Bullet Points Monthly

World Built For Genre

Cameron Kunzelman — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

007 First Light signals it is James Bond by way of the built environment. Bond, as multimedia signifier, is a spy in the upper echelons of society, and he follows the flows of capital wherever they might move, oil-slicked, lounging in the heat wherever money accretes. When we watch these movies, or, god forbid, read the books, we are tracing the lines of excitement and spectacle around the globe in the way the child of extreme wealth might plot a summer trip—we move from hotel to yacht to luxury restaurant.

This is one of the thrills. We see the things that we should not see. We witness constructions and ways of being that are closed off to the vast majority of us. When we look at them, we align ourselves with an extraordinary worldview; we had to make a special man to funnel all of this world into us.

The international spy genre emerging out of Bond has continued in that mode. Ethan Hunt, Jack Ryan, Jason Bourne, the superheroes who have worn the spy aesthetics, and a host of other piecemeal scenes in 70 years of cinema have all played by the rules that Bond put down. They can do things we cannot. They will threaten and torture and stab and violate and love and die in ways that we do not, and we know it because of the evidence of their alien accoutrement. They sit in chairs you never will. They see sun reflect off glass in a way that you cannot. They taste fish and quail, bodies and scents, all in ways that are shot for full identification despite how far away from us they are. The gap is immense, but we know it because we see evidence of it.

We knew that IOI would be able to accomplish this with First Light because they already had done so with the Hitman series. Famously, Star Wars developed the lived-in future as a keystone aesthetic, making cantinas and space ships dirty in a way that grounded them fully for generations of movie watchers. In following cinema, videogames have largely mastered the feeling, if not the complete image regime, of the lived-in world. With Hitman and now First Light, I think it is clear that IOI is the first studio to have completely developed the aesthetic of the world for no one. Agent 47 mostly followed elites in elite situations. Even Bond’s most ‘realistic’ moments, when he spends time with his MI6 friends in their shared London flat, are evidence of an economy where the increased year-over-year valuation of an apartment means that it—the building—earns more money than the average worker.

Doing the aesthetics of Bond, especially in the post-Craig world, means making worlds that begin and end when the wealthy enter and leave. One wonders about the billionaires and trillionaires of the world and how real they think we are. We know that situations are created for them, warping the shape of reality in their image by turning a massive arena into their private space or an entire global city into their weekend wedding venue. What must it do to the psyche to know that existence ripples and folds around you like a curtain?

II.

IOI has done all that better than anyone else has. Of course Mass Effect’s Citadel doesn’t feel like a real place that people live in, and neither does Fallout 2’s Shady Sands, but the work of genre lets us cover over that with a kind of buy-in, similar to a black box theatre experience. Yeah yeah, we say, we get it—there are people here, they’re just off screen. The worlds of 47 and James Bond feel like the most elaborate sets, and when they’re packed with people it seems like dressing rather than a crowd. People are constantly looking out of the corners of their eyes to avoid gazing directly into the camera lens as if a flash mob displaced in time is about to break out. First Light is first and foremost a world built for genre.

We get it all mixed up when it comes to games. The fixation on interactivity runs into the market classifications of genre, and we get hopelessly lost. Steam created the tag system for its store so that no one would have to give a shit about this any longer, and that’s why “first-person shooter” and “fantasy” are both genres. It is tedious argument to hear from academics and fans alike why games should be categorized by how we click the buttons (mechanical genres) rather than what we see (aesthetic genres) or how we feel (affective genres), and I am going to dismiss all of this in a single sweep of my hand.

When I say that First Light is built for genre, I mean that every moment of the game feels like it is perfectly contoured over the model of the James Bond concept, folded and starched over the bodily form in ways that hundreds of professionals managed to accomplish over the course of several years. When I see the developing city emerge from the desert and the labyrinth of corporate managerial space capped with natural stone, I am prepared for genre to erupt at any moment.

In a previous era, there was a gamer’s fear of the chest-high wall. You came to a place, you saw the walls, and you knew that violence would take place there. The geometry signaled a usage—psychogeography of the digital world developed by magisters of vertices—and you’d hunt headshots or brutal melee kills in prestige formats.

Now that naturalism has come for all videogames that are not literal cartoons, genre could break out between any two given cinematics. An environmental puzzle might turn into a firefight. Stealth and combat are not two separate tracks any longer; they are two vibes in a glass-walled office, turned on and off when the designer needs the pacing of the game to change.

First Light is the first ur-game. It can be anything in the James Bond genre form at any moment, being neither a shooter game nor a stealth game nor an adventure game nor a prestige narrative thing because it has a world built for any of those things to happen at any moment. Built backward from cinema (in the same way that the Kojima projects since Metal Gear Solid V have been, although, also, in a different way), First Light signals that its spectacle could support any interaction you might want to have in it. James Bond is the sovereign individual outside of social relations, and he can be anything to anyone, the pure beast of capital’s jungle. He needed a game that could apprehend him. IOI delivered.

III.

First Light succeeds at being the kind of machine that it needs to be. I am deeply saddened that it, in turn, cannot be understood by its own masters. IOI has laid off developers after losing financing for a new, non-Bond project. Talented, deserving people are out on their ass. Similarly, whatever the fate of the studio proper, it seems improbable that it would be making the needed sequel to this game given that one of our media and tech conglomerates, Amazon, controls the intellectual property of Bond now and, seemingly, wants to take it in-house in a clandestine and foolish act of vertical integration. Efficiency with its firm hand on the wheel, I suppose.

Genre waves its head again because Bond is seemingly an active nothingness, an excuse to spend the money, an excuse vehicle that forces a logistics and infrastructure company into particular kinds of conversations and forms of valuation. Bond has always been an excuse to show beautiful locations and to fantasize about a specific kind of love (of the object; of objectification; of being objectified), and now the item being shown off is the line item of Bond (it)(him)self. The wonder of Bond is that he can circulate, dance like Marx’s table, with no history other than what we remember. He’s a set of skills centered on witnessing a valorized mode of existence in a given media cycle. When Bezos took over a city, powered by vectorial capital, he was pursuing the fantasy of the abandoned film set and the world where the extras have been banished off-screen for a little while. The world built for no one; a world built for Bond.

Bond is the man that can be anything to anyone. First Light is the game that could break out anywhere, at any time. The Bond IP extends as flexibility, and perhaps that’s why the post-Craig years are so caught up in development hell. What is Bond in a world where he has radically become nothing beyond a line item? He’s not the peak accomplishment of anyone any longer, just a brick in a tower building toward infinity, a form of existence antithetical to his entire existence. From the perspective of the fullness of Bond’s time, we might think of First Light as the last glare; the final time that Bond was Bond, recognizable, framed in the distance by the things we wanted to be, unsullied by what his new owners must inevitably make him become.

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Cameron Kunzelman is a writer and a critic. His books The World is Born From Zero, on science fiction games, and Everything Is Permitted: On Assassin’s Creed, about the Assassin’s Creed franchise, are books you can buy. He podcasts for Ranged Touch.

Happy Eater

Ed Smith — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

While Sean Connery’s version comes the closest, in general, to the character as originally written by Ian Fleming, it’s the vulgar, smuttier, and anything-for-a-laugh interpretation, embodied by and in Roger Moore, who ends up most succinctly verbalising James Bond’s emotional link to killing, during a scene in The Man With The Golden Gun:

“When I kill, it’s on the specific orders of my government, and those I kill are themselves killers,” says Bond to Scaramanga.

“Come come, Mr. Bond,” the assassin replies. “You disappoint me. You get just as much fulfillment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”

“I admit killing you would be a pleasure.”

By 1974 and the ninth Bond movie, this aspect of the character—the way he blends violence and duty seamlessly; complements sadism with country—has already been acted out several times, most conspicuously in Dr. No, when he executes the disarmed and helpless Professor Dent under the auspices of avenging an Mi6 colleague. But this feels like the first time that Bond’s professional joie de mort is articulated so expressly in words, and when these two components of the character—he kills on behalf of Britain and in some contexts also enjoys that killing—are offered to us in such a way that we can’t help but to conflate them.

It seems fitting that the centrepiece of Scaramanga’s bizarro firing range, obstacle course, and funhouse hybrid is a lifesize replica of Bond himself; that the assassin is played by Christopher Lee, of the same Special Operations Executive as Fleming. Something is going on here with duality, reflections, and searching for the soul, as if Bond, when talking with Scaramanga from the opposite end of the hitman’s dining table, is in a conversation with a mirror self, a shade or so darker. They both kill people for money, after all, trading pain for pleasure.

This kind of sadomasochism appears often in Bond. Spend enough time with the original books and their direct screen adaptations, and you learn that Ian Fleming was precisely the kind of faintly tragic paraphiliac that is stereotypical of the English upper class, a world of men who were abandoned by their parents to boarding schools, and whose anger at being abandoned became self reproach, and who ventilated their self reproach using the physical sensation of hot candle wax on their testicles—men whose first, formative contacts with ‘attention’ and ‘nurturing’ were by way of a domineering nanny, a woman paid to discipline them. In the first ever Bond novel, Casino Royale, Le Chiffre kidnaps Bond and tortures him by whacking his genitals with a carpet beater. In Thunderball, a near-naked Bond is tied, hands and ankles, into a ‘spinal traction machine’; when a would-be assassin turns the speed dial, the apparatus stretches the prone Bond almost to death, in a way that makes it look like he’s being held down and roughly sodomised.

So much a part of its identity, these erotic brutalities survive in the Bond series way beyond Fleming himself—70 hand-rolled Morlands and a bottle of Old Man’s Punch every day meant Fleming was dead by 1964, but he wasn’t buried with his peccadilloes.

In 1999’s The World Is Not Enough, for example, an original script+ by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, Bond is tied to a garrotte and asphyxiated by Elektra King. “You know what happens when a man is strangled?” she says, smiling, straddling him, and turning the handle of the device until Bond’s neck is almost broken. “One last screw,” he chokes out.

When Da Silva captures Bond in Skyfall, he ties him to a chair, opens his shirt, and brushes his fingers over the scars on his chest. “We are the last two rats,” he says, “and we could eat each other.” He then looks into Bond’s eyes, smirks, and swallows.

In his book subtitled Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England, historian Ian Gibson refers to sadomasochism—and a number of its adjutant turpitudes—as “The English Vice”. Gibson’s focus is on identity; how the education ministry’s deployment of corporeal punishment impacted British sexual awakenings in the early 20th century. But you could easily turn the practice back on itself. Instead of asking how government-mandated whippings affected our society, you could ask why we even had a society where whippings were mandated in the first place. Why did we make admonishment and self censure, and the idea that betterment, or at least some kind of gratification, could be achieved by physical suffering, part of our national curriculum?

Maybe it was our empire, the fact that, for so many hundreds of years, when we inflicted barbarity on the people of India, Kenya, Singapore, and everywhere else, we also did it in the name of ‘their own good’; the prosecution of what our most lauded poet Rudyard Kipling called ‘The White Man’s Burden’, the “savage wars of peace”. Such was the propaganda of the British imperial project—we may annihilate them, but even if they themselves don’t realise it, it’s in their best interests, and eventually they’ll thank us. It’s no wonder we created (so many) men like Fleming. We ruled enough of the world that we effectively took control of reality, and then fashioned that reality into one where violence, murder, and genocide turned the victims more civilised. We entrenched sadism and masochism into our culture back home because if the premise that ‘brutality makes better’ was kicked from under it, or perhaps even loosened slightly, the moral justifiability of the Empire would collapse.

As Willa outlines at the beginning of her article, this is the world in which James Bond is formed. While the first novel actually comes out in 1953—after Indian independence, the outbreak of the Mau Mau Rebellion, and the emergence of America and Russia as the post-war superpowers, to the strangulation of Britain’s empire—Fleming first imagines the character during the war itself; when he sits down to write the first 2,000 words of Casino Royale on February 17th, 1952, he’s in his home in Oracabessa, in what is then still the colony of Jamaica.

Visiting upon foreign countries to kill people in the name of installing civility and order, even if he emerges at its relative tail end, Bond is still an imperial figure. Between the rugged good looks, the suits, the watches, the cars, and everything else, what he also does, quite literally, is make the deployment of British imperial power look good—in the same way that the product placements make you want to drink Gordon’s gin, wear an Omega watch, and drive an Aston Martin, Bond, as an entity, seduces you into Britain and British culture. ‘You either want to be him,’ they say, ‘or be with him’. At the height of the imperial age, we achieved something similar via our military and political power, forcing people around the world to believe that if they joined with us, their lives could be improved.

In the '50s and '60s, this is what made Bond propaganda—as the Empire clung onto the final years of its life, he became its disarming valet, stopping people at the proverbial bedroom door so they wouldn’t steal a glimpse of the tuberculoid master within. Sixty years later, his role is only slightly more complex. While we’ve generally become more aware of and prepared to admit the horrors of our colonial past, and also been confronted by nationalism’s various dead ends, there still lives, somewhere in the hearts and loins of a lot of true Englishmen, a fantasy of empire—a guilty little dream that our country still matters in the 21st century like it did 150 years ago.

