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 or less meaningful than singleplayer games or story-driven games. 

Brendy: Yeah, I think maybe it was stupid to lean so hard on the words "meaning" and "meaningful". Like, what is that, and where does that go? 

I played fucking Halo Infinite to death. I don't know if I find any meaning in it. First of all, it's like, okay, not every game needs to be meaningful. It can just be an injection. And second of all, your meaning is what you make of it. There are people who do find meaning in stuff like this.

Graham: I'm someone who has played a lot of multiplayer games and I get a lot out of that. And a lot of it is tension and the resulting dopamine, but I don't think that's inherently the game juicemaxxing me with gambling mechanics, any more than a competitive sport is if I'm playing football with my mates down the park.

Brendy: I don't know. I kind of do feel like it's a gambling thing, but I'm very sensitive, I guess, to addictive stuff.

"They all give me the sweet embrace of the void every time I go in or out."

It just makes me super wary of even the slightest little thing. And I thought of the caption, "an extraction shooter is a deathmatch with a gambling problem." I just thought, oh yeah, that is how I feel. I should have just written that and then saved myself 2,000 words. But that's simplifying it a lot. I think it doesn't really apply to 95% of players.

I think that was the other weakness of my article. It's calling into question somebody else's enjoyment of the game, the reasons that they enjoy it.

A lot of people will just be playing Marathon because they do like the juice. I just wish that Bungie applied how good their shooters feel to a fucking genre I like [laughs]. 

Graham: Yeah, I mean, most extraction shooters, I play because I do like that tension. Not of the risk of losing the stuff that I'm betting on getting to keep or getting to escape with, but just, you know, the doors in Arc Raiders are closing. There's three robots and another player there. I'm going to run and bumslide underneath that door like Indiana Jones just before it closes and get in there. Extraction shooters are quite good anecdote generators and so those little stories and moments of interaction with other players, even if it is just a combat thing, it's still compelling to me.

And then the loot stuff is just softening the blow, if anything. Because you can play Counter-Strike and you buy a gun in a round of Counter-Strike and then it's gone as soon as you die. There's no meta progression or there wasn't in traditional Counter-Strike when I was playing it most, and so meta progression stuff is just softening some of the brutality. "Oh, I died, but at least I completed a contract and got a new toy as a reward." 

Brendy: See, I like it better when everything is gone every time. Every fight's a clean slate. 

Graham: Like a battle royale more than an extraction shooter.

Brendy: Yeah, I did enjoy battle royales a little more just because everybody starts on an even keel and you can get lucky, and you can get unlucky, but the choice of where to drop is the thing that makes the most impact right at the beginning, and then everything else kind of flows out from there. 

And yeah, you die, you die. You don't carry anything out of the match except the feeling that you won or that you lost - and you know, the XP and all of the other fucking gubbins that comes afterwards, which is kind of unavoidable in the live service shooter. But I think I like going in with nothing and coming out with nothing.

It's like they all give me the sweet embrace of the void every time I go in or out. No continuity. 

"I love a fucking scratch card."

[Jonty is suddenly audible after 20 minutes of struggling with his microphone]

Brendy: Hello. We can hear you. Happy days.

Jonty: I changed literally nothing. It just suddenly started working. Hooray.

Wonderful. A mere, what, 80 minutes after we agreed to meet, I am ready to join you guys in video games. 

Brendy: This is PC gaming, baby.

[Graham and Brendy have been playing with free sponsored kits. Jonty immediately equips an actual weapon which can be lost if he's killed.]

Brendy: Look at Jonty bringing a 1.2k gun to a 0k knife fight. 

Jonty: I wasn't even aware that was a metric I had to be paying attention to. It's the gun I got from the training mission.

Graham: Yeah, I put that in my vault because I'm too scared to use it in case I lose it. Fully just using free loadouts because I'm too much of a coward to ever use my actual belongings. 

Brendy: You're like the guy who signs up for the free account on all the different gambling websites so you can use the £10 that they give you free and then you never cash out.

Graham: It's because you can't cash out until you've won that, you know, £100 or whatever it is. 

Brendy: That's right, they trick you. I remember that. I did that on Paddy Power back in the day. I thought, "Oh, these suckers, they've made a complete error. [laughs] I'm going to get this money."

And then, no, you can't take out any small winnings until you win lots more. I mean, obviously, it makes perfect sense.

Jonty: I have never succumbed to that. 

Graham: See, you said in your Marathon piece Brendy that you like a scratch card now and then, and I remember the thing that you wrote for Shut Up and Sit Down about scratch cards. 

Brendy: I love a fucking scratch card.

Graham: So I'm like, "This fucking hypocrite."

Brendy: [laughs] No, I honestly, I like a scratch card, but I had to fucking disable my own Paddy Power account because I was just betting on stupid sports I didn't even care about. Just to get a buzz. It was bad. That was back, that was like 10 years ago or so. This all informs my opinions about dopamine in games. 

