Microsoft-like information technology monopoly depicted in early scenes of the original 1999 movie. This reflects the fact that the years prior to 1999 were marked by severe competition between alternative operating systems, browsers, and hardware standards, leading to dominance by a particular computing culture promoted by particular companies. These messages suggest how the machines began their historic rise to power over humans. Explicitly called factoids, they are obviously meant to be parodies of the rhetoric used by a powerful corporation to consolidate its position:

Metacortex needs your help in the fight against poor quality software. Buy only Metacortex approved products. A good consumer is a loyal consumer.

Metacortex Blue is the newest operating system due to be released from Metacortex. This state of the art OS will change your life. Buy it – because you need it.

The Metacortex Pioneer browser version 6.0 set records as the most downloaded software package in history. So many people use it, why shouldn’t you?

Metacortex is working hard to bring all forms of media directly to your home. Soon all of your favorite television shows, music, and movies will be brought to you by Metacortex.

Metacortex works hard to ensure that you receive only the top quality digital recordings of the latest music and movies. Help us improve by reporting piracy.

Metacortex has donated computer systems to schools throughout the world. Metacortex – It’s what you know.

Metacortex is involved in several government programs to index and catalog the history of all citizens in order to provide greater security for you and your family.

This last slogan suggests how it was that Metacortex got the data necessary to create the city. Similarly, progress for the player can be conceptualized as gaining data, in the form of icons that confer skills, progress in levels of access and the power to combat enemies, and money that is conceptualized as information units and abbreviated $i. Action is primarily motivated by the various ways a player can earn experience, which is essential for gaining access to all areas of the city quite apart from any sense of “winning” a potentially endless game. Some experience is gained simply by killing enemies, by crafting abilities or items, by practicing a data mining specialty, or by gaining safe access to new neighborhoods of the city. The primary method is accepting missions from one or more of the three main factions. Some of these are somewhat rare “critical missions” which advance story lines, but a player can also undertake an infinite series of “standard missions”: assassination, courier, retrieval, rescue, escort, infiltration, and recruitment. Here, “retrieval” is a euphemism for burglary, and all the missions involve killing non-player characters (NPCs). Most require interacting with virtual computers.

For example, a typical assassination mission begins without information concerning the whereabouts of the victim. First, the player may need to fight his way past enemies to obtain a disc containing an access code either from the corpse of an enemy or from a small computer they are guarding. Then the disc must be placed in a computer at a different location, bypassing the security protections and making it either transfer the needed information to the avatar’s controller at faction headquarters, or copy it onto a disk which the avatar must upload at a third location. Finally, the mission controller tells the avatar where to go in the city to complete the assassination.

One of Cosmic Engineer’s earliest missions provides insights into how the communication system functioned as a battleground where numerous forces competed. Tyndall asked Cosmic Engineer to make an exchange between Zion and the Merovingian faction that would benefit both, giving the code for a computer virus in return for some valuable data. On the way to the designated location, he received a garbled message from his operator saying that someone was trying to block their communications.

After battling past guards, Cosmic Engineer met a Zion NPC named Franklinken, who explained their opponent was a computer program named Lyle Goodgame. Cosmic Engineer next found Goodgame, who was dressed in a white technician’s coat but struggled fiercely as he went down to defeat under the barrage of software routines Cosmic Engineer hurled at him. After contact was reestablished, Tyndall and the operator guided him to a filthy upper-floor bedroom where a character named Buffer took the virus disk and told him to take the data from the laptop computer sitting on the bureau. Back on the street, he battled past members of the Crossbones gang, to reach the nearest hardline where he could upload the data, thereby earning both 36,000 experience points and Tyndall’s warm congratulations.

Scientific and Philosophical Basis

The original Matrix movie explicitly quotes from Jean Baudrillard’s book, Simulacra and Simulation, using phrases like “the desert of the real” which appears on the book’s first page. The book begins with a bogus quotation from Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” The point is that everything is bogus, and under the corrosive influence of interpretations, existence has degenerated: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it” [3]. Baudrillard draws his metaphor from a one-paragraph literary work by Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” but he could just as easily have begun with Alfred Korzybski, inventor of a pseudoscience called General Semantics, who wrote, “The map is not the territory” [4]. But there no longer is any territory, and all we have is a map of a map of a map…

Although Baudrillard believes that advancing technology contributes to human estrangement from reality, his book is not about computer simulation. Rather, it seems to decry human culture in general and express a postmodern view that progress has always been an illusion. I say seems, because the book is – pardon the expression – very French. Fulfilling the stereotype that French intellectuals are poets rather than scholars or scientists, the book lacks footnotes, bibliography, and data. I find it amusant that a chief opponent in the second and third Matrix movies, who claims to know everything, is a French-speaking computer program who praises the French language and is named Merovingian after a dynasty of French kings who ruled during the Dark Ages.