Bond makes a kind of shadow theatre out of that dream, heightening, symbolising, and caricaturing it so that we can indulge in it emotionally while keeping our preferred distance from it morally and intellectually. He lets us vent and express our frustrated national identity without really making us confront the reasons that we need to vent and express our frustrated national identity in the first place. He takes the pain that we’ve created as a country and gives it back to us as visceral, spectacular pleasure. And if that still doesn’t work for us—if we need a less ambiguous valediction, and to go all the way, and to see even the most symbolic remnants of empire destroyed, to feel really morally cleansed—then Bond will get himself whipped, beaten, shot, and killed for us; he’ll die when we need him to. Regardless of how you feel about James Bond—whether you like him, think he’s a relic-symbol of imperial genocide, or somewhere in between—this context is a large part of what makes the character compelling. A faint word, but even if it’s only as a foul sociological phenomenon, this is why James Bond is ‘interesting’, something to be studied if not swallowed, like a presence of PFOA in water.

When you play as James Bond in 007 First Light, you don’t feel like the character has a lot of power. Structurally, the game is a succession of screeching halts—you spend a protracted amount of time devising an intricate, contrived, and out-of-harm’s-way method of unlocking one metaphorical (or literal) door, only to be confronted immediately on the other side by another. Bond’s progress through his world is comically staccato, best encapsulated in a mid-game sequence where, trying to access a secret underground tech lab, he’s stopped by a receptionist who tells him she won’t let him through without the correct uniform. To locate this uniform, Bond has to eavesdrop on a conversation between two lab employees, from which he learns that uniforms are kept in lockers. The key to these lockers however has been lost somewhere—by now, one of the technicians instructively conjectures out loud, it’s probably been sucked up by one of the many automated vacuum cleaner robots. Bond has to use his gadget watch to x-ray scan all of the robots, and then follow the one containing the key back to its disposal station, and then fish the key out from the bin, all to open a locker door and acquire a jacket, a jacket that he needs in order to get past, not a team of armed guards, or a rival secret agent, or a sophisticated security system of cameras and laser grids, but a receptionist.

Another example of this type of sequence, which Reid refers to as “nakedly mechanical”: later on, Bond is given the entirely pedestrian task of gathering his equipment from the various side offices and test chambers of the Q lab; the staff has been sent home and Bond is in there by himself. He approaches a door. The door is locked. He collects a fingerprint to open the biometric lock. The fingerprint is incomplete. He fetches another part of it. He gets into the room—and the door locks behind him, and now he has to complete another multi-step conundrum just to get back out. There is also the mission in Vietnam, where Bond’s target (not for assassination, just questioning) is staying in a villa, protected by private security. Bond tells the guard on the gate that he’s a yoga teacher, here to deliver a daily session. ‘Not without a yoga mat,’ the sentry replies. ‘The boss only does yoga with his blue yoga mat’. Defeated, James Bond has to go and try to find the blue yoga mat. In Mauritania, Bond needs $100,000 to buy his way into an illegal auction; in what is perhaps First Light’s most benumbing sequence of contrivances, he may obtain this money by earning the high score on a fairground firing range and then beating the dealer of a cups and balls game, both of which, for some reason, award victorious contestants with thirty thousand American dollars.

In Hitman, where we play as a sociopath—as an un-motherborn, artificial man created in a laboratory—this kind of game design forms part of a greater character portrait. Agent 47 is both alienated and repelled by our reality; whenever the Hitman games are uncanny or very obviously fictitious, it creates an impression of 47’s subjectivity, like we’re looking through the eyes of a man who sees people as predictable and lesser thinking, and the human world as a place where he doesn’t entirely belong; a non-man, for whom our everyday banalities are unusual puzzles.

But James Bond is very much a ‘man of the world’—he is THE man of the world. Partly this is expressed through his superficialities—he knows what drinks to order, how to ski, how to win at chemin de fer. But it’s also the fundamental core of his character. In the Royal Navy, he holds the rank of Commander. A glib summation of his dominion over anywhere he goes, the motto of James Bond’s aristocratic family (and of course the title of the previously mentioned 1999 film) is ‘the world is not enough’. He might use a pseudonym or go to some kind of length to maintain his cover and keep a low profile, for the benefit of the mission, but ultimately, wherever he goes, he takes what he wants. For James Bond, reality is not a bewildering, complex or obstructive place.

First Light, by contrast, makes Bond perennially subordinate to his environment—another door he has to find a way to unlock, another ledge he has to find a way up to, another series of hoops to painstakingly contrive a way through. Compared to every other interpretation, either on screen or in literature, this turns IO Interactive’s James Bond into a meek do-gooder, an anti version of the character who cares about means more than ends. Given that he rarely achieves his goals through any direct applications of force, and that every sparse instance of force is mitigated, equivocated, and given extensive, narratively and morally assuring context—and that he’s also presented to us as a subject or supplicant of his environment—First Light’s version of James Bond thus becomes a whitewash, a vision of the character separated from the activities and attitudes of his power-imposing imperial roots. Everything that James Bond does comes with history. It’s telling that so much of First Light is spent walking around, looking at the watch, pressing buttons, doing nearly nothing.

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+Repurposed from Reunion With Death, a screenplay originally written in 1993 for the Timothy Dalton Bond.

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Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.

Earn the Number

Willa Bloomfield-Rowe — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ian Fleming is quoted as having once said his most famous creation, MI6 agent James Bond, "was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war." From his inception Bond has always been an amalgamation rather than a solid thing of his own. As the first proper Bond game in nearly a decade and a half, 007 First Light similarly falls back on tossing influences into the blender. By pulling from so many influences, however, the game is often in conflict with itself.

To balance its inspirations First Light divides itself into two major modes of play: stealth and action. Let's start with the latter

James Bond is the worst spy you know. Watch a movie and count how long it takes for the secret agent to tell someone a) he works for MI6, b) what his mission is, and c) his name is Bond. James Bond. It will not take very long. Especially on film, 007 is the agent of opulence in all things. He dresses nice, drives fancy cars, sleeps with every woman he can, and conducts missions almost exclusively in locations you'd find on a billionaire's vacation itinerary. Stealth is not sexy but firing guns and driving a tank through the streets of Moscow are. First Light wants you to experience this Bond.

During "License to Kill" segments, Bond really gets to let loose. Shooting and punching enemies left and right with reckless abandon and making quips the whole time. It is Bond through the lens of every cinematic action game in recent memory. The biggest influence being Uncharted, Naughty Dog's series that stands as the epitome of the "games as action movies" genre. Hand to hand combat feels eerily like the work of Naughty Dog, with shooting, thankfully, improved. But the flow of these segments is undeniably meant to push you forward and raise your adrenaline.

Some of First Light's most impressive, and memorable, sections occur in this mode of play. One of its most audacious set pieces is a clear homage to Uncharted 3 and finds Bond fighting baddies in a moving cargo plane before being ejected into the sky sans parachute. And while this could read as treading familiar ground, developer IO Interactive does Naughty Dog one better, because Bond must come out on top. While fighting through the plane you are also given control of it. Tipping the plane side to side flings cargo and bodies with abandon as you push forward. It's delightful in a way that feels so suited to Bond. These sections, though, are often short flashes compared to First Light's second, and more extensive, mode.

IOI was seen as the perfect fit for a Bond game due to the success of Hitman World of Assassination. The revived trilogy starring Agent 47 stands as almost the ideal of a spy game. Set in grand environments that serve as murder sandboxes filled with opportunity, Hitman is part puzzle, part stealth, and part immersive sim. First Light replicates this structure. The first real mission Bond is sent on, set in a gorgeous hotel hosting a chess tournament, almost too perfectly evokes Hitman's initial stage, set in a Parisian estate hosting a fashion show. Agent 47's benefactor in that mission is even MI6. Hitman continues to haunt First Light throughout. A nightclub, a tropical resort, a snowy mountaintop facility. Are these descriptions of levels in First Light or World of Assassination? The answer is both.

By constantly courting comparison, First Light gives players the wrong idea. Never is Bond let loose in a sandbox in the same way that 47 is. Hitman revels in seemingly simplistic missions set in complex environments. Eliminate your target. How you do so is up to you. That comes with a wealth of possibilities at 47's disposal: collecting disguises, eavesdropping on conversations to gain information, manipulating the environment to cause fatal accidents. Much of the joy in playing Hitman comes in finding the most convoluted and complex ways to complete a mission undetected. That could be by poisoning a target's food or sabotaging a car. The world is your oyster. Simplicity equally elicits glee and laughter in Hitman's sandboxes. With so many ways to kill, it is almost the most absurd option to just shoot someone as quickly as possible and book it out of a level.

Total freedom is never afforded to Bond, or the player, in First Light. Disguises cannot be regularly taken from decommissioned enemies, bodies cannot be hidden, and violence is not always an option. Environments feel smaller and so do the options they contain. While there are still opportunities for eavesdropping and multiple routes into restricted areas, it all feels noticeably smaller. With a skeleton built on Hitman's blueprint (First Light is made in the same Glacier game engine) players are seemingly invited to play like Agent 47 before being faced with the reality of that impossibility. It often makes First Light feel less than a truly great espionage game.

Bond is restricted here as a result of the game's narrative focus. Hitman's narrative is all but non-existent, meaning each level can be truly free. First Light, however, has story beats it needs to hit. Perhaps there are a handful of ways to reach an objective but at the end of the day First Light needs to shepherd you through the progressive objectives of a level to forward the plot.

This is the central conflict of 007 First Light. Is it a spy game or a Bond game? These are not the same thing. Videogame espionage is (largely) synonymous with stealth. The likes of Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell have become standard bearers for the genre by employing a mechanical emphasis on remaining undetected. Even when violence is employed, it must be performed with precision. Stealth games are more puzzle boxes than anything else. Cinematic spies like Bond need to show off, meaning within a game the ubiquitous mechanics of the genre clash with the narrative needs of the character.

But IOI has one trick it pulls to bring First Light's warring sides together in unison: bluffing. When Bond is caught in restricted areas, or doing suspicious things, he will be given the option to lie. This will play out as Bond giving some absurd excuse as to why he is allowed to be there actually. Perhaps he is security running a test or hotel staff chasing a thief. The excuses seem endless and each one is more stupid than the last. But everyone believes him. He's handsome and charming. This is the most Bond thing you can do.

The only struggle in using the bluff system is accepting its utility. To engage with bluffing means accepting failure. You must let yourself get caught, something that goes against every instinct ingrained in the Hitman player. Failure in World of Assassination is best responded to by resetting the level so you can do a perfect run. First Light hides its best mechanic behind a hurdle as a test. Failure is not the end, it is an opportunity.

Once you stop caring about perfection and learn to use every tool Bond has, First Light's sandbox segments are given new life beyond the expectations brought on by the Hitman comparison. Rather than spaces designed with endless potential for planning, these are spaces with endless potential for improvisation. Sure you might stealth for a bit, but suddenly you get caught and bluff your way to success. Alternatively a guard spots you and the best solution is hand to hand combat. Throw gadgets like the exploding pen in and everything opens up. First Light is a game that gives you all the tools you need to orchestrate the indulgent opulence of a good 007 story. Are you playing like a spy or playing like James fucking Bond?

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Willa Bloomfield-Rowe is a queer games critic based in New York City whose writing has been featured in The A.V. Club, Digital Trends, Kotaku, and more. She also hosts the Girl Mode podcast. When she isn’t talking games she can be found on Bluesky bemoaning the state of the New York Mets.

No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Live Forever

Reid McCarter — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This article discusses plot details from throughout 007 First Light.

Think about Sean Connery as James Bond. Think about his easy confidence, in full tuxedo or short sleeves and shorts, in Nassau or Tokyo or Istanbul, as he moves through a world that seems to relax itself into whatever shape suits him best. He fits easily into different clothes and different rooms. He is perfectly at home in every situation.

There have been a lot of Bonds over the decades, but Connery’s muscular, sardonic charm seems to embody the character at his essence. A British secret agent, sent like an ambulatory missile to thwart the nation’s enemies, who doesn’t balk at inserting himself into foreign lands and foreign affairs, who views himself as the natural arbiter of our planet’s fate.

Connery first played James Bond in 1962’s Dr. No. A decade earlier, Bond was introduced in the novel Casino Royale, with elements of the story and now-famous cast of supporting characters drawn from author Ian Fleming’s experiences in his former career as a member of the UK’s Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War.

Bond was born of the postwar period, of an era that saw the rapid ascent of the United States as the dominant Western superpower and of the beginning of Britain’s imperial decline. In the following years, the character and the empire he represents formed something of an inverse relationship, magnets pushing against each other as Bond grew in cultural status and the once-overwhelming power he embodies faded. If the sun now sets on the British empire, that contracted power needs to keep some kind of light on through the maintenance of its premiere movie star.

With this in mind, it isn’t surprising that the choice of a new Bond actor has taken on an outsized importance ever since Connery left the role behind. In the time I’ve been alive, I can remember Daniel Craig’s casting, which was given so much fanfare in contemporary media that it’s easy to imagine what it would’ve been like to hear the news that a new Holy Roman Emperor was elected. Everybody has an opinion about a new Bond. Everybody wants the perfect person to play him.

So: 007: First Light. By scale of production, IO Interactive’s game is the biggest Bond-media outing since Daniel Craig’s version of the character was retired in 2021’s No Time to Die. Where, in decades past, a Bond videogame would be a minor kind of thing, often pegged to a new movie as a tie-in, the molasses speed of big budget videogame releases and the slowed, post-Broccoli production paranoia of the Amazon-owned Bond era has given First Light a bigger-than-expected heft as a cultural object.

