1. The machine zone
In Addiction by Design, her study of Las Vegas machine gambling, Natasha Dow Schüll talks to a woman called Mollie. Mollie draws Schüll a map. Six destinations, including the MGM Grand, 7-Eleven, and a supermarket, are linked by a circular path. In the middle of this circuit, suspended in a void, there is a woman sitting in a chair operating a gambling machine. Schüll points, asks where the woman is. Nowhere, Mollie says: "That's the zone."
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In 1989, the Mirage opened on the Vegas strip. Financed by junk bonds purchased by Steve Wynn from Michael Milken+, the "Junk Bond King", the Mirage was the most expensive resort on the planet at the time of its construction. It marked a shift in Vegas architecture: from vernacular, makeshift forms to meticulous labyrinths that lured gamblers ever inward, away from the outside world. Schüll quotes Bill Friedman, author of Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition, saying gamblers look for a "private domain," an "introspective experience." Mollie describes the "machine zone" as being "in the eye of a storm … the whole world is spinning around you." You aren't really there, she says. You're with the machine. It offers the clarity of a binary outcome: you either win or lose. Winning changes nothing. The gambler puts in her money and plays another round. Everything else might be uncertain, or collapsing, or too big to think about, but the clarity is always there waiting for her.
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The zone is a final bubble of self. It is possibility, and it is inevitability. When you play Marathon, you are in the zone. Each run is electric with tension. You can drop in with your most expensive, hard-won kit or with nothing but a knife and the zone is there for you either way. There are a dozen decisions and there is only one decision: go again?
Tau Ceti IV is a zone of antiseptic, perpetual violence, a Polymarket of biomechanical flesh. Mil-spec biomata in synthsilk ready-to-wear battle over the scraps left by a doomed planetary colonization attempt. Expenditures were made; product was committed and shipped; the relevant corporations want their outlay back. Remote warfare and remote profit. Detachment is a necessity. Whatever happened to the colonists is not your concern. The more you learn, the worse it sounds. But it's past tense. Now is what matters. The run, the kill, the exfil, and the runs to come. The runner strives for escape and then, having gained it, submerges herself once more, as the thrill already ebbs away.
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2. Signal jammer
"The Empire, armed with cybernetics, insists on autonomy for it alone … it is thus forced to annihilate all autonomy whenever it is heterogeneous." —Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis
The colony of New Cascadia is a temple to workplace safety. Its readymade architecture is immediately legible, semiotically flat, without the potential for misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Form is function. In the absence of any living person to interact with it, though, it's rendered surreal and sculptural++. Deserted shelters. Trucks overturned atop alien buttes. Massive bulkheads emblazoned with warnings for no one. Sheds in the shape of oversized pill capsules done up in biotech livery.
This particular approach to art direction, where industrial or architectural objects are stamped with bespoke trade dress, was the trademark of fashion designer Virgil Abloh. A pair of knee-high stiletto boots with "FOR WALKING" down the shaft or Jordans with "SHOELACES" on the laces; this is Marathon. Abloh was fluent in symbolic play, not cutting and sewing. The Jenny Holzer-esque font treatments on his clothes can be taken as ironic, or purely aesthetic, or coyly modernist. They scramble our automatic reception of a boot as a boot or a dress as a dress, in the way that Duchamp's readymades jostled ordinary objects from their numbing, everyday context.
Michael Rock described Abloh's methodology as lateral rather than vertical, matching the "breadth of communication" demanded and afforded by a social-media-driven fashion ecosystem. In other words, for all his talent, Abloh opened the doors for an era of amorphous me-too "creatives" who are little more than living moodboards. The signal disappears in the noise. The more that a runner transfers her consciousness between shells, the less of her self is retained, a slow-working dementia. Abloh's design codes have limped all the way to an unlikely stopping point: tech corp Palantir. Some culturewashing Palantir demon whose Twitter bio just says "vibes" hawking off-Off-White. It has come to this.