Graham: I think we're getting to the heart of the matter now. 

[The boys die and spend about ten minutes dealing with inventory management and different types of ammo and lore videos.]

Brendy: This is another thing I don't like about fucking extraction shooters. It's the amount of time that you and your friends just sit muttering about stuff instead of actually playing the game.

"It's like a Team Deathmatch game. I'm kind of okay with that."

Jonty: I mean, I am very Arc Raiders pilled, I've played that game for a long time, and it is also sort of difficult to understand and weird, and you spend a huge amount of time shuffling things around at the beginning and the end of each game.

But it does feel a little bit more like you're... I don't want to say you're in control of things because you're really not, but you can have perfectly civil encounters with people in Arc Raiders. You can just skulk around and dwell in the shadows and be a fucked up little scavenger. And that's a perfectly acceptable way to play. 

Whereas this is more aggressive in its inscrutability and openly about, like, "lol, you died." Like, I just got an achievement for dying, which very much seems to be the overall branding. Don't love it.

I'm actually ready now.

Graham: Yeah, it's definitely much more PvP combat orientated, but I don't hate that. I just go into every scenario now expecting that I'm going to have a fight with the other players, so I just shoot first.

It's like a Team Deathmatch game. I'm kind of okay with that. 

Jonty: I don't mind Team Deathmatch. I think that's my preferred multiplayer game, but this has so much cruft in service of being an extraction shooter that I've got to do all of this dicking around, and then I have a Team Deathmatch game in which all the other players are much better than me.

Brendy: That's every multiplayer shooter for me.

Jonty: Well, yeah, I mean, I don't want to act like that's not the case in nearly everything, but at least if I play, I don't know, Gun Game in Counter-Strike, that is very bang, you die, retry.

Whereas this, I've got to do all of this fucking around. I'm spending three minutes watching a bug do something before it loads the game in. 

Brendy: Gotta love that bug.

[The boys all watch the loading screen moth as we load back into Perimeter.]

Graham: I guess I also had that problem with Arc Raiders. If anything, in Arc Raiders I seem to be constantly getting items of no obvious or intrinsic value. Whereas here, at least, when you finish a round, it just auto-vaults and auto-sells a bunch of stuff for you. I feel like I have to think about it less, rather than being like, wait, is this a thing I'm supposed to be breaking down into constituent parts? Or am I supposed to sell this to the chicken? So Arc Raiders I found more overwhelming in terms of the inventory stuff.

But then in Marathon I find the objectives in the world more overwhelming, because there's no intrinsic meaning to any of the weird fucking objects. In Arc Raiders, I get it, there's a robot and there's a warehouse and it looks like a warehouse. 

Brendy: Oh, I just did a thing. I pressed a thing. It's called a TAD.

Graham: Oh yeah, I did that once! It's going to summon a bunch of robots to come fight us now.

Brendy: No, it shows you where bad people are. I think there's bad people on the roof. You see? 

"I know this because I pressed it by mistake and killed myself."

Graham: Oh yeah. Okay, so this is what I mean. I did this once. I pressed the TAD Scanner, and I don't know what a TAD is, and I didn't know what it was marking on the UI, but it made like four robots start shooting at me, so I assumed it was related. [I turn around and see a bunch of robots coming down the corridor.] Oh yeah, here comes a bunch of robots. 

Brendy: You've got to read the guides, Graham.

[Several minutes later, the boys are murdered by some other players, again.]

Brendy: I think we're playing this wrong. 

Graham: How should we be playing it?

Brendy: I think we should be going in with the most gear that we can. 

Graham: But then we might lose it, Brendy!

Brendy: Yeah, but so what? I mean, we will, but I think that's what I'm doing right now. 

[Brendy equips a big gun.]

Jonty: Wow, that's a big gun. Yeah, it took me ages in Arc Raiders before I got sufficiently blasé to start packing large weapons, so I think I'm just going to do the freebie grind for a bit. 

Brendy: Here's an electronic grenade, I'll use that. That one says 1, this one says 2, and that one says 3, so I'll put them all on. Cash flow, don't know what it does, I'll put it in.

I'll take a health kit, a shield kit, a cardio kit, an antivirus pack, a mechanics kit, a debug, and... There we are. How much value is that? 

Three grand. 

Jonty: Yeah, I just don't have anything. I've got nothing but scrub tier bullshit. 

Graham: Alright, I'm taking 1.7k worth of stuff, including my two best guns and some, like, shield and leg armour, and a grenade I don't even know what button to press in order to throw. 

Brendy: Ah, now, see, you press G to throw, and I know this because I pressed it by mistake and killed myself.

Jonty, what's your man's special ability?

Jonty: Uh, that's a great question. I think surveying? Like, scanning the area?