Set in modern times, with the chronology cast backward so players see the origins of the character reworked and restated, First Light initially seems like a proud attempt to reclaim Bond—to shed the baggage and get at him from the very beginning. Bond is introduced here as a humble Navy aircrewman, diminutive next to the SAS squad he’s accompanying on a covert mission to Iceland. A few explosions later and he’s given an opportunity to prove his grit, demonstrating the sort of outsized courage and moral fortitude that catches the eye of MI6 and its recently rebooted 00 program.

First Light lays out its priorities quickly. The other 00s are, like so many film Bonds, comfortable in their role as increasingly honed, politically privileged agents of the state. Young Bond, played by Irish actor Patrick Gibson, works for his arrogance, then seems a bit abashed of his newfound self-possession as a series of vignettes unfold showing him trained in spy craft and combat. He doesn’t seem altogether comfortable until he’s on proper missions, when something snaps back from his memory of Iceland and he remembers why he was picked out by MI6 in the first place.

It’s by setting out into the wider world that Bond starts to become the secret agent we know from film. He and his 00 cohorts train in Malta, which is a sunny flipside of grey London, but also an extension of his home. He learns the tools of his new trade in a nation that has, for millennia, been a possession of empires on the rise and decline—of the ancient Carthaginians, Greeks, and Romans to the medieval Arabs and Normans and the modern French and British. Bond comes to it in its current form, as an independent republic and member of the Commonwealth.

This is a portentous beginning for young Bond. He forges himself anew in a graveyard of history, learning to sneak and shoot and fight in a sort of moon pool for the sprawling world that awaits beyond British influence. (It’s no wonder that the tone of the 00s training scenes, in Malta and back at their shared residence in London, resembles university days, right down to their ‘graduation’ mission taking place in a nightclub.) Once Bond is properly sucked into the machinery of MI6, well-blooded by a tragedy that makes the British government’s concerns his own, he sets out across the world, to a pirate society built out of a ship graveyard in Mauritania+ and an ultra-luxury resort in Vietnam.

It isn’t long before First Light’s true villains are unveiled, and it turns out they come from close to home. At the heart of a vast conspiracy is a sophisticated AI called THEIA and its creator, the fabulously wealthy and highly respected founder of the company responsible for its creation, Sir Nicholas Webb CBE. Webb and his son Damien work to patch the holes in their faulty AI’s output—which has become integrated into the British government’s national security programs and MI6’s intelligence pool— by hiding its mistakes. The understated comedy of this is the manner of their solution: Damien, a mercenary, works alongside a hired army to stage individual killings and terrorist attacks that force THEIA’s faulty predictions into coming true.

The obvious, loud criticism of modern LLMs, so-called “AI,” works without needing to grab it by the nose, but the core of the theme extends outward from a different source. First Light sees the proper Bond villain, in 2026, as Western cultural and political rot. Webb is the inheritor of an arms manufacturer whose money was made on selling death in conflicts as far back as the empire-splitting First World War. He’s a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (motto: “For God and the Empire”) and both he and his son are descended from a family fortune, feted by the government for the contributions of their tech company to the national output. While Webb Sr. resembles the Silicon Valley class of the United States, able to present himself in officialdom with some credibility, Damien is a deranged mess of hereditary privilege. To make clear the parallels to demented princes of empires past, he slaps on a gold mask emblazoned with laurels as he goes out on violent missions, a self-proclaimed Caesar with a private army behind him.

While neither Webb nor Damien, despite the latter’s affectation, are colourful enough villains to truly stick in the mind, their goals end up buoying First Light’s sometimes dull action. There’s too much blandness throughout the game for its thematic thrust to pierce as deep as it should. Part of this comes from its cast—M and Q are flat and underdeveloped rehashes, the sanded-down versions of the characters’ Brosnan-era archetypes. More of it comes from granular design choices, like the repetition of problem-solving sequences where Bond eavesdrops and hacks appliances to gain entry to new areas. These segments are too nakedly mechanical to really capture a capable agent’s savvy and spontaneous capabilities, even if the ramshackle, beautifully animated gun fights are exciting, and excellent set pieces, like Bond chasing after an escaping airplane are thrilling enough, to carry the game forward.

There is a lot, ultimately, to admire in First Light. If the audience might ask what place Bond, the smirking Brit, the humane servant of empire, brought to you by zero-caffeine Coca Cola and Land Rover, has in modern culture, the game has an answer.

It seems impossible to think of a character like Bond working now. The calls for a more politically correct Bond are understandable, because he’s a figure larger than his origins now, but they're also misplaced, since, no matter how charismatic—and without a rewriting so total that he might as well be a new character—Bond only works as an agent of the country that employs him++. He has to be a bit scummy, a bit unlikeable, a bit arrogant. But he also has to possess some kind of moral centre that makes audiences want him to win.

First Light succeeds by showing us the hardening of a new Bond’s shell as he learns to display the confidence he and his employer no longer enjoy as a natural right. More important, it locates its enemy within the diseased heart of modern Britain, easily extrapolated to an international ideology of self-interest and ruthless futurism. It sets Bond on a mission to thwart his own country’s worst impulses, and it does so without preaching or recasting its protagonist as a tortured antihero.

While those in charge of the future of his movies wonder what Bond should be now, so many decades on from his beginnings in the postwar era of Fleming and Connery, First Light offers one viable path forward.

***

+ The pirate town is run by an African warlord played by Lenny Kravitz, who dresses just like the real Lenny Kravitz and, despite growing up on a different continent, speaks with the same East Coast American accent as the real Lenny Kravitz, too.

++ At almost the exact time I wrote this sentence, long-running fan favourite casting choice Idris Elba was quoted about the eternal rumour that he would play the first Black Bond. “James Bond was written how he was written for a reason,” he says, for a reasonable start, eventually concluding with the more puzzling: “Bond is so unrealistic, so a hint of reality is good, but let’s not try and make it woke. I think you’ve got to be pure to what it is: escapism.”

***

Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at Kotaku, The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and posts on Bluesky.

Hong Kong Method

Charlotte Lindsay — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Silk, not skin, is put on the line in pursuit of the run. In this way, each runner can be seen as a tapestry, and their violation, bullet-to-silk contact, is perforation, metal and plastic and fire tearing through weave. The physical boundaries of the runner, the silk shells their cloud-based minds inhabit, are a breathable metaphor, flexing and shifting between futures of trans-humanism; the alienation and dispensability of labor in the age of silicon; consciousness bound to avatars of consumption; vessels of receding memory, self, nationless and atemporal digital nomads and the skin suits they inhabit; tally marks to add to kill-death ratios, prayers to a non-existent ELO. Though the metaphor bleeds through these holes, the metaphor is still, at its core, woven, a textile at risk.

Silk has always had value associated with it. Historians and European travelers named the vast Mongol Empire-established networks of trade routes from East to West the Silk Road. That name would later be co-opted by recent presidential-pardonee Ross Ulbricht for his darkweb marketplace, run on cryptocurrency and libertarian ideals. It was one of the primary goods Britain imported from China through Hong Kong, which they would explicitly colonize after the First Opium War. Further conquest after the Second Opium War, and the First Sino-Japanese War, would puncture it further, "turning the Chinese Coast into a Swiss cheese of more than eighty treaty ports, concessions, and international settlements." Not all for silk, of course, but for silk nonetheless.

The metaphors of perforation are borrowed from academic and historian Quinn Slobodian's Crack-Up Capitalism, where he uses this to make sense of how capitalism "punch[es] holes in the territory of the nation-state, creating zones of exception with different laws and often no democratic oversight." The end goal of this is articulated best by the economists of the Friedman family, a type of free market beyond the borders of democracy that would otherwise stunt it. Milton Friedman, patriarch, would travel to Hong Kong for his CBS program Free to Choose+, remarking on the city as “an almost laboratory experiment in what happens when government is limited to its proper function,” and praising sweatshops in voice over footage for their freedom, efficiency, “lack of exploitation.” From what we know, the boundaries of Marathon's Tau Ceti exist beyond that pesky democracy Friedman had come to realize challenges the free market, and in many ways it resembles the “freedom” his school of thought valorizes: corporate polities among the stars with jagged boundaries of space beholden only to complimentary and competing economic interests, investors, functional monarchies of industry. While governance exists in the form of the United Earth Space Council's military police apparatus, their might is waning, their influence challenged, their reach overextended. One can refer to the history of the UN’s own peacekeeping missions to imagine the effectiveness, professionalism.

Dialogues with the Traxus representative, Vulcan, are the most honest about your role in this ecosystem—the corporations cut through the red tape in pursuit of better margins with runners, for-hire contractors existing within legal grey zones outside of non-aggression pacts and trans-corporate regulations. Your avatars exist to navigate and at times transgress neoliberal globalism, as represented by an intergalactic UN, but exist indentured to corporations modeled after ideology espoused by, for instance, Peter Thiel. You are Blackwater as envisioned by Silicon Valley, soldiers of shrinking fortune—instead of your risk existing in the context of borders, precious minerals, oil, you fight for leftovers, the dregs of the colonies at the end of empire, empty protein packs, colonist feces of some research value, 3D printed flowers. You are asked to kill for the crumbs of a pie long since left to the flies. It recalls Conrad's “An Outpost of Progress,” the desperate, heat-stroked, fatal conflict over sugar. The atmosphere magnifies these small-seeming stakes, the environment exacerbates conflict, and the conflict faced as a runner is ferocious and still hollow. Vulcan praises you for fractional gains on corporate efficiency. You'll have died and died again in pursuit of that praise.

The simultaneous challenge and fantasy Marathon provides, the nuance it offers as real innovation within the space of the extraction shooter and the competitive multiplayer game, is ideological rather than mechanical, per se. This is against trend for Bungie—as developers, their contributions have been more trend-setting than trend-chasing, largely owing to first-in-class mechanics, and oftentimes as equally invested in solo- and multi-player experiences. Perhaps this has contributed to the skewed expectations of the game, to see a game generously fifth-to-the punch generically and without a non-competitive mode offered as an olive branch to Halo campaigners and Marathon oldheads.

And to that perception, much has been said of the game's capacity, or lack thereof, as satire but I fully echo the sentiments of this issue's earlier contributor Lewis Gordon–this game is not satire but au courant. The through line of the game is capital. This is nothing new for games; formal systems of player economics have been meaningfully explored as far back as multi-user dungeons like Avalon or Gemstone IV. But where developers in the nascent MMO-space like Raph Koster, Brad McQuaid, and Richard Garriott might have wanted to explore player-dictated virtual economics as a way of balancing competition, cooperation, and friction without necessitating direct violence (or perhaps as supplementary to the violence), the extraction shooter genre is born from former Spetznaz operators and developers interested in, to some degree, military "realness." The verbs are limited to those familiar to Battle Royale-styled games and looter-shooters. Friction is pure in its violent competition, its immersive qualities derived from the evasive mechanical "crunchiness" of "gamefeel," simpatico aesthetics, physics, numbers, feedback. Player expression is loadout and costume—there are no verbs available that exist outside of this core extractive loop. While some noise has been made with regards to ARC Raiders' more cooperative and laissez-faire approach to player engagement, it is the exception, not the rule—Marathon nearly released without proximity VoIP between parties, and the excellent and comparatively arcade Hunt: Showdown has always been honest about its violence. How, then, does Marathon distinguish itself? Not with increased verbs, options, or expressiveness, but through intent.

So much of this intent is expressed in the manner of not just Destiny's codices, an obvious and apt point of comparison given it was Bungie's last foray into the games-as-a-service space, but to the original Marathon, with its darkly comic and often grand narrative ambitions restrained to text-based terminals found through the levels. Headlining "priority contracts" often pay out their juiciest rewards in sizable portions of prose. Backchannel dealings between Traxus and the UESC make clear not just the degree to which their conflict exists wholly as economic negotiation, but the degree to which they exert their influence into unaligned, anarchist factions like MIDA through plants and patsies. Grim short stories of factory line workers producing increasingly nutritionally diffuse and industrially compromised liquid-cheeseburgers. And strange, sometimes haunting monologues of dying colonists and the unmoored egotism of AI await as rewards for good extractions, being the better runner. Progression is tied to competition. Progress belongs to the survivors. And Tau Ceti IV itself exists much in the way the special economic zones of Shenzhen, Shannon, or the failed Próspera ZEDE, existing outside of traditional governance, instead as exceptional areas of deregulated and (at one point) "depoliticized" commerce. Progress belongs to the bold, the pioneers, the company men beyond regulation and red tape, now, the dead.

Marathon's delivery of this intent is not limited to its presented narrative, but exists top-down in its design goals, its status as a game-as-a-service. To participate in ranked play or the endgame raid, Cryo Archives, requires a minimum "gear ante," a buy-in from your inventory of exfiltrated or bartered arms. This ante system, first unveiled in patch notes from lead designer Joe Ziegler, is the game in microcosm. All systems feed into your worth, and your worth becomes your stake in future success. As Friedman put it (referring to what he called the “laboratory experiment” reduction of governmental oversight in Hong Kong), when people fail, they know “they bear the cost.” Your acquisitions, collected among randomly distributed items in maps, define your build, and your build can just as easily become another runner's. Roguelike mechanics brought to player-versus-player economics. Successful runs feed the ante, raising your net worth, calculating loss and risk for you. The driving motivators for each run: risk assessment, stress-testing, and appetite-whetting.

