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Digital games have become an incredibly popular and influential industry within American cultural life, to the extent that digital games and the experience of playing them has been represented in many popular films. This essay posits two crucial elements for the representation of digital games in film: As discussed by Wolfvideogames are intertextual by nature, drawing upon divergent texts and providing an interactive environment for users to read these texts.

Cinematically, the notion of player-agency control is influenced greatly by this intertextuality, and player control has been represented in a number of films involving videogames and digital worlds. This essay looks at the use and representation of player-agency control in both the Tron and Matrix film series, as well as the recent film Wreck-It Ralph.

There are three elements that are essential to this representation: The digital game industry is now the largest, most popular, and profitable form of media on the planet. According to the Entertainment Software Association, digital games are being played by more a diverse population than ever, with more than two-thirds of all American households playing some type of digital game ESA, Digital games, then, represent a large aspect of popular culture, and elements of games, from their narratives, characters, game worlds, and particularly game mechanics discussed here as ludological featuresare the object of representation and exploration in other popular media, particularly film.

Brookey discusses at length the convergence of the film and digital game industries, where films are adapted into digital games and vice versa. This is a rich area of scholarship in considering the effects of media convergence on both of these industries, as well as the similarity of digital games and film elements. In this essay I instead examine the representation of game experiences in narrative films.

Cultural products such as these are important to study in order to consider the place of digital games in culture at large, the elements of digital games represented, and the ways in which elements of these games are considered.

Burrill also notes the importance of studying digital games and their influence through the ideologies they impart to culture at large: As game elements become part of larger cultural narratives like films, it is important to consider their greater impact in examining how elements of games are taken up in other media.

This essay examines the representation of digital games through three different films franchises: TronTron: Through a consideration of the gaming elements represented in these three films, this essay suggests important criteria for the representation of games in cinema: Through an examination of the ways that each film addresses player agency and the intertextual elements of this representation, this essay emphasizes the importance of this concept in cultural representations of gaming.

As discussed by Wolfdigital games draw upon divergent texts and provide an interactive environment for users to read these texts.

They are rich, intertextual environments that pull references and techniques from a myriad of different media sources, particularly films. This term acknowledges that in reading a text, knowledge is not simply translated from writer to reader, but is instead filtered by cultural codes developed from other texts. A text could be anything from actual written words, to representation, to a physical article such as clothes, hair, or architecture.

In digital games, not only is there text that appears onscreen as narration and description, but every bit of scenery, character appearance, and diagetic sound could be considered text. As Kress describes, the term intertextuality has become theoretical shorthand for the dialogic nature of texts as continually referential p.

Orr emphasizes the transformative nature of intertextuality in the ability of textual references to alter the work that came before it p. Orr does note that the interactive nature of hypertext brings writers and readers together p. These scholars see intertextuality as a process of interpretation, and through this process, the audience identifies references within a text to other media texts.

A film that references a novel draws attention to the ways that different media forms trade ideas and concepts, yet these concepts are represented in a way specific to that particular medium. Ideas traverse media, but their representations are media specific.

Conversations of intertextuality in television in particular emphasize genre conventions and the role of the audience, especially their role in shaping audience expectations for a particular media text. As Meinhof and van Leeuwen describe, a TV commercial will inspire different expectations and reception than a music video or news report.

These authors, then, see intertextuality as also the blending of multiple genre forms. Schumaker argues that analyses of intertextuality in film often lean too heavily on literary criticism or study the features of particular directors rather than the function of intertextuality within the genre itself. The intertextual path which leads from television shows to generically related games indicates that it is the games which activate the everyday environment of play.

There the game show stands in a familiar circle of activity. Crossword puzzles are not solved by individuals, but form the center of social activities. Digital games take individual, specific elements of other media and place them within larger contexts and situations. The rules of a simple game, then, becomes part of a larger social system of activity within an interactive digital game.

What makes intertextuality in digital games different from other media is the immersive and interactive nature of games. Texts and film have a hierarchical, or one-to-many, relationship with their audiences. Within the gaming environment, the ability to play with these other texts alters those texts and ultimately allows individuals to experience them in more dynamic ways. This research seeks to outline the intertextual nature of video games and the gaming experience, demonstrating how the experience of video game play is uniquely intertextual and encourages an approach to media that is also uniquely participatory.

The second element of these films is their representation of player agency. Player agency is the process through which gamers make decisions and intervene within digital gamespaces. Digital games are unique in that they are interactive; individuals have the ability to experience virtual spaces and interact with media in new ways through digital games. While digital games have structure and particular rules just like any other structured system there are an infinite number of ways through which the goals of a game can be achieved, and gamers are able to use creative invention and use their agency within the gameworld, usually through an avatar.

The notion of player-agency has long been an area of inquiry in games studies Behrenshausen, In cinematic representations of gaming, the notion of player-agency control is influenced greatly by this intertextuality. In order to represent the agency of players within a game, films rely on intertextual references: I posit that there are three elements that are essential to this representation of player agency within films about digital games:.