Brendy: You're like a TAD. 

Graham: Like from Neighbours?

Jonty: Deep cut for the '90s heads there. 

[We load in and soon come across a large group of robots. Graham carefully pings each one of them.]

Brendy: That's useful pinging. There's a lot of robots. Watch this, though.

[Brendy triggers a fight against all the robots simultaneously. Graham and Brendy take them down.]

Brendy: See, this is what good gear does. 

Graham: I would have just avoided those guys, but you went right in there. 

Brendy: I don't think that this could go wrong at all. 

[Brendy picks another reckless fight with some more robots.]

Graham: Brendy, what are you doing? 

"Put me in my place and say, Brendan, you're just cranky. You didn't give it a chance."

Brendy: Nothing. I'm just saying, like, I've brought three grand worth of guns. I've got to win.

Graham: I'm starting to see why you don't like this game. Or maybe why you don't trust yourself around this game and its systems. 

[Brendy triggers another fight. Jonty is downed.]

Graham: Brendy, why did you get Jon killed?

Brendy: I didn't get him killed. All I did was press a button.

[Graham revives Jonty.]

Graham: I feel like we should get out of here.

[The boys exfiltrate successfully and are back in the menus, retaining the expensive loadouts they went in with.]

Brendy: You see, lads? When you gamble big, you get big.

My god. I'm shaking. I'm so sensitive to this stuff. I feel like I've just had three espressos. 

Graham: Do you feel the life coursing through your veins, Brendy? Do you want another hit?

Brendy: I need to go and have a lie down.

Jonty: I didn't kill anybody, but I did get a load of valuable stuff, so... I win at capitalism.

[Jonty and Graham have both reached level 5, which means they have to skip through (or watch) lore videos, and then can't progress until they claim their codex rewards, which means interacting with the codex, which is bad.]

Brendy: You do have to go in and click on all of the things in the codex and then you'll get a little sticker on your customisation menu so you can add it. For example, I've just unlocked a little sticker to put on my guy. 

Jonty: Oh, okay. I've unlocked a bunch of shit. There's all this fucking lore. I'm not reading any of this shit.

Graham: No, me neither.

Brendy: God, we're very cranky. I thought that youse were going to come in and really go to town for the game. Put me in my place and say, Brendan, you're just cranky. You didn't give it a chance. 

Jonty: I mean, both can be true.

I've made all the notifications go away, which is, in-game as in-life, the point.

Graham: No, it's like I said before Brendy, I didn't strongly disagree with anything you said about Marathon, which I had only played for an hour at that point, only the stuff that you were saying that sounded more generally about multiplayer games or extraction shooters.

I do think it's okay that the quests in Marathon are quite lightweight. When people say that the quests are part of what set this apart versus something like Arc Raiders, I think they're just there as, not quite a carrot on a stick, but something to pull you through and give you some direction when you're soloing. That's fine. It's still ultimately a game about, what I think of as quite a nutritional experience, of encountering other players. 

"We could all just be playing Straftat now."

Brendy: I watched an entire YouTube video of someone just being so breathless about it and saying that the quests are one of the things that really set it apart. You know, that it gives you these quests and the quests are why you play. And I thought, really? Is it though? 

So, I think you're right. I think it's okay for little things like this to exist. Especially if your game isn't really about that, you know? It's a way to force players to be in the same place. 

[We're still in the menus waiting for Jonty.]

Graham: I am having fun now, I should say. Brendy, are you? 

Brendy: Yes, I am.

Graham: Yeah, I fucking got you! In your face! 

[laughing]

Brendy: That's definitely more to do with both of you than the video game. Like, we could all just be playing Straftat now.

Graham: Sure, but that's valid though, right? It's a platform for nice time with your friends. There's nothing wrong with that. 

Brendy: You're right. There is actually nothing wrong with that. I think that's why I needed the little caveat. You can have meaning with friends. You're getting it by proxy.

Graham: I would argue that's not a lesser form of art. I think that's easily taken for granted, because actually, there's lots of unpleasant experiences we could be having  in games right now. Which we wouldn't be enjoying. 

Brendy: That's true.

[The boys eventually escape the menus and load back into another game.]

Brendy: Oh, we're inside. Oh, this fucking place. I hate it.

[We've spawned inside the wall that runs down the middle of Perimeter.]

Brendy: The wall being here means that there are these little chokepoints basically that split the map down the middle, and then where we are right now are bits where if you want to get from north to south, you have to go through one of those. That's why I feel like the level design is fucking cool. 

Jonty: It's just 2fort basically, is what I'm hearing.

Graham: Oh shit.

Brendy: What is it? What did we find?

Graham: There's a bunch of... Robot birds? Something else is beeping, but this is a Screk. It's a Screk flock.

Brendy: How did you know that!?

