I think like a Runner: calculating, efficient, committed to the contract. I plough my hard-earned credits into better gear; I tweak the sensitivity of my analogue stick so that I can twirl it with greater precision. All this happens once I’m in Marathon, but lately I’ve started to think like a Runner outside of the game. What is the optimal time to log on: in the morning or evening? Are sessions a touch calmer during the day, if less frequent? Do I maximize my enjoyment by minimizing how long I wait for a connection? These meta questions always circle back to the most concrete, unassailable fact of this otherwise capricious game—that I’m reliant on other players for a good time, their meatspace presence tethered to mine through the internet.

The Runners, as others have remarked, are an ingenious bit of narrative design. They are people whose consciousness has been uploaded to the cloud yet can be downloaded into an artificial body, i.e. the various classes of so-called Shells. With each new game session, players enter these Shells via impressionistic loading screens which double as manufactured dreams (or “sense-memories” according to Marathon’s lore). Short, sharp death inevitably follows a handful of tense, loot-filled minutes, yet that’s never the end. Rather, Runners are able to load back into another Shell, thus entering into an endless purgatorial fight for resources on the iridiscently pretty Tau Ceti IV—grist for the mill in the cosmic wilderness.

Runners are sad, servile creatures, consigned to an existence of plastic, polymer, supersized tarpaulins, and getting smoked repeatedly in Dire Marsh’s murky waters. Maybe I am sad and a little servile, too—grist for the mill not of the in-game agri-pharma business NuCaloric or Amazon Web Services analogue, CyberAcme, but of Sony itself. I am a live-service player which means, like the Runners, I am a resource. Where, with each rebirth, the fictional Runners accrue debt to their Shell manufacturer, thus plunging deeper into corporate serfdom, I accrue a kind of time debt to Sony (the game’s publisher and owner of its developer, Bungie). I log on almost every evening like a good, dependable worker, plugging away at contracts and acquiring better gear. To be clear, all live-service titles operate according to this kind of time debt logic; sinking tens, if not hundreds of hours into them makes our leaving all the harder (and our purchasing of skins all the more likely). But no other online multiplayer game has spelled out this wretched power dynamic with such clarity as Marathon.

There is hardly a better indicator of how live-service players have become a resource than the primacy of SteamDB in contemporary gaming discourse. The site, among other functions, tracks concurrent player numbers which has caused armchair commentators, Reddit nerds, and wannabe CEOs to pour over these real-time figures, using them to argue for either a game’s commercial, and even creative, success (including Marathon’s), as if raw popularity at any given moment is the most insightful metric. 

But perhaps this number is telling, just not quite how these people envision it to be. Game companies like Sony seek to marshal our aggregate force as live-service players in a bid to create tidal waves of momentum. We are activated by these corporations through slick marketing campaigns and so-called “server slams”, by incremental gameplay tweaks in tried-and-tested formulas, and, maybe above all, by the desire to avoid FOMO for the golden weeks when an online videogame truly feels like the zeitgeist. We are playing, yes; and maybe also being played—reduced to tickers in the daily-active-users bar. 

Live-service titles typically obscure their exploitative impulses: the relentless gear grind of Arc Raiders’ is softened by its picturesque, post-apocalyptic scenery. Marathon is pretty, too, though the world is emblazoned with barcodes and branding which reinforces its oppressively capitalist gameplay loop. The game marries competitive online shooting with loot acquisition; this causes a high-stakes, risk-reward dynamic that means every session feels like a roll of the dice (indeed, writing for Kotaku, Zack Zwiezen called Marathon a “slot machine of loot and death”). But there’s a third aspect of the game that shapes the experience: contracts. These simple tasks, like having to scan bioprinters for something called a sparkleaf, funnel each team of Runners around the map, the gamified carrot cajoling them forwards. 

In this unholy and frequently unpleasant fusion of casino, bland objectives, and retina-scorching shooter, Marathon feels supremely modern. It may also be an inflection point: a kind of ouroboros-esque comment on the world where score-keeping and speculation are the norm thanks, in part, to the rise of online betting, metric-focused social media, and decades of videogames like Marathon mainstreaming related types of systems and behaviors. I don't think Bungie has made a satire but something colder and starker, a reflection of this moment rather than a value judgement on it—a statement of being. 

Marathon feels like the machinations of techno-feudalist modernity pushed to a misanthropic end-state extreme. As players, we’re part of this machinery; the mob, troops if you will, summoned to deliver the aims of the corporation—in this instance, to breathe life into Sony’s product. There is no dissonance between our aims and that of the cyberspace Runners, only resonance: a shared need to execute violent actions with cut-throat accuracy; to pull the trigger with greater proficiency, now with convincing haptic resistance on the PlayStation 5 controller. Marathon isn’t just a game; it feels like bootcamp for a future that’s already here.

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Lewis Gordon is a writer and journalist living in Glasgow who contributes to outlets including the New York Times, The Guardian, and The Ringer, and ArtReview.