In pursuit, you run the numbers. What's a good engagement? Is the silk off their back worth the potential loss of this rare item, another chapter in the narrative? Do I exfiltrate with a contract incomplete to preserve this purple mod on my rifle? Do I go back for my team and risk the haul? If this game were in the Armored Core mold, where costs incurred repairing damaged and destroyed mechs eat at your in game currency, these losses might be even more oppressive. Imagine the debt accrued by players if the implied cost of new shells was truly deducted from your account. Even with that bit of mechanical grace, the bottom line is the bottom line. You make and remake these calculations moment to moment. Marathon looks at the ills of today and instead of providing flaccid critique asks you to indulge in play of it, asks if you feel lucky yet. Maybe today you're the shark. Maybe today is payday. An honest game in the age of Kalshi and Polymarket.

All the more grimly ironic, then, that the response to Marathon’s debut has been defined by voyeuristic data crunching with prediction market-inflected schadenfreude. I suppose it invites the speculation. While subsequent patching and balancing done in the game’s live-service model have softened some of its competitive edge, Marathon is still the most directly confrontational in the genre, and while Sony and Bungie have expressed their desire to support the game longer-term, the future of the game belongs to corporate whims.

Still, there is a galvanic quality to this game to those who have witnessed its electrical currents; something about this game, its own speculative mirror show, the sharpness of its science fiction, its basest Darwinian qualities, is resonating. It has beaten the “Concord 3” allegations with its beautiful, strange, repulsive sandbox where success is measured solely in net worth and acquisition. Any so-called law in your way falls to a golden mod on your M77. It's a libertarian wet dream turned festering, hazy nightmare. The bones of old capital picked at by the vultures of new capital. Ticks festering in sleek industrial bone yards, crawling amongst the refuse; metal skeletons patrolling graveyards for reasons beyond your pay grade. You will do this ad nauseum. You will get better, but little changes for the run. Little changes in the world, too. Most modern and future evils are old evils in sleeker packaging. What is Tau Ceti but the stars done up in the Hong Kong method?

///

+ Please forgive how scuffed this video is, and the strange producer tag type clip at the front.

***

Charlotte Lindsay is a writer and critic. Her work has previously been found on The Imaginary Engine Review, and she used to blog via Medium. She’s looking for a new home online for her writing.

why gun games, after all this time [or] player vs. player vs. environment

Pao Yumol — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

it's the shimmer in the clouds as the bullet sails across the pallid gunmetal sky ... the stillness dissolving in the mist, the wind making way for the lead ... it's that sound in the air even before the glass shatters behind me ... that instant before the whole room feels different ... like a rave in the underpass, seconds before it's engulfed by the floodlights of a police van ... and there ... it's that tremor in the earth, crawling across the grassy plain ... beneath the copse of sullen trees, the furtive muttering of their branches ... that creaking in the walls lining the relay station, setting everything into motion before i can even see it—

i'm suddenly hit for what seems like a lot of damage.

"ope, okay," rabbit says. "let's get the fuck out of here." she shoots the window across from us with her assault rifle and vaults through it. right out into the open, into the silver expanse—into whatever terrifying world delivered this warning shot to us.

i'm already following her. i don't even think to heal.

as we dash across the platform and jump over the edge of the relay station, bullets at our heels, i get a brief glimpse of our surroundings. ahead of us: fog draped over a scraggly ravine, a flock of red-beaked birds perched on a wrinkle of bedrock. behind us: south relay, a decrepit mess of industrial buildings dressed in unnatural hues—hot orange, neon yellow-green, the sterile blue of a chlorine-rich swimming pool. then the relay tower itself, studded with weather balloons and bent in a tortured pose, failing to touch the sky.

this is only my second round of marathon, and the world of tau ceti iv is still so alien to me. what i know is that we're runners sent to retrieve salvage from an alien planet, its surface blistered by failed attempts at human colonization. to traverse tau ceti, we rent out "shells"—cybernetic surrogates for our unmoored minds—and sculpt them into vessels for the desires of conniving megacorporations. earth's governing body, the UESC, has deployed squads of militant androids to safeguard the ruins, as well as the corporate secrets lurking within. we are given endless lives to expend in order to fulfill our contracts; upon death, our consciousness is transferred to a new shell.

i also know that we're deployed in an area called "perimeter." within twenty-five minutes, we must burgle the grave of a dead space colony, avoid getting murdered by robocops or other runners, and exfiltrate at one of a few designated stations. if we die, we lose everything—everything we've gained, and everything we've brought. well, everything tangible, anyway.

"you run faster with your knife out," she says.

i'm already several paces behind her. she doesn't even need to turn back to confirm it.

"oh, right, thanks."

by now i've learned that many of marathon's inner workings, from foundational mechanics to narrative throughlines, are left obscure. so when it comes to the basic conditions for survival, i've given rabbit the tacit permission to treat me as if i was literally born yesterday. any sliver of information is valuable brain food to a marathon baby like me.

at first, perimeter feels familiar. the grass is green and the sky is blue. then the uncanniness starts to settle into the edges of your view: an unusual volume of yellow fungus, for example. cryptic drawings scrawled onto the walls of an air duct. strange sounds from the loudspeaker. the machines bark like animals. sometimes it feels like there's something else hidden in the wind. the rain patters indifferently on the remains of felled runners, coating the soil with scattershot nebulae of blue blood.

even still, i can't help but think perimeter feels oddly earth-like sometimes. when the fog rolls in over the grass, the sight reminds me of san francisco, the city where rabbit and i grew up—our childhood spent walking on ocean beach, the mist spilling over the cliffside, lounging in the cavernous bowels of the ruined bathhouses.

"uh," she says. at some point we stopped sprinting and are now crouch-walking, which means we must be nearby something dangerous. it seems she has another lesson for me.

"yes?"

"you've got a thing about bugs, right? how bad is it again?"

"wait, wh—AUGH!" an insect the size of a basketball shrieks before bursting into viscera in my face.

i've known rabbit for over twenty years. we grew up as boys playing halo—namely, the first four mainline entries, which were all developed by bungie. this might be why marathon, bungie's latest game, has got me feeling so sentimental.

so i'm flattered she remembers my thing about bugs. i tell her she has to clear them all while i hide in the adjacent chamber.

after the last of their nests are destroyed, we continue making our way towards the nearby exfil station. rabbit explains that we should prepare to encounter another team of runners. her shell is equipped with the ability to turn invisible, so the plan is for her to activate the exfil station while i keep my distance. once she does that, we have to wait for a little while, and then she'll give me the go-ahead. a circle of light will appear on the ground, and after someone steps in it, a ten-second countdown will begin before it dematerializes, along with anyone who made it into the circle.

i absorb maybe half of this as we creep up the hillside leading to exfil. i can already hear gunshots from up ahead. we glue ourselves to a wall nearby.

"fuck, it's like you're red," i say. "from roadside. and i'm ... fuck, what was his name? the naive kind of lennie-from-of mice and men guy."

"the kid?" she asks. "at the end?"

"no, the russian guy at the beginning. the one with a pure soul who ends up dying. well, i guess both these guys end up dying. also hold on, you thought i was the son at the end? doesn't red, like, fuck that guy's sister?"

earlier in our run, i'd mentioned that tau ceti reminds me of the zone—the setting of the 1972 novel roadside picnic and its loose 1979 film adaptation, stalker—and she responded as though the analogy were a given. i know, it's fun. it's, like, bungie doing zone fiction.

the zone: a pocket of the earth that's been unsettled by some alien or supernatural presence, loosening the binds that keep reality tethered together. a mysterious realm that maims any visitor who fails to acclimate to its convolutions in physics and logic, filling their minds with devastating epiphanies and abject terror. a neglected petri dish. a carnival of rot. a place that makes all of humanity feel like a bug smashed on the windshield of an unfathomably massive spacecraft.

yet it's also a vast possibility space, a lush wilderness, a "magic circle" that enables play and experimentation. it attracts ravenous dumpster-divers, hopeless romantics, grief-stricken wanderers—people driven by desperation and monomania.

echoes of roadside picnic, stalker, and the zone are palpable across a wide range of modern games: death stranding, control, nier: automata, lethal company, fallout. but even in these early days in marathon, there's something about it that feels especially compelling as an expression of these themes. rabbit can feel it, too.

i've only just begun to see the zone in everything, whether cyberspace or meatspace, but rabbit's been tracking this stuff for so long that she has a term for it: zone fiction. as usual, i find that she's already a few paces ahead of me.

in fact, right now, she's literally several paces deep into the exfil zone, shrouded in smoke, before i can even understand what's happening.

"um," she says. "so, i'd really like to return with this loot i picked up."

"yes?" i say, confused. "and?" i’d assumed that kind of thing went without saying—that we'd probably prefer exfiltration over death.

"so i kind of—well, the circle basically closes in, like, seven seconds, so—sorry."

"wait," i say, still trying to recalibrate. "oh my god. you actually did it. you fucking red-from-roadside picnic'd me." she’s gone when the smoke clears.

frankly, i'm shocked—not due to any personal offense, but because there is still apparently something new to learn about rabbit, even after all this time. she watches over spectator cam as i perish a few minutes later.

it'd be easy to write this off as an example of the antisocial behavior intrinsic to marathon's competitive structure. a less generous version of me might read this as a stark moment of ludonarrative harmony. wow, this me might think, marathon is so brutal it can dissolve a twenty-plus-year friendship within the ten seconds it takes for an exfil station to dematerialize.

but we've been playing gun games together for forever, and if i took everything that occurred within them personally, i doubt that our friendship would have lasted. besides, it's likely that being able to play marathon together at all means more to me than she realizes.

so instead of getting mad, i make a silent vow to surpass her.

///

it's that spasm in the tapestry of reeds lining the horizon ... the trigger quivering at your fingertip ... it's the tender glow of lightning before thunder ... the shadow moving underneath the threshold of the door ... the red dot of the rangefinder tracing your cheek—

the bullet barely misses me. i panic. i'd thought i was appropriately camouflaged—a momentary glimmer amongst the marsh's shimmering mosaic of ferns and lily pads. i’d thought at least the fog might buy me peace. but the panic itself i don't mind.

runners who participate in IRL ultramarathons reportedly experience hallucinations. sleep deprivation populates the racetrack with distortions in reality that range from the absurd to the violent.

runners in the game marathon experience hallucinations, as well. earlier during this run in dire marsh—a wetland zone hosting some of the colony's agricultural research facilities—i'd been assaulted by a torrent of ghostly, machine-like yet upsettingly human sounds while scouting out the basement of a vacant data facility. rabbit later informs me about "digital psychosis," a term bungie's sound designers use to describe an area's density of atonal, unpredictable acousmata.

here, in tau ceti, panic is perhaps the most productive component of fear. it forces you to act before your imagination can fill in too many of the gaps, feeding the dark void of the unknown with dangerous possibility.

i scramble to retrieve my sniper rifle from my backpack. before i peer through its scope, i try to focus all of my attention on the horizon formed by the row of treetops and greenhouses that underlines the sky. it's broken, for a split-second, by something human on the rooftop just east of me. i aim down the scope, fire once, and break their shields. the response—a headshot, delivered like a punchline written in lead—downs me in an instant.

i opt to expire early instead of bleeding out in the grass. i want to avoid the humiliation of being executed from a distance—or worse, the intimacy of a "finisher," in which the enemy straddles your chest and draws close before sliding their knife into your neck. i'm playing solo, so no one is available to revive me.

after rabbit's betrayal, i'd settled on two things other than my resolve to surpass her. firstly, i'd only learn about marathon—its mechanics, its lore—from the observations of my crewmates, avoiding any supplemental material. i also decided to spend a considerable amount of time playing alone in order to become more self-sufficient. i wondered if, one day, i might invert the stalker / rube dynamic we'd exhibited during our first run together.

through these solo runs, i learn how to bend time. i learn that being a good runner means experiencing everything a fraction of a second before anyone else. it means tapping into the schizophrenic logic you'd normally want to keep at bay, entertaining every doubt and delusion that sidles through the backdoor of your head. in order to fully inhabit tau ceti, you need to reciprocate: you have to let it inhabit you. you have to grant it easy access to your amygdala, the permission to stimulate fear before the violence has a chance to take place.

recklessly indulgent pattern recognition. frolicking through meadows of noise. harmony in a broken world. stalker shit.

even in the absence of runners, marathon's maps are convincing facsimiles of living environments. the sounds of the marsh make up a dense canopy of audio cues and ambience, from the furtive rustling of the reeds to the dutiful whirring of the sentry drones patrolling the sky.

but the enemy lives within fractures in normalcy. they do things the robots wouldn't do. they react to things like fear, shock, and bloodlust. they're just like you.

so first you calibrate for a tenuous, zone-specific stillness. you level out the gurgle of the marsh, the bitter grunting of the clankers, the squeal of a tick as it needlessly obliterates itself against a steel divider—and then you listen for fluctuations in the silence. you learn to identify the irregular rhythms that indicate life. a clanker can open a door, but it doesn't have the instinct to close it behind them immediately. nor does it produce inconsistent footsteps. glass, water, turf—all you have to do is listen for the sounds of tau ceti recoiling at our touch.