The typical interpretation of intellectuals who have written about the Matrix mythos is that it raises questions about the nature of reality and human knowledge, and thus perhaps relates most directly to the topics of ontology and epistemology in academic philosophy, but also perhaps to the philosophy of ethics. Matt Lawrence has written an engaging book from this perspective, Like a Splinter in Your Mind, taking the title from a passage in the first movie [5]. When Morpheus first meets Neo, and just before he offers the red pill of enlightenment, they discuss Neo’s aversion to being controlled by the system. Morpheus observes that Neo has long felt there was something fundamentally wrong with the world. “You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.” Lawrence plays the role of Socrates with his reader, using a discussion of The Matrix to get the reader to think more deeply and independently about a number of the issues covered by philosophy courses. This is a fine function for a professor of philosophy to perform, but it falls short of exhausting the meaning of the mythos.

More radical views were offered by leaders of the Transhumanist Movement, that promotes technologies its members hope will transform human nature utterly. Economist Robin Hanson has argued that if people find living in the Matrix to be rewarding, then it is real and really valuable to them, so it would be reasonable for them to decide to dwell within it. He argues that most people in this world are already slaves, and they can become free only by making fundamental decisions about who or what they will become, rather than merely playing pre-scripted roles in the existing social and economic system [6]. Philosopher Nick Bostrom argues there is no way in which we can conclusively determine whether the world we experience is not itself a computer simulation, and his chief alternative theory is that intelligent species may destroy themselves before they become capable of building a simulation that fools our senses into making us think it is real [7].

In the movies, a constant question is whether Neo is The One who will save humanity, perhaps not merely from the machines but also from its existential dilemmas. This is a fundamentally religious function. Michael Brannigan and James Ford have both analyzed the mythos from a Buddhist perspective, and the first movie does contain elements reminiscent specifically of Zen Buddhism, at least as it has been interpreted by westerners [8]. Neo learns from a small child to bend a spoon, not with his fingers or a Yuri Geller magic trick, but by bending his own mind [9]. In his martial arts training, and in learning to leap great distances through the virtual air, Neo follows in the arrow-shots of Eugen Herrigel’s book Zen in the Art of Archery [10]. Gregory Bassham and Paul Fontana have both identified Christian themes, in which Neo takes the role of a self-sacrificing messiah just as Jesus did, but Bassham also analyzed the problem of pluralism [11]. How can there be a single truth, while leaving people free to believe incompatible ideas?

Martin Danahay and David Rieder offer a very different interpretation, writing “The Matrix does an especially good job of dramatizing the exploitation of the average American worker in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century America from a Marxist perspective. The film is full of allusions to numerous social and economic themes that can be traced back to Karl Marx” [12]. True, but the radical political heritage of the mythos is much broader than Marx the individual man; it is an entire century of European critical thought [13]. I believe it was Friedrich Engels, Marx’s associate, who first articulated the concept false consciousness, the idea that people have been deceived by the system into accepting a false ideology divorced from reality:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought [14].

Engels wrote these words in 1893, yet Friedrich Nietzsche had expressed a similar view already in Also Sprach Zarathustra in 1885 and On the Genealogy of Morals in 1887 [15]. The chief difference is that Marx and Engels focused on how the capitalist ruling class imposes false consciousness on the working class, in order to get them to accept their subservient status as just and necessary rather than rejecting control as unfair exploitation. Nietzsche believed, in contrast, that all societies imposed false consciousness upon their people, socialist ones as well as Christian or capitalist ones. In his optimistic moments, Nietzsche believed it is possible to become free of all ideologies, but this seems to require severing all ties with other people, and as in Nietzsche’s own tragic case leads to insanity. Decades later, Sigmund Freud, who believed people tend not to be aware of their own subconscious desires and psychological conflicts, argued that civilization inevitably imposes painful inhibitions on the natural impulses of human beings, and we may well debate whether this surrender of liberty to achieve progress is worthwhile [16].

