Revolutionary Redux

The goal of most Marathon sessions is to choose your specific “runner,” a cybernetic body with specific abilities (Triage can throw healing robots, Thief can use a drone to scout areas and rob loot off players) and set off to complete different objectives for factions, grabbing gear as you go. This is an extraction shooter. If you die, you lose everything including whatever gear you entered the match with. The stakes are therefore pretty high. Victory can be huge, defeat can be devastating.

What do you do when running low on supplies? One option is to use a “sponsor kit” a free, minimal gearset loaned out by a faction. Another option is to play as a Rook. These shell bodies are the same as the automated robots used by the UESC, the Unified Earth Council. They are the authoritarian government of the setting. So if you want, you leap in as a Rook and you’re granted a free gun. You enter a match with other “normal” players in this pseudo-enemy body for a chance to scavenge.

In Escape From Tarkov, the big extraction shooter before Marathon, these kinds of units (generic mooks with simple gear) were literally called SCAVs. Rooks are vulture, picking at what players left behind, aiming for a chance to kill someone with a backpack full of loot before escaping.

But there can be multiple Rooks on a map, multiple poverty players, scurrying about. This is a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. If they cooperate, they stand to benefit entirely. But that kind of cooperation is rare. More often than not, even if you try to signal peaceful intent, things end in blood and scrap.

Here’s how my Rook runs when this morning:

First run. I spawn in to the Dire Marsh region of Tau Ceti. I am close to the “Complex,” a sprawling hanger-like space full of cargo and loot. As I approach, am I alone and begin to gather what leftovers I can find. Guns, medical supplies. I enter a laboratory and another Rook enters from the door on the other side. We pause and he fires. I fire back. We knock each other down.We crawl towards each other, bleeding deep blue cyber-blood.

He calls out over his mic: “Well, uh… see you around.” I say nothing but I think “You could have walked away.” We die and get nothing.

Second run. I’m back in the marsh and headed to the AI uplink facility. Decent leftovers, I find an assault rifle. Automated UESC bots spot me and I make a defensive stand. One of the robots moves differently; it’s a Rook. He fires. I fire back.

We hit the ground together, bleed out, and die side by side.

Third run. It’s mostly peaceful. I get a good haul and make my way to an exfiltration point. It’s guarded by UESC bots but I can manage that. I turn around and spot another Rook. I attempt to shake my head to say “no, no.” The exit is right there, you fool.

He fires and knocks me down.“Sorry, buddy.”

His voice is full of such remorse but as he kills me, the UESC bots gather around him. His chance of exfiltration is low. We could have done this together; it would have been no more than 20 seconds of cooperation but he couldn’t manage it. He couldn’t control himself.

Fourth run. I’m not playing around anymore. If blood is what they want, blood is what they’re gonna get. I’m on the perimeter section of Tau Ceti, approaching the Northern Relay. A hear a noise below me and leap over the edge of the catwalk. I fire immediately, kill him, take his gear and run. Maybe I could have said something to him.

This was easier, this was a win. Sucks to be you, buddy.

Fifth run. I’m still at the Northern Relay point and I hear footsteps above me. This time, I’m the Rook scurrying underfoot. The Rook above me jumps down and heads to a nearby storm drain. I sneak up behind him and jab a knife into his neck. “Buddy, buddy, I have frie-“ I don’t care to listen. I execute him here and there.

He was trying to tell me that he’s teamed up with a few other Rooks. They swarm me and kill me. My corpse falls next to the other Rook.

This is what they do to you. You try and try to find the common ground—if we all cooperate, we could walk out of here with a lot of good scavenge—but most players don’t bother to listen. And over time, that makes you less inclined to listen. No recourse but teeth.

I’m not your fucking “buddy.”

In many places on Tau Ceti, pustulating nests birth an endless stream of ticks who rush towards the nearest player to gnash away at their health. Is this different than most gamers and their instincts?

Rooks are ravenous, they chase you down desperately. They might hold a shred of remorse but when they spot you, they usually give tireless pursuit. Rooks are just like ticks. They are bloodthirsty. When I talked to my friend about this, many of whom are designers, many disagreed.

(if you’re one of these folks know that I love you and I love talking to you about games. Know that I’m performing the dubious “service” of games “criticism” here, exploring an idea and poking at the edges of the map. Either way! Let’s press onward…)

There’s a belief in these conversations, or there seems to be, which say that players are complex and varied; they cannot be quantified or their behaviors generalized. I wonder if we are speaking about the same thing; I’m not really talking about players.

I’m talking about gamers and I believe there is a difference between a player and a “gamer” and I think the world of Marathon has more gamers. I do not think gamers have a resilience in them and I do not think they function on a level as deep as a player does.

At least 9 times out of 10 ape kills ape, y’know? Without thought.

This is obviously a very mean position to take and I accept that to phrase things like this (which I have done mostly for the sake of rhetorically expressing my sentiments) makes me sound like an unkind person. But I think there’s a kernel of truth in that rhetoricizing, one which does point to an interesting dilemma. As I discussed this with folks, it was stressed that there’s one main verb in Marathon: kill. Therefore, to expect someone not to kill in Marathon is like expecting a human not to breathe. We do the things we are able to do.