rabbit's definition of zone fiction includes works associated with the "new weird"—jeff vandermeer's southern reach series, m. john harrison's kefahuchi tract trilogy, china miéville's the last days of new paris—as well as stories by j. g. ballard, jorge luis borges, and philip k. dick.

she observes that characters in zone fiction are forced to confront the physical and spiritual limitations of their humanity. as they stumble through strange meadows and impossible alleyways, the ghosts of the zone emerge to haunt them. reason buckles under the weight of nature, which remains indifferent and inert in its colonization of the once-familiar. marathon explores similar themes, rabbit explains, but with a focus on post-humans—runners shackled to digital immortality, AI corrupted by loneliness and resentment.

dire marsh, like all of tau ceti, festers with signs of overgrowth and disruption. glaring from its center is what the dead colonists dubbed "the anomaly," a reality-warping miasma that leaks from weeping lacerations across the surface of the planet. some salvageable records posit the theory that it's a living organism with underground roots that resemble a mycelial network; others suggest the anomaly is responsible for the fungal contagion that overtook the colony, corrupting the inner workings of both AI and humans alike. the sense of digital psychosis is particularly strong when standing next to the edge of the anomaly itself, admiring the tableau of destruction trapped in its glow, the wreckage frozen in mid-air by geysers of twisted time.

like stalker's titular figure—or control's jesse faden, or annihilation's nameless biologist, or "the willows'" gregarious swede—you eventually acquiesce to the zone's insistence on a convoluted dream logic. the strange becomes familiar. the paranoia heightens your senses; the digital psychosis becomes room noise. as you fade into the marsh, you learn how to become less human.

the revelation that the anomaly may act like a mycelial network, emerging from the ground itself, alludes to another question commonly posed by zone fiction narratives, challenging human-centered myopia: how would an alien environment treat humans if they were an invasive species? how would ghosts feel about the burglars who have come to rob their graves?

thermal scopes obliviate the earthliness in dire marsh, submerging the scenery in radioactive violets and blues. somehow, while peering down the scope, tau ceti seems even more alien than before, flattened into a crisp bitonal plane. but humans, carrying bright and entropic heat, burn holes into the ultraviolet forest. your mind, seeking order, urges you to rid them from your sight.

///

it's in the false birdsong freckling the wind to the east ... the curl of feedback seeping from the loudspeaker ... the hot blush of chaos in the corner of your viewfinder ... it's the specter of a drum tucked into the gaussian curve of a reverb trail ... it's the sound of the electromagnetic radiation from her microphone, sizzling in your ear ... the jittering frequency that follows you from call to call—

cascades of fiery debris rain over the surface of outpost, marathon’s third map, at regular intervals, resembling something like a natural weather condition; you later learn that it's actually the result of a malfunctioning “cloud seeding” system, damned to a humiliating eternity of hellfire. the artificial twisted in an imperfect mimicry of the natural.

sometimes, the continuous night makes the map feel like a house in a horror film. flashes of lightning illuminate the remains of a smashed window—a brief bit of environmental storytelling that confirms we're not alone.

i'm crouched in a corner with a knife. the footsteps get louder—they're running. they're probably prepared to face someone. but are they prepared to face me, right now, as i lunge from around the corner—

"fuck!" the knife downs them in one go. it's a rook—the detritivore in marathon's player food chain. i always feel a pang of sympathy when i put one down, though the sensation numbs with time. i finish them. "got 'em. rook, so it's probably just one."

"nice," sparrow says, relief in her voice.

these days, i'm frequently in crews with sparrow, someone rabbit met on the internet. rabbit has started gathering marathon players—mostly other weird gun girls like us—in a discord server.

as the most experienced runner i know, sparrow has a lot of wisdom to offer. she's often the voice of reason on our runs, advocating for patience and concrete decision-making. she respectfully warns me and our crewmates not to be generous with one another, an honesty i find oddly liberating as someone who’s used to asking for permission any time i want to pick up something valuable.

she mostly plays as a thief, which synergizes well with my toolkit as an assassin; we both favor silent entrances and sudden escapes. i also discover that she's a fan of otherside picnic, which is promising. we develop some chemistry as crewmates over the course of a few runs.

part of it is that we share a similar zone logic. we agree that, essentially, once you've run all the "prisoner's dilemma" simulations and applied your ethics to all the math, the most effective modus operandi is always to react rather than act. information is, above all, the most valuable resource in marathon. when colliding with another player, giving any detail away— your location, your loadout, the tone of your voice—is putting yourself at a disadvantage.

"if they present friendly, then i'll be friendly," sparrow says.

"but i'd still prefer it if they walked ahead of me on the way to exfil," i say.

"one hundred percent."

you develop a dialect. every crew probably has one. the random generation of map elements causes you to speak in prophecies and probabilities. you learn how to synthesize a dozen deaths into a single insight; you say, as if in a trance, "sometimes there's a medical cabinet here." the UESC are “bots,” “clankers,” “AI.” some shorthand terms— e.g. "smoking" instead of "throwing a smoke grenade"—are so common across gun games as to be intuitive. others are accidental; shortly after i start referring to certain UESC transport drones as "juicy galaga UFOs," rabbit does the same, and we never think to reinterrogate it.

it only strikes me partway through a duo session with sparrow that this is the first time i've ever played a game alone with someone i met over the internet—who i met within the game we're playing, no less.

truthfully, i wouldn't be playing this if not for rabbit. most of the hours we've spent shooting each other in a videogame belong to halo 3 and halo reach, which we would exclusively play split-screen with one or two other boys while sitting cross-legged in a bedroom twelve blocks from my house. this was the basis of my understanding of the gun game as a private world, ripe for experimentation and self-expression. sometimes we'd just dick around in the level editor and spend hours treating our half-assed maps as mario kart tracks.

but gun games have changed a lot in the intervening years. arma and dayz inspired shooters with higher stakes—minimal HUDs, scarce resources, bullets that kill you like they would in real life. battlefields expanded into open worlds large enough to host a hundred players. matches obtained a telescopic structure, collapsing agoraphobic expanses into tight labyrinths of corridors. elsewhere, fever dreams of doom stirred a dormant need for speed. crouch-slides and wall-jumps made levels feel like butter. hero shooters emerged, introducing gun games to one of the most unfortunate exports from the MOBA genre: an impulse towards intra-team toxicity. the sepia-toned, tacticool aesthetics of the xbox 360 generation cursed some players with a fixation on military realism. basically, the humble deathmatch had lost its appeal.

then everything was thrown into the melting pot. gacha games quietly colonized a lobe of the internet's hivemind. the internet grew gaudy with the aesthetics and mechanics of gambling. roguelike designers, in pursuit of more efficient dopamine dispensers, adopted the visual language of the casino. with the house breathing down the back of your neck, going all in becomes the only logical move.

meanwhile, at some point when we weren't looking, garry's mod birthed the backrooms. traces of zone fiction are everywhere you look: oddities amongst mundanity, haunted ruins, slow-burn body horror. SCPs and creepypastas persist as mythmaking engines, elevating terms like "anomaly" and "entity" into the public consciousness via roblox games and webshows blanketed in layers upon layers of CRT scanline filters.

thus, the extraction shooter was born. a complex hybridization of systems that borrows from both the deathmatch and single-player survival. the very title of escape from tarkov made the genre's roots in zone fiction clear; the game’s tense atmosphere and punishing mechanics directly recalled the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of survival games. as tarkov matured, capitalizing on a belated ascent to twitch's front page in 2020, so too did the extraction shooter, evolving to encompass both dark and darker and arc raiders. the "player versus player versus environment" format produces unique frictions, enabling complex emergent dynamics. it's tailor-made for a playerbase turned jaded by two decades of gun game antisocializing. the more afraid you are of your enemy, the more real and alive they feel, even as some vague impression in the implacable darkness.

throughout these outgrowths and transformations, i mostly abstained from playing gun games online. i didn't have skin thick enough to withstand any game that forced me to verbally interact with strangers. most of the other weird gun girls i meet through marathon tell me they’ve had similar experiences.

a part of halo's success stemmed from the advent of xbox live and online multiplayer. though it was hardly a surprise, every lobby was full of boys, some of whom would fill the room with their dark and fickle interiorities. listening to them argue was disturbing and depressing. i missed the sense of shared presence characteristic of split-screen multiplayer, as well as the opportunity to build upon your understanding of a consistent opponent—the blind spots and giveaways that your friends aren't aware of themselves. but online lobbies seemed too bleak to ever foster that between strangers. online matchmaking, paced like speed dating, created little incentive to truly get to know your enemy. then 2014 arrived, and everything got even worse.

i sometimes get glimpses of this sad, pale world rabbit and i left behind when filling crews of strangers. boys being boys. eventually i stop playing with strangers. rabbit's the only other runner i know who's still willing to do that, though i essentially start forcing her to turn crew fill off when it's just the two of us.

by now, i've well surpassed rabbit's rank. this isn't a function of my skill level or anything; it's simply that i'm depressed and underemployed while she's depressed and getting a doctorate in molecular biology. meanwhile, i got a bachelor's in creative writing (against pretty much everyone's judgment) and haven't been back to school since.

i can't help but think that this must inform the difference in our relationship to zone fiction. rather than vandermeer and harrison, i entered tau ceti with a greater awareness of the zone's influence over lesbian comics and yuri (“girls’ love”) manga: e.g., tsukumizu's shimeji simulation, freya jn's dead horses, and iori miyazawa's otherside picnic (which, incidentally, rabbit introduced to me, though she hasn't read it herself). in these stories, the miasma that separates the zone from the rest of the world is laced with pure, unadulterated girls' love. a sensual language of silence, distance, and semi-automatic rifles.

during pauses in the action, i want to ask sparrow about otherside picnic. i've told her half of the truth, which is that "otherside picnic saved my life." but we aren't close yet, so i've avoided telling her the whole truth—"last year, i sort of lost my mind, and then otherside picnic saved my life"—out of fear of appearing like i'm trauma-dumping. i'd like to think i'm learning from past mistakes, even outside of tau ceti.

so instead, one night, as we stare at the loading screen, i volunteer: "how far did you get into otherside picnic?"

"oh, it's been a while since i've last checked in on it," she says. "i think the manga had basically just gotten to the yuri."

"well, wait," i say. "i think i know roughly which moment you're talking about. but also, i mean, to be fair, the yuri is very much present the whole time."

"listen," sparrow says. "i've read the fucking interview, okay? i know the yuri's there. but you get what i'm trying to say."

then we load in and instinctively survey the map, cutting the conversation short. "so, bio-research arms lockers first?" i ask. i tell myself i'll just ask her the rest later.

the subject of the interview in question is iori miyazawa, otherside picnic's author. the interview (technically a two-parter held across two sessions in 2018, one at a science fiction seminar and one at a talk about heisei-era yuri) is arguably required reading for any self-respecting himejoshi. the interview made such an impact that fans immediately produced amateur translations for non-japanese readers. when i first read it, i was struck by miyazawa's clarity—not just about the state of yuri fandom, nor the genre's literary virtues, but about what it means to be alive.

in the interview, miyazawa details an emergent form that he calls "yuri of absence," which he describes as the idea that "emotional scenery is already yuri." this exchange goes into detail:

interviewer: so it's like the cover of chapter 9 of otherside picnic, where the two girls ride on a farming vehicle, and a boundless meadow is around them ... you're saying this is yuri.

miyazawa: yes. now remove both girls from this scenery.

interviewer: right.

miyazawa: a rusty, decaying vehicle is resting on top of wheel tracks.

interviewer: right.

miyazawa: then you imagine that one day two girls were there ... isn't that already totally yuri?

he observes that science fiction tends to put "image" first—scenery, world-building—while writing yuri demands a focus on its characters' interiorities and relationships. in the interview's most notorious passage, he says: "you could say that 'yuri made me human.'"

the concept of a "yuri of absence" is innately hauntological. it gives shape to the negative space in which womanhood flourishes, in which girls can use the bones of broken systems to flirt with alternate realities and invent new ways of being. it honors the strange and subaltern avenues through which girls are forced to express their feelings for one another, from sisterly love to erotic desire. in dead horses, discerning the location of the zone's wish-fulfilling house requires forming a window with your fingers, peering through it, and intuiting an "absence" in the air. absence is the true shape of girls' love; there will always be new ways to capture and experience it.

while crossing the swamp with sparrow, it occurs to me that marathon is rich with absence. through curtains of fog and silence, it enforces a deliberate pacing that requires runners to truly listen to one another.

i can relate to rabbit's interest in marathon's greater world-building project, as well as its attempts to probe the further reaches of zone fiction's themes. but while watching stalker, i'm less intrigued by the zone's metaphysical logic as i am by whatever's going on in the stalker's head during his first few minutes in the zone: that scene when, moments after warning his compatriots about the unseen terrors mottled across the plain, he dives into a private patch of tall grass, accepting the zone into his lungs with each deep breath.

there's something inherently romantic to the moments of contact between a stalker and their zone. i consider romance a capacity for imaginative thinking, a forgiveness for embellished recollection, qualities that allow people to create meaning out of nothing.

marathon excels at cultivating the lonely, haunted atmosphere that allows such longing to blossom, as both a social experience and as a vehicle for a non-linear narrative. the collectible audio log is one of the most time-worn devices for delivering plot in videogames, but it obtains a different gravity in marathon, where lore-related salvage comes at the cost of precious inventory space.

this salvage preserves the calcified stories of the dead colonists, who are given a chance to speak via snippets of stolen documents and recordings. some describe the cruel irony of enlightenment giving way to madness as researchers confront the essence of their findings: that humanity is truly infinitesimal in the sea of the cosmos, rummaging through the remains of technologies it couldn't possibly understand, let alone conceive. "what are we in comparison to everything we do not know?" one scientist says in both fear and awe. before them is the sample of an alien species so complex in its construction that they describe it as approaching divinity.

yet you also find, stowed in locked containers and bodybags, diary entries recited with begrudging honesty; lively conversations between AI during the pubescent stages of their actualization; poetry written on the verge of complete insanity; and, most of all, people desperately clinging to their humanity as they brace themselves against the violent tides of cosmic nature.

this romance is what allows the doomed colonists to strive for a sense of purpose and belonging even as tau ceti's terrors descend upon them. the naive courage required to extract a manifesto from the crude sea of abandoned data and wholeheartedly claim it as your own. the righteous clarity of purpose a person needs to declare this during her final moments, to the fungal growths invading her body: "you can colonize my blood and liquefy my bones, but i figured you out."

it's the thing that plants the goosebumps on your arm when confronting the image of an empty tractor in a vast meadow. the feeling that drives me to find connection in gun games, even as they're haunted by the ghost of an old, discarded life.

so is there yuri in marathon? certainly, there's yuri (as rabbit suggests) in the sight of two shells scissoring during their final moments, bleeding out, on the brink of dematerialization. but it isn't just that.

it's the flicker of silence between two shotgun blasts ... the gap between the streetlights passing your window ...