Take the argument from the perspective of the machines. Progress for humanity may be possible, but only if we embrace computer technology, and become embraced by it. Cybernetics offers entirely new theoretical paradigms for analyzing social phenomena, such as conceptualizing organizations as information-processing systems or modeling social interaction by artificial intelligence [17]. The collection and organization of data about “the information society” may come to be dominated by information scientists or computer scientists, rather than sociologists and anthropologists [18]. One likely area is in the understanding of complex adaptive systems. Using advanced computer modeling, the science of self-organizing chaos could predict multiple-outcome events like sociological trends and historical transformations. Accurate prediction of environmental change could be possible with mathematical models that couple atmosphere, ocean, land, and ecosystems. Powerful computer models might accurately predict how society needs to change in order to have sustainable development [19].

Throughout the home there will be special-purpose artificial-intelligence reference aids instantly providing information and advice, possibly without the need of a general-purpose computer. Every electric appliance will rely on a computer to operate it. Many homes will have smart sensors to detect who is in each room and adjust temperature, music, and other aspects of the environment to that individual’s preferences [20]. The computer revolution will continue far into the twenty-first century [21]. The computer mouse and keyboard will become obsolete, because there will be quicker and more convenient ways to interact with the computer. Voice activated technology will eliminate computer keyboards. Computer interfaces will range from unobtrusive display glasses to direct stimulation of the brain.

One hope is that technological transformation will naturally move the world’s economies away from the heavily polluting activities that characterize industrial society. If the world truly becomes an information society, then much production and consumption will be carried out with little use of material resources and little environmental pollution [22]. If rich societies continue to rely heavily on industrial production, and if they do not develop very effective technologies for controlling pollution, and if global politics is unable to limit growth, and if natural processes are unable to handle increasing pollution, then the Earth will become a hotter and on average less hospitable planet than it is today. Perhaps we need to take our blue pills and migrate into the Matrix.

The Matrix Online hints at some of these issues, but they are not central to much of the action. Players start in the slum areas, and struggle upward toward the elite business district, perhaps enacting a revolution of the proletariat. The top-level agents of the machines wear business suits, while players have the choice of wearing working-class clothing looted from defeated enemies or pop fashions made stylish by commercial advertising. However, players are forced to work exceedingly hard by whatever faction they associate with, Zion as much as the Machines or the Merovingian. It is never clear how the players can become liberated from their toil. The original movie ends with Neo’s monologue, which exists in two forms. The monologue in the original script was ambiguous:

I believe that the Matrix can remain our cage or it can become our chrysalis… to be free, you cannot change your cage. You have to change yourself. When I used to look out at this world, all I could see was its edges, its boundaries, its rules and controls, its leaders and laws. But now, I see another world. A different world where all things are possible. A world of hope. Of peace. I can’t tell you how to get there, but I know if you can free your mind, you’ll find the way [23].

As released to theaters, the movie version of Neo’s final monologue is more radical and directed to the system that resists change rather than to people who are its prisoners. Neo says he does not know the future, but he knows that a revolution has begun. If successful, it will create “a world without rules and controls, a world without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible.” Those words certainly do not describe The Matrix Online, where everything is under control of the system, and only by learning how to exploit the rules can even a sliver of freedom be achieved.

Hacking and Coding

In the three movies, a Zion operative jacks into the Matrix through a direct computer interface inserted at the base of the brain. Although direct brain-computer interfaces are an active area of research today, we are decades away from being to duplicate this in the real world [24]. Logging into MxO is like going back in time, to an earlier era of computing, because the user must enter username and password on command lines [25]. Throughout the offices and other rooms in the city’s buildings are found many computers: desktops, laptops, and mainframes. The desktops have mice, but the displays on their screens show entirely green text ending with a flashing green rectangle representing the cursor. Many messages from these computers, all in green text, end with “>_” which was a common pre-Windows cursor where the user could type a command.

Entirely green text-based displays incorporating a command line interface were standard in the real world of the early 1980s, but personal computers displayed full color by the time mice were common a decade later. The mouse and windows interface that was nearly universal by 1999 was pioneered by the Alto computer in 1973, and incorporated in the commercially successful Macintosh already in 1984 [26]. Although the first Macs employed a monochrome display, it was black on white rather than green on black. Anachronisms are rampant in popular depictions of earlier historical periods, such as the stirrups used by cavalrymen in movies of ancient Greece and Rome, given that the stirrup actually did not enter Europe until long after Rome fell [27]. The chief guidebook to The Matrix Online explains repeatedly that the history in the matrix was fabricated by the machines and contains many brash lies as well as subtle errors [28].

