What we talk about when we talk about running (in Marathon, while playing Marathon)
Last week, Brendy explained his feelings about Marathon, Bungie's new extraction shooter. He didn't like it, arguing it was merely "going double-or-nothing on the simple psychological and adrenal hacks that define [the] genre".
Sounds like something we should all play together, thought Jonty and Graham. So we did. Will we be able to convince Brendy that there's more to Marathon than gambling and barcodes, or will we all repeatedly die in a prefab outbuilding while pathologically refusing to watch the lore videos? The following chat has been edited for length and clarity and to remove roughly nine of the times we died.
[Graham and Brendy are on a run in Perimeter, Marathon's starting map. Brendy needs to smash a lot of windows. Graham needs to destroy an antenna.]
Graham: I don't necessarily disagree with anything you said specific to Marathon.
Brendy: You just disagree with something I said that was probably a big generalisation.
Graham: I think you were generalising about maybe multiplayer games quite a lot. I mean, you conceded yourself that you play games for distraction, but a lot of the time it sounded as if you were saying that repetitive multiplayer experiences are fundamentally less valuable