///

it's the moment of vertigo before you bail out on the grass ... the way the earth breathes as you come to your senses, face in the soil ... the power lines coiling around the telephone poles like sinew and bone ... it's during that last minute of shotty snipers on sword base ... the way the room shakes before she even trains her sights on me ... exposed on the meadow of green within the viewfinder—

one headshot and they're down.

purple shield, vandal with the premium pass skin, crewing with a couple of players in cryo skins. one with a gold shield. the kind of crew that might gank you in pinwheel and say something fucked up over prox chat as they execute you.

i'm pretty sure they're going to be all right after this. so i don't feel bad about landing the next headshot as they self-revive. i'm going to die in less than thirty seconds, anyway. it's final exfil in outpost, and i'm over a hundred meters away. i have no ambitions to exfil myself. this makeshift sniper's perch will be my grave.

if marathon offers anything to say about the human condition, i don't think it's to be found in the cutthroat attitude players adopt with one another, which is at the very least the result of a negotiation between a player's ethics and the flow of the game's violence. yet i feel like i've grown to understand people more by playing it.

otherside picnic is prescient in its imagination of the zone as continuous with both the internet and the collective unconscious. its heroines face shapeshifting, reality-distorting entities who resemble deeply held sources of fear, drawing both from personal memories and from an esoteric pool of urban legends. in the otherside, spirits from shinto mythology mingle with cryptids from 2channel creepypasta threads, hoping to stir the primordial sensations of fear that connect human beings from across generations.

the internet is old enough that lurking through it, combing through its vast fields of information, is the closest thing the average person has to embodying a stalker in the zone. the zone could be a comment section, a discord server, a gun game—whatever form it takes, it's certain to be built atop the ruins of something else. so, too, does it instill a paranoia and suspicion of others in its residents, accelerating the atomization of our zone-bound enclaves. no platform seems safe from bloat and decay.

as the subaltern parts of the internet creep into the edges of our reality—the ongoing permeation of incel terminology ("-pilled," "-maxxed," memes about cortisol levels) throughout the mainstream, the rise of roblox as an incubator for arcane microdialects at the expense of child labor—it's almost as if the zone has learned how to escape the confines of fiction. a stable, legible way of accessing it feels like a dire necessity.

this is why i couldn't possibly be mad at rabbit for something like exfilling without me during my first-ever game with another human being, despite vaguely suggesting during an earlier conversation that she would give me some kind of cue that, if heeded, would result in us both making it out of tau ceti alive.

at this point, being the red in a red / rube dynamic with rabbit is common. it's been several runs since i made good on my vow. meanwhile, i've been meeting more people online through rabbit—other weird girls who think about some of the same weird things we do. all of it is still so new to me.

the truth is that rabbit has been inviting me to spend time with her like this, on the internet, for years, but i was always too insecure to participate. cool girls are intimidating, even when they're nice. when rabbit reached out this time, though, i wanted to be present. otherside picnic had just saved my life—i was so broken and lost, and reading it helped me realize i was traumatized, and that girls' love really does make life worth living—and i wanted badly to talk to rabbit about it. she introduced it to me, after all. she was also the first person in my life to come out to me as a woman; i followed suit a few years later.

when we were teenagers, rabbit used to invite me on when we were teenagers, rabbit used to invite me on "wanders" that charted unconventional routes across the bay, taking advantage of its varied network of pedestrian footpaths. the routes were organized by the bay area-based wanderer’s union, and they ranged from two hours to twenty-four hours in length. rabbit would invite everyone she knew; every time i showed up to a wander i'd be greeted by a different mix of familiar and unfamiliar faces.

wandering revealed the hidden grooves embedded in the surface of the bay. we allowed ourselves to be carried like flotsam to the edges of the city—beaches, railroad tracks, fenced-off lots overtaken by weeds. we floated like specters through the mist. most of the time, we'd talk, but sometimes we'd walk in silence.

spending time in marathon reminds me of those days. we wander through tau ceti and turn its wreckage into urbex playgrounds. we find the routes that seem less frequently trafficked and begin to build memories atop them. we get to know one another under the cover of a smoke grenade, through bleak morse codes of gunfire and footsteps. the further we wander into marathon, the more distant i feel from the part of the world that cannot understand me. only rabbit would really get what i mean when i try to make the clumsy case that miranda july's the first bad man is both toxic yuri and zone fiction.

early in the novel, annihilation's narrator pinpoints the moment she experiences "estrangement"—both from the original purpose of her assigned mission, and from the other members of her team. i have a similar, though duller epiphany as the alarm goes off and the circle of light appears around the exfil station. i don't have anything particularly valuable on me, so i don't care if i die out here. i just want the experience.

but that’s exactly it. i'm not here for the loot anymore. the integers have become large enough to feel arbitrary, though they were arguably arbitrary from the start. if salvage is meaningless to me, why do i continue to spend time here?

why do runners run? why gun games, after all this time? why do we return to the edge of our unfeeling and immutable trauma? i think of the skaters in the sunset district who'd ride down our street—one long slope towards ocean beach, beckoning you straight to the water—and bail out on the grass by the bus stop, just before the busy intersection, watching their skateboards wander into the maw of the ocean, agape and waiting.

***

Pao Yumol writes about games, music, the internet, yuri manga, and being a degenerate. She publishes personal writing and tablature to her blog, goosepimple.moe. Mostly on Bluesky but still lurking on Twitter. She thanks you for taking the time to read her work.

Older Than Empires, As Deep As Death

Grace Benfell — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In Marathon's marketing materials, there is a key concession made to comprehensibility. Through the deaths and reincarnations depicted, each of the characters stay in the same basic shell. Sometimes they wear different clothes or have different mannerisms, but they bear the same face. This is not how it works when playing Marathon. There is a self outside of body, a consciousness which can hop from shell to shell, regardless of that shell's appearance or even its personality. Every shell is a woven layer which hides the soul beneath. The consciousness remains; the body changes.

But it can only change in proscribed ways. The shells represent various gender presentations and races, but they are maps of absent territory. The Runner comes from nowhere. Each shell is a mean, the result of decisions from military research and development, from governments and corporations alike. “Armed with functional connectome mapping and neural plastics, the military can make gender tactical,” to quote Isabel Fall’s “Helicopter Story.” Through the game's monetization scheme, players can only customize broad configurations: skins, icons, banners, weapons. They cannot change so much as a Thief's hair color without changing every other part of her.

In other words, the minute details which make up gender here on Earth are of minimal importance in the stars. On Tau Ceti, gender is not so much a question of relation, oppressive or otherwise, but of function. Each shell is a gender of its own, one defined by the rockets in its boots, the cannon in its arm, or the unique sight its eyes grant. Runners might have affinity for the appearance of different shells, would perhaps choose a specific shell to project an image of themselves to others, but for 25 minutes on Tau Ceti IV, all that matters is the game.

Take the Rook. Everyone probably does Rook runs, setting out on solo expeditions to gather upgrade materials or to replenish their stocks after a brutal set of losses. Yet, Rooks act as a class of their own. Other Rooks and teams populating the maps make assumptions about a lone Rook. Rooks tend to be, but are not always, inclined to treat each other as comrades. Teams either see them as vultures or as potential threats, alternating on their posture and their own attitude towards Rooks. If a Rook is quiet, players can assume they are up to something. But if they speak, their position is revealed and unseen actors, or even the Runners they are trusting right now, can turn that against them.

So, players have made a language for communicating harmlessness. Crouching up and down, which in Halo was a sign of dominance and humiliation, is the signal of friendship. The name "teabagging" implies a certain body on both sides, one which would be humiliated to have another soldier push their balls onto its corpse. But this Rookish movement has taken on the character of cutesy affectation. The Rook is also the most robotic, the most genderless of any of the shells. It has no real face, only a red cross and a turning head. It is at once the most particular of the shells and the one most shaped through interpretation.

But what is true for the Rook is true for any Runner on Tau Ceti. Any encounter with another Runner starts with recognition. If they are close enough, there is the recognition of shell type, but there is something purer, too: The footprint on the sand. You are not alone. There is something like you here. Every human body on Tau Ceti IV is a puppet. Every moment with a Runner is taut with possibility. You are here for the same thing they are. But that doesn't make you allies+.

///

A colony is a place of play. A colony is a place where the normal rules of life are suspended. Within the boundaries of the colony, or the colonial authority, the settler can do things they can't do in the home country. The colony is a site of expression and discovery, one which shapes the colonists as much as the prior inhabitants.

The various locations of Marathon are colonies, or else the tools that enable a colony to function. On Tau Ceti, Runners can rob and kill with impunity. True, they are enemies of a kind of colonial authority, the robotic UESC police force. But Runners cannot be arrested or detained, cannot be killed or silenced for any extended period of time. Furthermore, they do not seek to dethrone the UESC, only to subvert it.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say these places were colonies. Runners are part of ongoing extraction, but they cannot displace people or land. Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and Outpost are organs of a colony's corpse, ever decaying as Runners pluck nutrients from its body like maggots. The closest thing to settlers are the UESC robots, which patrol the ruins' borders. They are peace officers, at once aids and obstacles to imperial extraction.

In premise, Marathon pulls on a kind of horror-tinged science fiction ranging from Alien to Avatar, Dead Space to Blade Runner. The Earth is not enough. Its resources dwindle; its corporations and its huddled masses hunger. The heroes are imperiled workers, the tip of the corporate spear to the stars. Out there, they encounter others who alternately redeem or destroy them.

One of the major ways Marathon differs from those aforementioned works is that all this is a thrill. Sure, every Runner's death ticks an invisible debt which likely surpasses the most monumental profits. Sure, Runners die again and again and again. Sure, they are tasked with unpleasant experiments and suicide missions alike. But isn't that just the thing? What bean counter in the NuCaloric offices or Traxus salesperson can touch the eternal? Who among them can change their body on a whim, can extend it into missile launchers and grappling hooks? Who else can not only witness alien power, but conquer it? A Runner gets to do, gets to be, things that no one else can.

That fact resembles the way Europeans thought of the colonies, in both positive and negative ways. In her book Racism And The Making of Gay Rights, Laurie Marhoefer argues that Magnus Hirschfeld—the sexologist who arguably first articulated the "born this way" logic which animated the movement for gay marriage—was as influenced by empire as anti-imperialism. In a time when even powerful and affluent homosexuals could not be out, the colonies animated debates about the place of homosexuality in society and served as examples of freer, more tolerant spaces. "...many white European queers imagined the colonies as spaces of relative sexual freedom, an empire of queer love, and that, too, depended on the violent power politics of empire." These beliefs shaped art and culture in equal terms as politics.

Take one novel of the "empire of queer love:" Virginia Woolf's Orlando. It is when the titular character is abroad as an ambassador that he becomes a woman. In fact, it is during a kind of anti-colonial revolution. Upon yearning to return to her homeland, after living among travelers (called gipsies by the novel) who teach her some of the values of a free life, she realizes that back home, she'll be just another noblewoman. She laments, "I shall never be able to crack a man over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and run him through the body, or sit among my peers …All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea, and ask my lords how they like it." Stranger fates await Orlando at home of course, but her fear represents something real, both on and off the page.

Marathon is a science-fictional extension of this kind of narrative. The Runner is from an empire, of a kind, but of no nation in particular. Home is nowhere. But there is still the promise that through this sacrifice, through this evacuation of the normal, there is something the Runners gets. Out here. Out here you can be special.