Following are two examples of command line file searches from missions to assassinate characters named Arlon and The Exterminator. The first comes from a desktop computer, and the second from a mainframe. “(Y/N)” asks the user to answer the question by typing Y for yes or N for no. In the second example, “grep” is the Unix command to find a text sting.

>find -d -p -b Arlon

Searching 10851 files for Arlon.

Searching complete. 5 files found.

Download results? (Y/N)

> Y

Download complete!

> grep -f Lee The Exterminator

Searching all files for Lee the Exterminator

Displaying results for search…

Transfer search results? (Y/N)

Transfer complete!

Some of the computers are connected to local area networks and to Internet, but by wires rather than wireless as is become more and more the case in the real world. Much of the communication of information from one to another takes place by physically carrying a disk. Sometimes the network is specifically described as the telephone system, reminiscent of the use of stand-alone modems in the 1980s and 1990s. The simulated 1999 technology has serious vulnerabilities, as well as being primitive from the standpoint of human-computer interaction.

For redpill avatars, exiles, and all the miscellaneous NPCs except the bluepills, human-computer interaction is totally different from the 1999 system. Data disks are obsolete, outside the specific missions that require transporting them, and communications are wireless. Keyboards are obsolete, too, but when a coder programs something, he moves his hands as if typing in the empty air. When a hacker unleashes a virus against an opponent, he often moves as if throwing a ball of fire or casting a magic spell. The enemies possess similar abilities, so if both parties to a melee are hackers, the air is filled with bright, colored lights. However fanciful such displays may seem, they actually have a basis in the research on augmented reality, wearable computers, and data gloves that has been done over the past decade.

Virtual worlds are a diluted version of virtual reality, computer systems in which the user is entirely immersed in an artificial environment. Augmented reality is more modest, overlaying a small or partly transparent computer display on the real environment, following one or another of several different methods. Data gloves are indeed glove-like devices the user can employ to control virtual interfaces by moving either the whole hand or just a single finger [29]. Considerable research and development has been invested in them, but it is unclear what their future potential really is. Quite apart from the effort involved in moving hands, there is the question whether sensor-laden gloves will be necessary given the rapid development of computer vision techniques that can recognize gestures by ungloved hands. Cosmic Engineer has virtual data gloves in the Matrix, but they do not seem necessary for the tasks he undertakes.

Perhaps more interesting are the visual display devices Cosmic Engineer wears, which are directly modeled on EyeTap, MicroOptical head-up display, and comparable devices that actually exist today but have not yet caught on in the marketplace [30]. The upper image in Fig. 2.2 shows Cosmic Engineer wearing a fictional Lansford Mark II program launcher, and the lower one shows him in a Reeves Enhanced program launcher. The Lansford places a half mirror in front of one eye so that it can overlay data on the scene, whereas the Reeves appears to obscure vision, perhaps because it incorporates a camera like today’s actual EyeTap device. Images from the Reeves are not in fact incorporated in the action, and the camera I tried out when I recently visited the MIT Media Lab was an inconspicuous pea-sized component easily supported on the bridge of an ordinary pair of eyeglasses. So if such interfaces are really used widely in future, they are likely to be less obtrusive than these two program launchers.

Fig. 2.2
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Two “program launcher” wearable computer interfaces

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Note that these fictional devices are called program launchers, rather than wearable computers. They are connected to the ubiquitous wireless network, and whether the computing is done locally or remotely is a matter of design choice. Certainly, each is large enough to contain an entire computer at the level of current computer chip development, let alone what may be possible in 2199. Thus, in several respects the advanced technology depicted inside the Matrix is about as anachronistic as the 1999 command-line technology, representing 2005 technology that is already being superseded.

