What are online shooters like Marathon really about?

This past weekend, the game developer Bungie gave fans a wide-ranging look at their upcoming game, Marathon, a futuristic first-person team-based extraction shooter. The gameplay reveal coincided with press coverage and influencer impressions — as well as a tone-setting cinematic short.

I highly recommend you watch the short. It is gooooood.

The video tracks two competing “runners” — the competitors players will inhabit when Marathon goes live in September. In the aftermath of a mysterious disaster that we see wipe out farmers and maintenance workers (grunts, to borrow a word from the Bungie lexicon), these runners scavenge what’s left behind, fulfilling lucrative contracts. They loot, fight, run, hide, banter and die. Also, they listen to Bach.

In parallel, both runners engage in some kind of calibration (?) exercise reminiscent of the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, as b-roll shows silkworms stamped with ID numbers 3D printing a human body.

I’m describing this all a bit poorly (again, you should just watch the video; it’s a fun way to spend eight minutes, and I’m not sure this post will make sense if you don’t) but what happens matters a bit less, I think, than how it all looks and sounds.

You probably don’t need me to tell you this but Marathon is exceedingly stylish. That much is obvious at a glance. I’ve seen the game’s aesthetic described (by journalists, citing Bungie) as "cyber simplicity" and "future less." It is defined by high-gloss plastics and metals, sans serifs, big blocks of color — often in stark, harshly-contrasting combinations — and materials speckled with the kinds of straight-from-the-factory hexes and hatchings you might use to calibrate a printer or a camera. Things in this universe appear fabricated rather than built.

Joseph Cross, the game’s art director, has said the style is described internally as “graphic realism.” He pointed to “Mirrors Edge, Aeon Flux, Ghost in the Shell, Otomo, Koji Morimoto, The Designers Republic [and] Chris Cunningham,” among others, as points of inspiration.

But there’s also a striking thematic vocabulary in the tone-setting short film. At risk of over-interpreting¹ what’s on display, the short seems to me to gesture at imagery and styles from the late aughts and early teens.

There are sequences staged to look as though they’re being shot by a selfie camera or GoPro — and a handful of shots that look like police body cam footage. The camera behaves in certain moments as though it is attached to a person, but produces non-diegetic light; it’s there, but it’s not clear where it’s coming from. That vantage feels commonplace now (a staple of lurid YouTube Shorts) but would’ve had an unmistakable political valence as recently as five years ago.

At the same time, those sequences, bleached under a harsh white light, call to mind the overexposed American Apparel advertisements we now see as a touchstone of “indie sleaze” (or, maybe more true to Marathon’s whole vibe, the Richard Turley era of Bloomberg Businessweek covers).

It all feels very familiar. 2014’s “Internet Ugly” if it were pumped out of a factory. The line outside Berghain. Unfinished homes in 2008 covered in Tyvek home wrap. Even Ozymandias, the Shelley poem recited in parts throughout the video, is now closely associated with Breaking Bad, the quintessence of early-2010s mass culture. And the 2010s, you might recall, ended quite poorly.

In the last decade, we’ve watched the techno optimism of the Obama era curdle into something else entirely, and the end point of that process is manifest in the cinematic: the workers killed off, contractors fighting for scraps in their wake. Bungie may as well have called the runners dashers.

“You ever wonder what happened to these people?” one runner asks a teammate, referring to the former inhabitants of Tau Ceti, the game’s setting.

“It’s not my business,” the teammate responds, coolly.

There are plenty of games that chase compelling imagery to no actual end, or that lack the discipline to follow through on an interesting idea. Valorant, of course, comes to mind to me here.

When Valorant launched, most of the maps shared a visual metaphor. Many of them were split down the middle, with one half representing a thoughtful, lovingly-crafted imitation of a real place (Japan, Morocco, Italy, etc.) and the other serving as a corrupted, degraded version: sleeker in places, but also peppered with industrial elements and construction equipment. Picture a half-built Apple Store intruding on a historic neighborhood. To wit, one of the heroes has a voiceline triggered when loading into one of those maps: “What has Kingdom done to this town? However pretty their lies are, they're just sucking my city dry!” (Kingdom is the nominal “villain” of Valorant, an evil corporation that does… something.)

You can read from those design choices a skepticism toward gentrification or megacorporations, or a love of old world, culturally significant spaces. It’s not terribly sophisticated, but it is kind of interesting! It is design with purpose and clarity of thought. But Riot’s fidelity to that visual metaphor has wavered over the years, and most of Valorant’s recent output has seemed to lean on striking imagery as an end in itself.

Now, do I know that Bungie — or Riot, for that matter — are thinking about their worlds in the same ways I am? No, not necessarily. And for a lot of people, it won’t terribly matter. “Visual metaphor” will not be how the vast majority of people engage with these games.

But Bungie, I think, is better than many other developers at wringing compelling bits of story out of multiplayer video game formats that generally defy straightforward storytelling. Now, in a major part of their outward presentation² , they’ve struck upon themes and storylines that cry out for articulation. I hope that Bungie follows through.

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1. One of my favorite classes as an undergrad was a Roman art and architecture class. In his introductory lecture, the professor announced that a lot of Roman art was both derivative and ugly — but also, that the works offered tremendous insight into Roman civil and civic life. The ways in which an emperor might style his hair in portraits stamped into coins might tell you something about how he wanted to be viewed, and the lineage he was placing himself into, for example. The details are hazy to me now, years later, but the central lesson has stuck with me, serving as something of a lodestar when talking about a <airquote>vulgar</airquote> art like video games.

2. The word I’m looking for is “marketing,” but it feels crude to acknowledge that I’ve just spent 1,000 words writing about marketing. This whole essay is a call for Bungie to transcend their own marketing!