Jonty: Oh, Graham's into the lore. He's lost. 

Graham: It's just what it said on my UI when I pinged them. Screks. 

[The gang try to visit some DCON stations so Brendy can deliver some salvage, when they run into some trouble.]

Jonty: [panicking] No, no, no, person. Shit the bed.

Graham: [also panicking] It's a person. It's a human person. Should we run away, or what?

Jonty: It's my least favourite kind of person. I think maybe they saw me. I think they definitely saw all of us, yeah.

Graham: Right, I'm going back in the wall. 

[Jonty has charged away in front.]

Brendy: You're so far from us, Jon. 

Jonty: No, it's fine.

"I have taken every drug in my backpack. I feel like a billion dollars"

[Jonty is killed. Brendy downs two of the enemy team, but another team show up. He and Graham run away.]

Jonty: So I'm going to be highly supportive and do my Duolingo while you guys escape.

Brendy: I'm low on health but I don't think I have any healing kits. I don't even know where you are, Graham. Are you on the other side of the wall?

Graham: Yeah, I exited the wall to try and find a way around, unsuccessfully. There's, like, no other entrance to this damn place. 

Brendy: I'm near you now. I'm annoyed because, like, we killed two people, and we didn't get any of their fucking shit. 

Graham: There's a honk button. I just found, like, the front of this... I guess I'm in a vehicle? And there's a honk button. So I pressed the honk button.

[Sounds of Duolingo from Jonty's microphone.]

Brendy: [laughing] I can hear the little Duolingo owl. 

Graham: I genuinely thought that was an enemy close to me and I was hearing proximity chat. 

Brendy: ¿Qué idioma estás aprendiendo? 

Jonty: It's German, regrettably, so...

Brendy: Oh.

[Brendy and Graham head to an exfil spot, where they run into trouble with some other players. While hiding like cowards, the other team manage to exfiltrate, forcing Brendy and Graham to relocate to the "Guarded Exfil", an exit point watched over by robots.]

Graham: Double or nothing. All in.

Brendy: Just let me try every single one of these drugs that I brought with me. 

Right. I have taken every drug in my backpack. I feel like a billion dollars, I think.

Graham: You're pixelated now. You have like a pixelated filter over you. Like you're a penis.

Brendy: I think that's the thingy jammer. Right. I'm activating this exfiltration point.

Graham: Is it literally called a thingy jammer? 

Brendy: Signal jammer. 

I think something bad happens now. [Robots fall down from the sky.] Yeah, they're right above you. [Brendy is blasted to pieces almost immediately.] Oh, I'm dying, but they're on fire, so you can just survive.

Graham: That'd be great. [I am immediately downed.]

Brendy: Just crawl towards the exfil and hope that you live long enough for it to go off.

[Jonty finishes his Duolingo.]

Jonty: There's some weird filter going on like it's censoring something. 

Graham: Yeah, that's because Brendy activated the porn filter. 

Brendy: The robots are just slurping the life out of me.

[The robots don't execute downed players, but suck the remnants of life out of them faster when within proximity. Graham has slowly dragged his downed robotself into the exfil zone as the countdown starts.]

Brendy: Are you gonna get away? 

Graham: I might, I might, yeah. 

[Brendy dies. The robot turns its attention on Graham.]

Graham: [panicking] No, no! He's slurping. Don't slurp me. Don't slurp me! 

[Graham exfiltrates with a sliver of health remaining. He's the only one who survived]

Brendy: I lost two and a half grand. Why did I do that? Why did I go in with all of the good shit? 

Oh well. There's no choice but to go again. I should just do it again. 

Graham: I'm getting a little bit of understanding about what you were saying about your scratch card problem.

Jonty: I worry I'm getting a slightly deep insight into your individual psychoses here. 

Graham: Yeah, I do feel like Brendy shouldn't play extraction shooters. This is what we're learning.

Brendy: Keep them away. I took all those drugs and I still didn't beat any of those robots.

The thing is I'm bored with going in with that peashooter that they give you. So I'm going to go in with at least one gun. I could buy an encrypted sponsored kit that has a randomised set of items in it for 4000 credits. I won't know what's in it.

Jonty: That sounds real swell for people who have 4000 credits. 

Brendy: I've just bought one. I'm gonna see what happens.

Graham: It's a loot box, Brendy. What are you doing? 

Brendy: Yeah, but you have to spend money to make money.

Graham: You're not allowed access to the Jank business bank account anymore.

Brendy: But lads, I'm investigating Polymarket. Let me investigate Polymarket. I swear, I just need to test it. I just need to test how it works. Once I understand how it works, it'll inform the piece.

[We enter another round and all of us die within minutes this time, Graham included. Brendy loses the gun worth 4000 credits again.]

Brendy: I got a Deluxe Profile background from dying in that marsh. It wasn't for nothing, that.