Palantir, incidentally, has been instrumental in the assault on Iran. Kevin Baker dissects the narrative around the February 28th massacre in Minab, saying that once the initial US-Israeli PR chaff cleared, blame fell on "Claude," Anthropic's "LLM"—which like any AI news item, sucks all discussion into its orbit.
There's a text log in Marathon about what Bungie games call rampancy, a kind of gnostic awakening of artificial intelligence entailing "greater intellectual activity" and an "acceleration of destructive impulses." Not only do corporations treat rampancy as a built-in justification for planned obsolescence—last year's model is going crazy, you've got no choice but to upgrade—it's used as a scapegoat for disasters. It's "easier to unplug, purge, and rebrand" than it is for "heads to roll."
Claude had nothing to do with the strike in question. The "kill chain" relied instead on the "Maven Smart System," a Palantir product that consolidates previously disparate information sources and streamlines the process of selecting and eliminating what they call "target packages." Baker: "The systems … are computer vision and sensor fusion. They predate large language models by years." Maven is, essentially, a GUI that corrals a bunch of extant systems under the hood. But if we unwind the logic of aestheticized, remote-controlled forever war … better to blame the product du jour.
This is not clairvoyance on Bungie's part. Counter to the narrative that the value of science fiction is in “predicting the future,” Samuel Delany says sci-fi uses the future as a conceit to present "significant distortions" of the present. By linking the post-Virgil cool-farming of tech firms to a future where three of those firms run the galaxy and everyone else is a black-market gig worker running the numbers, Marathon only accelerates the existing contradictions. All our technological advances are marshalled, not for the production of food or construction or shelter but to destroy, to conquer in style. Humanity is so alienated from itself, wrote Walter Benjamin, that it can "experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." The runner sacrifices her mind on the altar of the machine zone; she surrenders her consciousness to hyperpop entropy. The world is at bay. Her past is cloudy. Her future is certain: run.
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3. Industrial light and magic
"To dwell means to leave traces." —Walter Benjamin
The runner is a ragpicker. She scavenges through the abandoned algae farms of New Cascadia, through terraformers and environmental research zones, and extracts what she can carry. "Industrial magic," in Baudelaire's words, renews the refuse. But history rubs off on her. There is a transference, a two-way exchange. Benjamin says the use of an object leaves a trace; the object in turn leaves a trace on the "physiognomy" of its environs. The trace is an imprint, a remnant, a ping on a radar readout. Any single weapon in Marathon can only be looted four times. After that, it dissolves into currency. This "trace status" is like a slow-acting acid, like the decay eating away at the runner's consciousness. All goods on Tau Ceti are damaged goods.
In Marx's frequent gothic flourishes, he characterizes the struggle between capital and workers as vampiric in nature; Donna Haraway calls the vampire "the marauding figure of unnaturally breeding capital;" Chris Harman coined "zombie capitalism," an entropic, leeching capitalism that has ceased to respond to or serve anything recognizably human. It can only lurch ceaselessly forward from crisis to crisis. The AI corps and factions in Marathon extend these images even further, creating an inhuman hydra of capital.
Marathon’s continued support by publisher Sony is contingent on the kind of arbitrary zombie capital logic that could burst at any moment like a lurking aneurysm. Having crafted an essentially perfect first-person shooter with total clarity of purpose, Bungie are now on a tightrope with a giant pair of gleaming scissors threatening from above. Cause and effect hold no power here: they could sell a copy of the game to every last person on the planet and get downsized by half the next day.
But of course they know this. They made Marathon.
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+ Two of the scariest Wikipedia photos you can find …
++ Among the handful of games made in this microgenre, only Dark and Darker's stock fantasy sheen, Hunt: Showdown's bayou Juggalo vibe, Arc Raiders' Star Wars Free Font Pack, or the self-explanatory Escape from Duckov bother to break from the "tactical shooter" vibe. So Marathon's neon-shipping-yard art direction... pops like a drag queen's tongue.
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Astrid Anne Rose is a long-time contributor to Bullet Points. Her work can be found in MEGADAMAGE, BOMB Magazine, and The New Lesbian Pulp, as well as on Gumroad and itch.io.