Throughout the rest of this essay, I will detail specific examples of intertextuality within the Tron and Matrix film franchises, and in the film Wreck It Ralph.

Intertextuality works throughout Tron and Tron: Legacy in that way, by representing digital game elements as small competitions that exist in the virtual space of the game. We see the player start the game with a quarter and grab the joystick. The notion of a user in player-agency is very prominent from the start as the action shifts to the playing field inside the game. In Tron users are worshiped as gods; being the unseen overlords who control their movements in the field and with an awareness that the programmers wrote the programs.

I work at a savings and loan. You guys are gonna make my User, Mr. As with the MCP, the digital game rebels against its maker, seeking autonomy and independence from the user. Although the virtual world is written in code, generally, the code is impossible for player-agents to rewrite, though they can manipulate it. As in digital games, there are many aspects of the game world that players cannot change, but they can use creative play to come up with solutions.

This occurs most apparently when Flynn hijacks a broken down regulator, a flying war machine used to suppress enemies of the MCP. On the lam, Flynn and a mortally wounded Ram find a decrepit regulator among the cavernous outskirts of gamespace.

Here, Flynn is able to revive the machine simply by concentrating on its repair and manipulating the code to fix the engine and the structural integrity of the ship. Though pleased at the confirmation of his theological belief, Ram derezzes after praying to the users.

In the sequel nearly 30 years later, belief in the user has changed dramatically. The user player acts as an independent agent within the system. He retains control of his individual actions, and can affect certain spheres of influence directly around him, but the programs has grown beyond his control, as witnessed by the ISOs.

Contrasted with the first film, where Flynn was exploring the game and discovers his power as the player and exerts some sense of control, here he sees that the player is just another cog in the machine. The only way to win is not to play. Like the Tron films, The Matrix franchise also sets up a distinction between the real and virtual worlds.

The Matrix is set in a futuristic world where machines rule and the reality that humans experience is a simulation created by a machine that uses humans for an energy source. Neo Keanu Reevesa computer programmer, learns the truth about the Matrix from Morpheus Lawrence Fishburnethe leader of a human resistance force that fights against the machines.

Neo returns to the matrix and he and Trinity fight Agent Smith, a being within the machine that polices it, in the Matrix and rescue Morpheus as a machine attacks their ship outside of the Matrix, which the crew destroys just in time with an electromagnetic pulse. As he awakens, he sees the world not as the machines wish him to, but as it is, that humans are farmed for their energy compositing stacks of batteries that stretch as far as the eye can see.

In other words, though he cannot rewrite the code as a modder can do with a digital game or as a hacker or cheat code can do, he is able to change the parameters within the physical virtual environment, i.

In the above clip, while Neo cannot destroy the bullets, they exist on both the virtual and physical plane, he grinds their progress through the air to a halt. You moved like they do. Or, he is told, he can choose for the matrix to crash, killing all humans, but leaving the machines.

Neo chooses to save Trinity instead, rescuing her from the matrix by catching her from falling off a building and removing a bullet from her heart. Neo learns he can stop machines telepathically, but falls into a coma from the effort. He cannot simply destroy the projectiles, removing them from the virtual world, he must remove them with the ludological constraints of the game.

The Matrix Revolutionsthe final film of the trilogy, involves Neo visiting the Oracle and learning that Smith intends to destroy both the Matrix and the real world. Neo and Trinity take the fight to Machine City as the others defend Zion from the machines.

Neo fights Agent Smith, who has taken over the virtual selves of everyone in the Matrix, and Smith assimilates Neo but is destroyed, as Neo is connected to the source. Zion is saved and the Matrix resets itself, but all humans will be offered the ability to leave the Matrix.

While the third film has far less forays into the virtual, that the trilogy ends with a final battle between Neo and Agent Smith with the matrix is appropriate. Again, the relative position of the player to the player-agent is one of subservience or conflict. In that battle, Neo is tied to the Source, and his agency is tethered to that as well. Neo within the matrix is being played as much as he is playing, while Agent Smith, a rogue program at this point battles for sentience outside the game against his computer overlords.

Reilly who tires of his role as the villain in his arcade game Fix It Felix, Jr. The head of Sugar Rush, King Candy, warns Ralph that letting Vanellope race would reset the game, threatening her existance.

The four of them work to kill the virus Cy-Bugsas Ralph learns that Vanellope was part of the original game and encourages her to finish the race. Toward the finish line King Candy reveals himself to be Turbo, a character from an earlier racing game who manipulated the code of Sugar Rush to make himself king.

Ralph destroys the Cy-Bugs, saving Sugar Rush, and Vanellope crosses the finish line, resetting her game and restoring herself to a racer within it. Unlike the previous films in this project, Wreck-It-Ralph is purely digital in that the protagonists originate in the virtual realm; no one enters it and no one leaves, yet the digital is fully aware of its position relative to the real.

They wake up at the start of each day as Mr. Litwak opens the arcade, and work a just as any working stiff might.

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