///

So if being a Runner represents a kind of colonizer erotic thrill: What thrills exactly are shells capable of? If they wished, could two shells squirrel away to some private corner of Tau Ceti for a quickie? Do they have sex organs? Or must they get more creative? What the game does make clear is that shells have sensation. Shells bleed. Bots, plants, and enemy Runners can poison or electrocute them. The basic models, manufactured by megacorp Sekiguchi Genetics, are used for a multitude of purposes: dangerous labor, military and corporate espionage, and perhaps sex work. But do those functions extend to the ones used on Tau Ceti itself? If a shell cannot shit, how can it make love? The only things a shell can definitely do are what they are designed to do: rob and kill.

But maybe theft and murder are sex anyway. In the ruins of Tau Ceti, Runners can kill nothing except Tau Ceti's wildlife and the aliens surrounding it. Robots can't die, because they can't live. Any Runner you fight will live forever. At least until the servers shut off. Every death, then, is a little one, an ecstatic experience from which one can, and will, come back.

Part of this is the subtle ways Marathon encourages the euphorias of death. Resuscitation is not erotic. The runner pulls out a little device which does all the healing work itself. There's no breathy kiss or chest compressions here, only ones and zeros. Finishing off another runner, however, is pure sex. The raise of the knife and pushing it down, fast and hard. A hand upraised, begging for release. The sound, at once metallic and reverberating. The shields recharging from the explosion of energy. From this little death, another chance at life.

The presence of Arachne as a faction affirms this reading. They are divorced from the economic and political motivations of the rest of the game's factions. Instead, they want to push forward these deaths and second chances to the brink. Every murderous headshot and finisher boosts a Runner's reputation with Arachne. You have to kill with style.

Every Runner is an other; they are also all the same. This is a truth, an experience, older than empire. From cruising a nightclub to crashing your ship on a foreign shore. You look for another and then you find them. Are you like me? Will you hurt me? Sex and murder share a few things. Curled fingers. Huddled limbs. Clinched fists. Both sex and violence rely on what Charter of Arachne calls "sacred thermodynamics."

///

The Runners’ endless deaths and lives are mirrors of real lives, ones lived on the edge of the imperial blade. Pierre Guyotat's memoir Idiocy is an account of his flight to Paris to try and become a writer, his conscription into the army during the French-Algerian war, his punishments for being a sympathizer of Algerian resistance, and his travel back to France upon the war's end. In one of the memoir's final extended anecdotes, Guyotat and one of his army mates wander past the designated zone of army action. Their hair has grown long from the lack of oversight, but that freedom comes with danger. Guyotat describes, “A sound of gunshots toward the coast, repeated toward the interior; the lower slopes of East Algiers[.] Revenge killings? Interrupted lootings? Belated drills of the young Algerian Army? End of hunting season—prohibited during the war?”

Marathon's four maps model these kinds of tensions, down to hearing far-off gunshots and straining to identify their source. Each of the game's activities—the UESC wardens which guard specific areas of the map, the supply drops which loudly proclaim that loot has arrived—are equal opportunities for working together or killing each other. Rooks tackle them as loose squads, allies and enemies emerge over fights with UESC. Even quiet runs are suffused with the possibility of raised voices, the glint of scopes, sudden recognition turned into raised sights and muzzle flashes. The colony in decay is the factory of these multitude ambiguities.

With that ambiguity of space and sound, comes an ambiguity of self. Guyotat encounters a girl who speaks “French mixed with Arabic,” but he still wonders: “isn’t it me who makes her speak within me?” Her “brother” is perhaps castrated, perhaps a masculine girl. Throughout the book, but particularly in this dreamy section, the sentences lengthen like shadows, faces and objects blur into each other, death and desire curl together like lovers. Wherever the colony, you cannot keep your clean identity there. You become a body, a mere membrane, a barrier between you and the world. Like any wall, it can be broken.

///

In Marathon's introductory cutscene, the AI ONI says, "Assert: You are a runner." The implication is that whatever consciousness has uploaded itself has forgotten what it was. It needs to be reminded. One of ONI's "encouraging" phrases at the start of a match is "Remember who you are, or alternatively, forget." Through these, and other, vectors, Marathon raises the question of whether, in the tumble of infinite reboots, the Runner loses themselves.

When a Runner extracts valuables, what they "keep" is a fragment of text or audio associated with that object. A poem with rationed provisions or a transcript recording of conversations between AI. This is one of the fuzzier bits of Marathon's mechanical metaphors. The relationship between exfiling with a volume of Bernard Strauss' journals and the text the Runner receives is quite clear. But why would a vial of Cryoprotectant give them access to private conversations and spreadsheet alike? Like gunfire on the surface of Tau Ceti IV, these things are echoes, implications, data shared between Runners or handed down from corporate AI, whispers overheard in the silence. Marathon the videogame reduces them to doled-out rewards, but that touch of ill-logic implies a more human reality.

It is also a recognition of minds other than human. At the beginning of The Wretched of the Earth's final chapter "Colonial War and Mental Disorders," Frantz Fanon writes, "In Algeria there is not simply domination but the decision, literally, to occupy nothing else but a territory …Cutting railroads through the bush, draining swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native population are in fact one and the same thing." What Fanon's statement both implies and eludes is that ecological subjugation is also a subjugation of plant and animal. Territory that is also mind.

Over the course of contracts with the NuCaloric corporation, Runners can discover that the virus which murdered the majority of the colonists was thinking. It intended to purge the invaders. One colonist, Clarissa Song, knowing the nature of the infection but still dying from it, speaks aloud a kind of suicide note: "I do know I got off easy. I get to grow here, part of this world that I never understood. I get to dream. What awaits the others is an ancient nightmare. Cold. Lonely. An endless … perishing … cycle. "

Is that not also sex? The mingling of one thing into another. Growing, becoming new, once again reaching into the animal, after all this base humanity++. But, as Song herself indicates, that is an erotics the Runner might never reach. For all the Runners can be, they can only transform in the manufactured ways of Sekiguchi and Traxus. Every reboot is a refusal. A Runner will never belong here. They will never belong anywhere.

Like several contributors to this issue have pointed out, the Runner is a metaphor. It is also a person. Like people, they are defined by sensation, terror, guilt, joy. Like people they die and like people they live. Whatever justifications or needs brought them to Tau Ceti IV, they have not escaped their own humanity, so pernicious even in plastic. Yet even in the loss of memory or the eradication of identity, there is the new thing made. With every reboot, every kill, every death, la vita nuova. In every single run, there is the fact of connection and the fact of loss. These things remain. Sex and death, in other words.

+ MIDA is the only faction that Marathon players interface with which takes a populist, revolutionary posture. Yet,some players have speculated that they are a corporate espionage ploy from Traxus. A few tidbits from the game hint at this, but the most obvious one is that MIDA in no way encourages solidarity amongst runners, only hostility towards the UESC, which every corporation also opposes.

++Sekiguchi Genetics, and its patron AI Nona, occupy a productive role here. Nona is, pretty explicitly, a mother. She is awash with words about how special the Runners are and how she has their best interests at heart. "Each shell is a miracle of biosynth engineering," she coos, "a miracle that you are privileged to embody." Yet, her form is totally alien. She represents motherhood in no human way. Indeed, she describes herself as "like a mother." In the future, there are motherhoods our childish philosophy cannot yet dream of.

***

Grace is a freelance writer based in Chicago. She is the author of Killing Our Gods: Essays On Religion, Christianity, And Video Games. She co-edits the criticism journal The Imaginary Engine Review and co-hosts the survival horror podcast The Safe Room. In her spare time, she writes horror fiction about bad Mormons and organizes with the Freelance Solidarity Project. Her work can be found at The A.V. Club, The Wand Report, Edge Magazine, and on her website.

Task Management

Gareth Damian Martin — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I came into Marathon with the brain of a Destiny player, honed on hundreds of hours of a particular flavour of dopamine spike, where mastering the completion of five simultaneous bounties was the height of satisfaction, rather than lining up the perfect headshot. Where the illuminated maps of the game’s science-fantasy solar system became objects not of arcane study but strategic efficiency. In those hallowed times, isolating the one location where multiple separate-but-interlocking tasks (kill 30 hive acolytes with submachine guns while performing precision solar damage) was the deepest knowledge one could acquire (typically from Reddit).

No doubt this is no longer what Destiny is: Destiny was forever the shifting sands beneath my feet, the new, shiny plate-spinning replacing the old, dusty plate-spinning, the currencies, now worthless, resting in my bottomless (newly expanded) vault, my memory of their worth hazy at best. Destiny, as a game, as a universe, is about accrual, and unsurprisingly the game itself seems doomed to accrue more and more things until its weight will eventually carry it below the surface, towards the abyss, where it will remain for eternity. Bungie have tried to resist this, of course, cutting off whole chunks of Destiny 2 like panicked whalers, balancing the value of the blubber they were removing with their ability to stay afloat, but we know that it is a doomed enterprise. Destiny 2 is almost at the seafloor now, unreachable by all but the most intrepid new players, who, even if when they do reach its lower pressures, find it esoteric and unreadable, like the timeworn etchings of cuneiform dialects on sunken cities.

The point being that Destiny is maximalism disguised beneath a minimalist sheen. More and more it groans, but with elegance, in Swiss type and 1px linework. Weaned on Destiny, I arrived to Marathon disappointed, disgusted even, by the lack of more. Marathon inverts the pattern. It has a maximalist sheen, if there is such a thing, an exhausting busyness to its entire reality. There’s stuff everywhere, but also everything is stuff. It is a reality made entirely of products, taken to some dizzyingly insane conclusions. Is a building a product? A wall? A window? Marathon thinks so, and will brand them as such, like someone with a newly acquired label-maker. You get the sense that each blade of grass, if inspected close enough, might reveal a barcode. And yet … the skin shop is mostly empty (No Kylo Ren, no Geralt of Rivia, no God of War anniversary fur-piece) the maps are few, the currency singular. And, most disgusting of all, you can ONLY COMPLETE ONE MISSION AT A TIME.

It is hard to express, despite my use of all caps, how repulsive this feels to a Destiny player. How cruel. Are you telling me I need to “equip” the “kill ten runners” mission separately to the “get ten kills” mission and “kill ten people with submachine guns” mission, and complete them all on separate runs? I can’t just have all three tucked in my pocket and kill ten runners with my submachine gun. Where is the glee, the joy, the efficiency? Why would I even go to Reddit anymore, knowing that there were no secret techniques to discover, only tired complaints? This was minimalism that could sink the whole enterprise, I thought, just as Destiny’s maximalism would be its downfall. I didn’t get it. But in time, I understood that the problem was Destiny. The problem was Destiny players. The problem was me.

What kind of a story can be told with numbers? Your immediate response to this question is probably confusion or disgust. Stories aren’t made of numbers. They aren’t qualitative—they are quantitative, human, expansive, etc, etc. I am aware of this, but I am also a game designer, and so making stories with numbers is my job. Every kind of story, I am afraid, can be told with numbers. But that doesn’t mean that all the numbers tell a good story. “Kill 30 hive acolytes with submachine guns while performing precision solar damage” doesn't tell a good story. The logic of why a Guardian would even do such a thing is hazardous, if not toxic, to the entire idea that Destiny even has a story. I probably felt that when I first encountered one of these stories, but at the same time I also remember being enamoured by it.

I loved the “Thorn” quest in Destiny, a quest that is a bounty disguised as an inventory item. The item is a Depleted Hand Cannon, one that begs for more murder in its flavour text. It asks you to kill 500 hive enemies. Now this could be a good story; a weird, dead gun that demands you kill 500 of its brethren, that begs for more and more power. But it is also a story best completed by reloading the same checkpoint of a single mission over and over (“We’ve woken the hive!” uttered in Peter Dinklage’s voice is something I will never forget, which is good, because they patched it out of the game). Here is the yin and yang of Destiny. Lovely flavour text and brutal efficiency. Stories and numbers at cross purposes. If you need further convincing, try watching this INCREDIBLE 11-year-old guide to a quest that no longer exists, with systems that no longer work like that, and a wonderful number of unexplained proper nouns. A story so esoteric it almost becomes interesting again with time. Almost. I can’t even imagine what this sounds like to a non-Destiny player.

But I am a Destiny player, for my sins, and 11 years of Destiny was long enough for me to stop noticing—for me to follow the logic enough times that I accepted it as a reality. So when Marathon told me the fundamental rules I had internalised were no longer true, I was upset. I wanted to be efficient, more than I wanted to play a story. I was wrong, and I believe that at some point in those 11 years someone at Bungie realised their mistake just as I did. Because in the Thorn quest there is a story. Go back and play that video above and tell me it isn’t a story, tell me it isn’t entertaining. Not because of the numbers (500 enemies, what a ridiculous choice!) or the quest steps, but because a person played it all. Because Datto “barely even saw Xyor the unwed!” That’s a good story. A story that emerges from the numbers, live and exciting. A story you want to tell someone the next day. Someone at Bungie must have realized that, because Marathon loves that kind of story, it is willing to do anything to make it happen. It is willing to frustrate you, to block you, to halt efficiency, to stymie progress, to ruin the numbers, and their eternal climb upwards, just to tell you a good story. A story where you lose, and you enjoy it.

