FRIDAY HARBOR, San Juan County — When people ask Paul Chadwick what he's been working on, it's a tough question to answer. Chadwick, creator of the well-regarded and nuanced "Concrete" comic-book series, is also a scriptwriter — but for a videogame, "The Matrix Online," releasing March 31.

Like Hemingway in Hollywood, making the shift from "real" writing to videogame writing has been tricky for Chadwick. The challenge is even greater when dealing with the philosophical — some would say rambling — themes of the "Matrix" franchise.

Chadwick says his game blueprint follows that of the films. "The Matrix is a virtual world that's being collectively dreamed by people in fluid-filled pods, who believe the Matrix is reality," he said in an interview at his home here. "But they actually haven't awakened to the fact that it's an illusion. We call those Blue Pills."

Paul Chadwick, writer for "The Matrix Online."

In the game, he explains, you'll be able to play as a Red Pill, someone who — like Neo, Morpheus and Trinity — has elected to be unplugged and enlightened. With your digital avatar, you hit the dirty streets of the Matrix, completing missions and helping — or harming — the resistance.

As Chadwick talks about his unusual life's work, the sun is beginning to set off the coastline of his home, a house his grandparents built. As his wife and son clean up after dinner in the kitchen, the family rabbit snuffles around under our feet.

Jacking into the Matrix may require a genius's programming skills, but Chadwick takes a low-tech approach to his own involvement, he says. (There's not even a television in his living room.) In fact, Chadwick still constructs the characters for this game as he's always done for his books: out of charcoal and paper.

Chadwick, who creates a year's worth of stories at a time, says his goal is to keep players coming back to the Matrix night after night. He speaks glowingly of the payoff: seeing his characters come to life in 3-D. "It's kind of like an on-command performance onstage," he says.

One of Chadwick's favorite parts of the game allows players to choose which faction they want to join. There are subgroups within subgroups — some friendly, some fighting.

"You might ally yourself with them," Chadwick explains, "because they offer great benefits of increasing your powers. Or you can help out the machine civilization and work with an agent." (It's possible to switch allegiances, but there's a penalty.)

And all the factions have their own personalities.

From charcoal sketch to final cinematic, the character of Cryptos joins "The Matrix Online."

"There's a group of young Red Pills who idolize and almost worship Neo. I think of them as the Goths of the Matrix." They'll have their own Web site, he continues, where anyone playing within the group can log on and learn more about their collective identity. "They'll have melancholy love poetry about Neo," he laughs.

It's this kind of immersive detail that he hopes will hook gamers from the start (for a review of the game itself, see accompanying story). "EverQuest," which could reasonably be described as the most popular massively multiplayer online game in history, has had Star Trek-like conventions, at which whole families dress up as their in-game alter egos.

Is Chadwick nervous to see what is unleashed when the game is released? "The first ['Matrix'] film so got to the heart of teenage alienation," he says. "You know something's wrong with this world, and you know you're different. Maybe you're special. And then it beautifully did the Philip K. Dick thing: 'Everything you know is wrong about reality.'

" 'Reloaded' did more of that — the Oracle, who you thought was human, was another program. There are programs helping you and programs with grudges against you. And 'Revolutions' suffered a little bit in that so many mysteries had been revealed, that it was more of a consummation.

"But," he adds, "I love that the [filmmakers] ended a great conflict with not killing your enemies, finally, but making a deal."

In that spirit, he thinks the Matrix will endure as a pop-culture phenomenon, because of its complicated moral universe, whether there's a game or not.

"It's not good guys and the bad guys," he says. "It's more like that old Orson Welles movie, 'The Third Man.' "

"The Matrix" movie series may have ended in a truce, "but everyone's pushing the boundaries, and everyone's violating things here and there." The next logical step, he says, was to open this universe to anyone who wants to play within it.

And after spending months in the Matrix, how does he feel about his "script"? "I hope it's good," he says. After a pause, he adds, "And I hope there's some psychological truth to it."

Jennifer Buckendorff is a regular contributor to The Seattle Times: jenb@elvis.com