In doing his programming work, Cosmic Engineer would stand on a rooftop in the Tabor Park section of the slums, where there is a microwave dish that communicates via broadband with the main computer system, rendering coding and crafting more reliable. Nearby there is a hardline where he can upload anything he makes to his personal inventory. The high point of this work was when he assembled the computer programming code to allow him to create a Remote Proxy 5.0, the best quality ­secondary avatar that a coder could use to fight alongside him during his missions. There were two main prerequisites for creating and using this proxy: to reach level 35 in general ability, and to possess the Transmit Code ability associated with being a Proxy Master and which itself could be coded at level 33 and Proxy Technician status. Coding actually increases general experience, and in this action he earned 7,650 ­experience points toward gaining level 36. In addition, to do the proxy coding he needed to have $i49,612 of Information currency and the necessary code fragments to assemble. The money was no problem, and after expending the $i49,612, he still had $i5,608,167.

The seven code fragments were another matter, sometimes costly to obtain and embedded in a distinctive programming language. The first one was the coder ability function subroutine, and the second was the ability class routine. Cosmic Engineer had bought the ability class routine from a non-player vendor in the Kedemoth neighborhood of the slums, named Len, for $i1,000. Four others were ordinary variable fragments that may be looted from dead enemies, burglarized from their offices, or assembled out of smaller byte-like fragments that have been acquired in these same nefarious ways. The last was a coder patch, obtained by killing members of the Sleeper exile gang in the Vauxton neighborhood in the advanced Downtown district.

Exiles and Personalities

Considered as a vision of the possible human future, The Matrix Online suggests that technological and social progress will cease and people centuries from now will pretty much live as we do today. In this respect its vision is identical to that of Clarke’s City and the Stars. One obvious difference is that the people in Clarke’s novel seem to have chosen their fate, whereas the socio-technical stasis in The Matrix Online was imposed by the machines. Another is that it is technically possible to leave Clarke’s city, but there is no place to go other than Mega City in The Matrix Online. One can transcend its reality only by shutting off the program, and perhaps walking outdoors to enjoy the sunlight.

When I entered the Matrix in 2008, its social life was already far into decline, more than 3 years after its original launch. I occasionally encountered other players on the street, although never upstairs in the office buildings because taking an elevator separated my avatar from the others. There were always a few hanging out at Mara Central near the Congregational Church, because there were many vendors at that location and no dangers. Occasionally I would see a couple at Tabor Park because it was a good location for crafting, and one time a group of about 20 assembled there. One indication of how unpopular MxO had become was how little ­material was available to buy from other players in the online market system. Once, Cosmic Engineer was recruited to a group, but it evaporated immediately. The ­videos available on YouTube indicate that some groups of friends continued to enter the Matrix together, but the kind of vibrant social life I had seen in World of Warcraft and Second Life did not exist.

Perhaps appropriately, given the mythos, I found the exiles very interesting, and of course they were constantly available for Cosmic Engineer to interact with. At the bottom of their status ladders were the four dozen gangs that infested the spaces around the buildings and some of their rooftops. Killing their members afforded experience and loot but not much ethnographic information. However their general premise was sociologically plausible. As Frederic Thrasher observed in the 1927 classic, The Gang, when overall social order disintegrates, people will tend to establish their own local groups which the authorities will contemptuously consider gangs, unaware that on some level all societies are gangs [31].

Since most missions required traveling across the city and entering one or more buildings, there was a constant challenge to get past the lurking, hostile gang members. With luck, a route could be found, running down the center of the relatively safe streets or along the elevated highways, to a point near the desired door, which with luck was unguarded. If a gang blocked the way, Cosmic Engineer had two choices. First, he could kill them, being careful to pick them off one at a time but hurrying because more gang members would soon appear. Second, he could dash directly past them, realizing that in most cases they could not enter the building; a risky course, this was especially difficult with office buildings that had revolving doors, because they were hard to operate quickly. As he advanced in experience and learned how to operate his secondary avatar proxy, on occasion he could combine the methods by sending the proxy on a suicide mission to distract the gang, while he slipped into the door and prepared to create a new proxy.

Inside the buildings, some gang members and many employees of corporations or factions served to defend against interlopers like Cosmic Engineer, and to advance the story by things they said and did. Some of them are friendly and offer help, but sometimes in an ambiguous manner. When Cosmic Engineer was hunting for Lee The Exterminator, an NPC named Fox philosophized: “One who searches will never find. One who seeks will always find.” When he was hunting for Franklinken, Chi advised him, “Just follow all signs that point to ‘red.’” On a different mission, Arago observed: “Once red, twice blue. Rabbit you seek is behind you. If you turn now, they will speed away. If you strike with patience, they will end this day.”