If there were more complex options available, options to emote a wave or flash a green light signaling friendship, the decision to kill becomes more deliberate and perhaps more condemnable.

But we can’t do those things so…

Are players really bloodthirsty? Are they really ticks?

Can you “blame” them?

I’ve thought about this a lot in the last few days and I think the limitation of mechanical verbiage does allow blame even if, you know, this is a game and there’s not really anything morally wrong about shooting someone in a video game.

Let’s make note of that if only to pre-empt disagreement. I don’t think shooting a digital gun at an avatar is a “real” moral decision.

But for the purpose of this conversation, let’s talk evocatively!

If killing is the default, if that is one of the only things you can do, I don’t think, conceptually, you’re absolved of the choice to kill when you make it. Maybe you’re manipulated by the designers, sure, and that reduces your culpability but you still made the call.

You pulled the trigger.

If you have two choices (kill or don’t kill) and one is the only “active” choice, I believe the decision to not perform that act takes on a kind of worth. If all you can do is kill, the choice not to kill is “important “ even if the game does not give you many other choices. It’s not nothing!

I also don’t know if I fully believe gamers think strategically about something like a wider game economy when deciding to kill. So I don’t trust that their decisions are based on much more than a gut reflex. There is an enemy over there; point and click.

To kill a Rook is (on a high level) to deny funding, to deny weaponry that a foe could use later in a “real” run but I don’t think that when the trigger is pulled there’s a thought further ahead than the moment. The thrill of the execution here and now. The blood calls.

This is, again, not a very charitable position. The game itself does guide people towards some level of strategic thinking about money and funds but that’s a broader context draped over a simpler give and take. Players might optimize how to navigate this system but the breadth of their concern for the economics of Tau Ceti is individualistic. They are optimizing individual runs; they’re not balancing a wider player economy. There’s not a big picture mindset. Or so I choose to believe.

In our conversation, someone brought up an interesting counterpoint and it’s one that’s floated around in my head as well in all this.

ARC Raiders is also an extraction shooter with, in theory, a similar core loop and ideology to Marathon but game fostered a much more active kind of player cooperation. A kind of subculture emerged where some players sought communication over conflict.

It got to the point that at least one outlet asked if the game should have a PvE only mode. This is something, I think, that if you suggested for Marathon, many people would balk. So what’s different here?

I’ve not really played ARC Raiders (it uses too much AI tech for me to find that palatable) and so I don’t have a rebuttal here. Which is fine by me; a part of any conversation like this is admitting blindspots or accepting when someone’s point strongly counters your own.

I’m not a player psychologist, I’m not a designer, I’m not an academic. I’m an art critic and my approach to writing is one firmly planted in a radical emotionality. I believe in sentiment, I believe in feelings.

When a Rook kills another Rook, I fully accept there’s a limitation of available actions pushing them in that direction but there’s there’s a culture thing play, a kind of learned behavior which many people have turned into instinct over years of game playing. It's a feeling.

One need only think of Call of Duty and the way the gameplay structures ripple out into the real world, priming people not only for military recruitment and the acceptance of war but also the way it ingrained domination and yearning into the multiplayer language.

Marathon uses this kind of power play to paint a portrait of a dark future, a speculative corpo-space partially reflecting our own world, where killing becomes an unending gig economy job. It’s a game packed with smart design, clearly thinking about what killing means.

But it does all those other things too. Just like how an anti-war movie can't entirely be anti-war, a shooter can't be only a treatise on capital consumption and "senseless" violence. To depict the thing is to normalize the thing. When you build a game system about acquisition and the comfortable feeling of *power* you reinforce at least some sense that this kind of life, this kind of pursuit is inherently appealing. you can toss the aesthetic cloak over it but the lizard truth underneath is still there. if you're a designing a game like this, you're counting on that! it keeps people playing and buying your seasonal battlepass.

When Rook kills Rook, it is a kind of “failure” in the utilitarian sense. Jeremy Bentham or whoever would hate it. It’s selfish, needy, maybe even thoughtless in most cases. This is fine! But as I have spent many years in video games, I’m nervous about the idea that there’s a spark in them which is different than other mediums and I’m also very cautious about romanticizing what players “do” in games. or maybe even who they are as people. There’s no moral weight to killing a Rook but there is a choice made and I find the lead up to that choice interesting.

I cannot fully diagnose the thing happening and for many people, I think their answer is very simple. This is what the game expect, this is what is rewards. There’s no worth to the decision; there’s no grounds to call anyone bloodthirsty. But I can’t make that leap. I don’t think games are special but I think the choices we make in all contexts are important and say something.

I detest things done for their own sake, I bristle at suggestions which I think flatten the prickly bits of things.There’s nothing superior about not pulling the trigger on another Rook but it is a gamble which is as interesting, or perhaps more interesting, than forcing the fight and gambling on your aim and twitch reactions.

It’s a different card and placing it on the table is at least in theory the route to the most equitable spread of rewards. The limitations of our language in Marathon: you can at best speak to someone with proximity chat if you can even get close, make the gamble exciting.

But it’s also a gamble which this playerbase broadly (though not always) rejects in favor of blood and there’s a point where you might decided “well, okay.” There’s a point where the only answer to dealing with the tick swarm is to squash them before they can bite.