There are many nightclubs across the city, where avatars may dance with exiles without any worry of violence, and where some of the mission-giver exiles hang out. Two exiles in the international district, Operetta in Club Pandora and Lotus in the Jade Room, experience reality through music. Operetta asked Cosmic Engineer to retrieve a musical score composed by a rare bluepill who understands the ­unreality of the Matrix but chooses to stay within it for the benefit of her enraptured ­listeners. Lotus asked Cosmic Engineer to deliver a CD of her music to Milankovitch, who turned out to be in great distress but calmed when he played it for her. The next mission for Lotus was motivated by her anger that an Internet server was distributing pirated copies of her music. Once he had retrieved that copy, he brought it to Kat, Tube, and Wren, three friends of Lotus who asked him to play the healing music for them. As soon as the first notes came from the computer, they attacked Cosmic Engineer, and he discovered that the pirated copy had been altered with a subliminal message causing violent behavior among exiles. The piracy of the music had been a clever ruse by the Merovingian to attack Lotus.

French intellectual that he was, the Merovingian was probably aware of the theory by the German idealist philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, that the world is embodied music [32]. In the Matrix, this may be literally true, because a computer program is practically the same thing as a musical composition, enacting variations on a theme over time. Yttri, an exile in one of the lowest-level slum neighborhoods, draws analogies between music and computer programs, saying that a “coda may become a code” that alters the Matrix if played. Another analogy is that reality is a suite of computer programs written in the language of chemistry. Raini, dancing at the Jacob’s Ladder nightclub, sends players in search of narcotic code that act like narcotic drugs on her, saying “If you aren’t living on the edge, then you simply aren’t living.”

The most prominent group of exile leaders is the Spectrum family consisting of two parents, Mr. Black and Dame White, and eight children: Amber, Cerulean, Greene, Grisaille, Indigo, Mandarin, Rose, and Violet. Love is not the principle that unites them, as the Prima guide for the game explains:

The two parents each covet the other’s power, but never admit it. They work against each other covertly through their children. The siblings compete for the attention and favor of both parents, as well as playing their parents off against one another. The emotional turmoil of the conflict and the mental and physical exercise involved in waging it are the family’s bread and butter [33].

The most intense sibling rivalry rages between Indigo and Grisaille (Gray), who are only half-brothers because Mr. Black fathered Grisaille without Dame White’s cooperation. Indigo is the oldest and is favored by his mother, whereas Grisaille is favored by his father. As the Prima guide explains, “Gray considers the other siblings to be incompetents. They despise him for being Mr. Black’s favorite when he’s an outsider to their family. In truth Gray hates both Dame White and Mr. Black, and would eagerly see the entire twisted Spectrum destroyed, even if he had to sacrifice himself to do it [34].

Many of the mission-giver exiles represent a specialized role that humans are programmed to play in modern society. The Auditor is constantly worried about balancing his books, which presumably are in the form of computerized spreadsheets, and the recipes valuable to the Chef are computer program code. For the Sculptress, sculpture is the most meaningful thing in life, and for the Seamstress, tailoring is. The Chessman stands before an open-air chess table in Tabor Park, ready to challenge all comers, and naturally he has a ludic view of reality. In hiring Cosmic Engineer to kill an exile who had worked for him in the past, the Chessman commented, “Sometimes you have to sacrifice pawns in order to better your position on the board. Don’t worry, I’m not referring to you.” When assigning the next mission, he observed, “The French have a saying, ‘You cannot play at chess if you are kind-hearted.’ The same goes for the Matrix.” In his view, a player must learn to be both unpredictable and dependable, study the opponent as much as the game positions, and know when to resign.

As players interact with the exiles, they may learn new philosophies of life, but their characters acquire statistics that shape their strengths and weaknesses in a more mechanical manner. Unlike many other gameworlds, a character is not locked into one talent tree or list of professions, because a variety of abilities can be acquired and temporarily downloaded from any hardline, in exchange for others placed into storage. However, a list of five attributes are developed in a manner where change is extremely costly, starting at the moment the player creates the character. High perception benefits martial arts, vitality increases the character’s health points, and focus facilitates actions that require precision such as sneaking. Reason is valuable for intellectual tasks such as writing code, whereas belief represents a kind of confidence such as shown by Neo in the movies when he is finally able to fly.

While progressing up the levels of general experience, a player may build any of these five attributes, but at the very beginning the player must choose among ten different combinations of attribute points, each of which is presented as a personality type. For example, the detached spectator is described thus: “You watched the passage of the stars and planets over head. They came and went like the people in your life. Friends, parents, nothing ever affected you. Now you know why. Because none of it was real.” This type is high in perception but low in focus. Each of the ten personality types expresses the unreality of the Matrix in a distinctive manner. Inquisitive genius, which is high in reason but low and belief, described the decision to escape the Matrix this way: “You worked out the math, studied the formulas. Something just didn’t add up. The universe was missing something. And now it’s missing you.” It opposite, lunatic fringe, is low in reason but high in belief: “The snakes, man, the snakes! They just kept hissing! Why didn’t anyone else hear them! But you showed them. You got out! There aren’t any snakes on the outside. Not as many at least” [35]. However, unlike the players, these characters cannot leave the Matrix, but are forced to struggle within it, where personality types are merely different sets of point scores conferring advantage or disadvantage under a set of conditions set by the virtual world and its rules.

The Matrix Online incorporated some elements from the second and third films, notably having a faction led by the exile called the Merovingian, but its fundamental concept did not go beyond the original film because players could not attack the machines directly nor visit the underground Zion city. A key philosophical debate in the pair of 2003 films was whether a free and liberated human society would merely be another form of control. The people in Zion depend completely upon their own machines, as we depend on technology for our own survival, and their political system is marked by hierarchies in which an individual can gain some semblance of free will only by cooperating with some others who hold high positions.

If human society is also simply another kind of machine, then machines can be humans. In all three films we see this in Agent Smith who battles again Neo and the Zion freedom fighters precisely in order to gain his own freedom. The passionate affair between Neo and Trinity, and their bonds of loyalty with Morpheus, suggest that only humans can feel love. But in Matrix Revolutions, Neo encounters three exiles in a subway station who refute this deduction: a father, mother, and their little girl. The little girl is a program without a function, so she has been scheduled for deletion. But her parents love her, so they have made a bargain with the Merovingian to let her escape to live with a benevolent program named the Oracle, in return for their own loyal hard work inside the system. As a prediction of the human future, therefore, the entire Matrix mythos suggests we may never become really free, but we may also never entirely lose our humanity.

Conclusion

In 2009, after 5 years of operation, The Matrix Online prepared to shut down. On June 20, a newcomer to the official game forums posted this plaintive message: “i wanna play matrix online but i can’t find it in stores or online where to buy it. does anyone know where i can get it/?”

Exsuscito, who had posted 5,052 messages since joining the forums on November 18, 2005, replied, “Unfortunately, as of July 31st we are being shutdown, so as much as it pains me to say, there’s really no point playing. If only you and 499,999 of your closest friends came sooner.” In a sense, the future had been cancelled due to lack of interest.

Two of the game developers, whose avatar names were Walrus and Dracomet, invited players to a final celebration with music and a satisfying climax, consisting of the deaths of all the redpill avatars: “Come party with us in game on Friday, July 31st from 12 Noon Pacific Daylight Time till Dracomet crushes everyone’s RSI just before Midnight” [36]. On August 26, 2009, this post-mortem was posted on Wikipedia:

A grand finale was planned where all online players were to be crushed, but due to a server glitch, most players were disconnected before the final blow came. What had been envisioned as a last hurrah transpired as a gruesome slide show. High pings and low framerates caused by the developers giving out advanced powers (with graphically demanding effects) and abilities to all players, coupled with the flooded chat interface, meant many players were unable to experience the final event as intended [37].

On an independent MxO forum, Daving confirmed: “I got crashed out 5 hours early and couldn’t jack back in. Got the same message and eventual black screen as those that got meatballed, but didn’t get meatballed. Like the game shut down 5 hours early for me.” Players quickly put up a website called mxoemu encouraging each other to create a software emulator so that the virtual world could continue, but their comments suggested that they really lacked the skills and resources to succeed [38]. Of course this is a nice metaphor for the possible real future of the human species: We may lack the technical skills, material responses, and social organizations needed to prevent our own world from ending. On mxoemu’s forum, seven players expressed their feelings:

I am sad that the end of my little “escape from reality” is ending.

Since shutdown, things just aren’t the same for me. Big hole in my life for some reason.

I miss MxO more than anything.

Good luck, looking forward to seeing what you guys can come up with!

Unfortunately I probably don’t have any skills that would help out at this stage, but the best of luck to everyone!

I hope that this project has a future.

Long live the Matrix!