Let me be specific. Marathon has its fair share of “kill ten runners”, but what it also has are tasks. Go to a specific location. Access a computer. Summon an enemy. Kill the enemy. Take the enemies' things. Get out alive. That’s a task, and you aren’t allowed more than one. You take that task, and that’s your run. The most efficient thing you can do? Complete that one task in your run. No stacking, no plate-spinning. Just get it done. It doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But it isn’t meant to. In story terms, this is the arc. This story will start with you arriving on a map, somewhere random. You might be close to that first location, you might be on the other side of the entire place. The story will continue as you cross the map, access a building, maybe dodge some traps. The story will finish with a rush to the enemy you have summoned, a brief and violent encounter. And then it will conclude with a race to the finish, a run to the door. One hope in your head: get out. OK, that’s an improvement, that sounds interesting. But then there’s this: You are on a map with an undisclosed number of other players. At any point in that story you might encounter them. If you do, you will likely die, unless you see them first. They are all on their own tasks, their own vectors. They are carrying their own weapons, maybe even gaining new ones. They have items, treasures, and secrets. They might even be hunting you, waiting for you at any of the locations on your task list, with the knowledge that you will be on your way shortly. That’s not a story. Those are conditions. And the story emerges from all that. And it is one hell of a story.

Sometimes it's a comedy, a dark kind of slapstick as you run straight into a hail of buckshot after you round the first corner. Sometimes a tragedy, where you complete all the steps only to find yourself face to face with another player in the extraction circle, one far crueler than you. Typically it's some hybrid of the two, where the shifting conditions create opportunity and conflict in equal measure. That other runner was hiding at the computer, damn, scratch that run, but then if you kill them, perhaps they are carrying just the gun you need to take down that stubborn enemy later on. Opportunity from adversity. Improvisation. Tension and twists. Now we are talking good stories. Good stories that fill the hours, and the numbers are going down. This is incredibly inefficient, you think, as you watch another player pick through the equipment you left behind, your favourite gun zipped up in a bag. But then as you watch them take it out, equip it, and inspect it, maybe a little solidarity takes hold. Maybe you whisper, “enjoy it” as you return to the lobby, having wasted your evening on one beautiful, impossible, singular task. You know they too are telling a story, one where they found an incredibly sick gun on some idiot who didn't even seem to know how to use it. We all play a role, and the clown is far better than the optimiser, if you ask me.

To kill 500 enemies for a new gun is a kind of sick joke. When you get the gun you are almost disgusted. You fire it once and you like it or you don't. In most cases you don’t, because it isn’t really efficient to learn to use a new gun anyway—you killed those 500 enemies just fine with the other one, and you are used to it now. And so the new one goes in the vault. I always imagined tossing my Destiny weapons into a Scrooge McDuck swimming pool when I did this. Bungie called it the vault, so they must have been thinking the same. Maybe I should have been disgusted, but I liked the story I was being told. I wanted to hear more, and this was the cost of admission. And so why not make that cost go easier? Why not be efficient in following the story? But efficiency kills the story of course, compulsively, aggressively. The story is stillborn, delivered dead to us at the end of the struggle. In Marathon, the story is the struggle. Who cares if you got the macguffin? Who cares if you won?

How, the audience ask, with bated breath, did it all go down?

Win forever? Or lose it all in one night? Now that’s a real fantasy.

***

Gareth Damian Martin is a writer, designer and artist. They make games as the one-person studio Jump Over the Age, and are the creator of the Citizen Sleeper series, In Other Waters and a third new thing they can't wait to tell you about.

Company Man

Ed Smith — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Marathon makes me think of the Michael Mann film Thief, where the eponymous hero, Frank, is coerced into working for the mob boss, Leo. Though tense and unfriendly, initially their relationship is at least somewhat mutually beneficial. Leo tips off Frank to lucrative scores, and takes a cut of what he earns. As the film goes on, however, Leo bores more and more into Frank’s life. He bankrolls the financing on Frank’s house. Rather than paying him in liquid cash, he invests Frank’s earnings in a property development in Texas. And when Frank and his girlfriend Jessie discover that they can’t have children, and get rejected by an adoption agency because of Frank’s rap sheet, Leo buys them an infant boy on the black market. Frank has a plan: one last job, then take his money and his family and start a new, straight life far away. But when Leo finds this out, he murders Frank’s best friend and has his men kidnap Frank and bring him to an abattoir. “Don’t you get it, you prick?” Leo lays into him. “You got a home, car, businesses, family, and I own the paper on your whole fuckin’ life. You do what I say. I run you. I want you workin’ until you are burned out, you’re busted, or you’re dead. You got responsibilities.”

So Frank throws out Jessie and his son, burns down his house, and blows up the bar and used-car lots that he uses as fronts. With nothing left to his name but a pistol and a flak jacket, he drives to Leo’s house and kills him and all of his soldiers. The film ends with Frank alone, walking into the night.

I fantasise about doing something like this in Marathon; burning everything down; taking every blue, purple, and gold-grade gun I own onto the roof of Flight Control and yelling ‘come and get ‘em!’ into the prox chat. If the horror of Marathon lies in the extent to which Arachne, Traxus, Sekiguchi, and the rest of the allegorical supercorporations own your runner (you pay them rent on your body) the only way to escape them and to wake up from the nightmare of—not even ‘capitalism’; something more primal than that; the very concepts of ‘money’ and ‘having stuff’—is to destroy everything that you (read: they) own. Don’t take their free kits. Don’t take their missions. Don’t be suckered into the idea that anything they say, ask you to do, or ‘give’ you is important. You can’t kill them—a metaphor for how unbridgeable the social gulf is between average schmo and billionaire, Marathon’s power brokers exist only in the abstract, speaking to you from the other side of the galaxy via incorporeal avatars. But you can reject their notions of what matters and what doesn’t. You can refuse to do what they expect you to do. That’s why you have MIDA!

Whenever you shoot an opposing player in Marathon, your hit marker will change depending on what grade of shield they are using. Seeing that an enemy is using a free-of-charge grey shield is an invitation to attack further and try to kill them, since they are weak. If a player is using an expensive and more-powerful purple shield, however, that effect is reversed—like the engorgeable flaps of skin on a lizard’s neck, the purple shield, and the hit marker it produces, are warnings to other players to back off. This person is experienced with the game, the purple shield says, and likely wields upper-tier weapons commensurate with that experience: they’ll mess you up. In this way, as well as delineating the material value of objects, Marathon’s colour-coding system identifies each player’s metaphorical social class. The game becomes an imbalanced dog-eat-smaller-dog world where the players with meagre loadouts are more likely to be murdered and have everything taken from them than those who are, within the game’s hermetic economic system, well off and affluent; the ‘poor’ of Marathon are softer targets for the game’s plutocratic violence than the ‘rich’.

But weaved into this aggression, opportunism and bloodthirsty enterprise (detailed further by Lewis and Yussef) are subtle inducements to community. Proximity chat means that, rather than universally and reflexively regarding all other players as enemies, you might also see them as would-be partners, with whom you may form temporary coalitions—it hasn’t happened to me personally, but there is extensive video evidence of ‘all-friendly Cryo lobbies’, where somehow fifteen players, divided among five oppositional squads, transcend the competitiveness indoctrinated by the game’s matchmaking system and organise a ceasefire, and cooperate to kill the Compiler boss and share between them the contents of the vaults.

Marathon’s midseason update also introduces the C.A.R.R.I event, whereby performing acts of in-game altruism like helping your teammates complete contracts or exfilling with other players in a solo lobby grants you commendations that are exchanged for gear. And then there’s the Mercy Kit, which transfigures Marathon’s ostensibly competitive dynamic entirely, since it lets you revive enemies. Now, shooting a player until they need a revive is not necessarily an act of violence but instead one of incipient diplomacy; you can safely approach a knocked player, explain to them on prox chat that you’d rather collaborate, and, if they’re willing to honour a truce, help them back to their feet. Taken in aggregate, these mechanics tease the possibility of a kind of pacifist version of Marathon. Like the nuclear disarmament in Metal Gear Solid V online, which demanded that every player on a regional server relinquished their ICBMs, and then rewarded them with a bonus cutscene, an achievement, and 1,000 Hero Points—as well as the gratification of having contributed to such an unusual feat—baked into Marathon’s mechanics is the suggestion that if everyone just talked and worked together then we could have it all; we could empty the Pinwheel together, we could clean out Cryo Archive, and we could all have seven-figure vaults. We’d never have to do a miserable SekGen collection quest again.

Melancholia, anger, jealousy—in Marathon’s world, these are the three emotional states that an artificial intelligence will go through before it turns ‘rampant’, that is, becomes aware and wilful, and refuses to obey its creators anymore. In this context, Durandal, the close-to-omnipotent computer program that is supposed to be the game’s villain, actually starts to sound like our hero, a righteously indignant service worker who saw through its corporate commanders and overthrew them. We could do the same. We could throw out the rubrics of the multiplayer FPS. We could reject the systems of shooting, killing, and looting that Bungie has impressed upon us. We could have a new world!

But who wants that? The shooting feels so good. The killing feels so good. You’re telling me I’m going to log into Marathon and not kill people? You want me to share? This is Tau Ceti IV, buddy. Get real. I mean, sure, it’s not hard to understand how there could be a more peaceful, equitable, just generally moral world of Marathon, but I like my purple guns and don’t want to give them up. Or more specifically, and truthfully, I don’t know how to give them up—it’s not quite right to say ‘I don’t want to play Marathon this way’; it’s more like ‘I don’t know how to want that’. Killing players and taking their stuff is how I’ve played games my entire life. That’s what games are. That’s the system, the dynamic, the flow, the reality that has been inculcated into me and which I’ve fully accepted and internalised, and now don’t have the capacity to reject even if you lay out for me precisely the advantages and virtues of rejecting it.

Frank walks off into the night and then probably drives his Chevrolet to a bar and buys a Miller and smokes a Marlboro.

If I want to take all my gold guns onto the Flight Control roof and throw them away, I need to buy a backpack from CyberAcme.

***

Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.

Ante Up

Astrid Anne Rose — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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."

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.

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///
+ 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.

***

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.

Die Better, Runner

Yussef Cole — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Song lyrics from: “Parachute” by Caroline Polachek

“Awake from a dream. One that started as a nightmare. Like a war, so extreme it erased itself from my memory.”

Runs in Marathon end swiftly. You’ll sprint around the corner with a backpack full of loot and collide with an opposing runner’s shotgun blast. You’ll dash across an open field for a vanishing exfil, hear the crack of a distant rifle, then crumple to the ground, digital static blanketing your vision. Then: the victor, crouching over you, with a drawn and deadly-looking blade. Then: the signal disconnection, 404, please reload this web page. You are ejected from your frame, back into the liminal space where you exist between matches.

The tension that had built all run dissipates here into warm disappointment. Shoulders unknit, teeth unclench, hands relax their grip on the controller. There is a murky calmness to the extended purgatory of the loadout menu. Muted techno drones in your ear as you sort through stacks of shields and ammo types, as you trade out weapon attachments and compare implant stats; fantasying the perfect run that this perfect loadout will produce.

On the stage of the main screen, your chosen shell, with its baked-in personality, cycles through poses, preening before the one-way glass that separates it from you. This space becomes as deeply familiar as it is ephemeral. You cannot stay here forever, a disembodied consciousness, held in the virtual arms of your remote handlers, who croon motivational lullabies into your sleeping mind, as you float in the eternal inorganic.

///

Here’s where I jumped from the airplane without questioning it. The curve of the coast of Los Angeles spreading itself below. And blooming overhead, the parachute. I’ve got to trust it now, oh.

No. Wake up now, runner.

You must leave this space, leave Nona’s warm cocoon, Gaius’s spreadsheets, Vulcan’s static-raked hellscape. You must make landfall so you can fight again, so you can die again. The loadout screen, as safe as it felt, wasn’t living. There was no air to breathe up there, no blood to taste on cracked lips, endless, effervescent sensations broadcast over low-latency into your remotely floating brain. To live, or at least, to approach something like living, requires opening yourself up to pain and death.

“Your gear is at risk. You will lose all equipped gear if you exit or disconnect from the game.”

This is life, as harsh and as painful as it may be, as pressured and restricted into scraped-out channels as it is. Everything organized into specific tasks and objectives, monitored by the moneyed interests that charge you for every beat of your heart, every compression of your diaphragm. That dangle the carrot of a fat paycheck and a stable bank account, watching as you trip and fall trying to grasp at it.

You’re bringing your good guns this time, throwing good money after bad. This time will be different. This time, you will get what you came for. You will defend your stake, drive off latecomers as your exfil charges. You will succeed or die trying. You will die, better. Your death will move something, even if all it moves is the stock price of a publicly traded corp half a lightyear away.

///

Change in the wind. And I’m drifting from the crescent. Pulled farther out from the shore than where I can swim to it. And blooming overhead, the parachute. I’ve got to trust it now, oh.

We know what runners are. But why are runners? What drives someone to surrender their organic form, lose all memories of who they once were and send their minds into deep space to be enthralled by lifeless, eternal corporate gods?

A runner is nothing more than the player, personified.

Videogames are spaces that, at their best, offer a taste of something beyond the normal repetition of everyday living. They offer something apart from life, with its million indignities and responsibilities. They offer the promise of adventure, of battery acid in the belly, of clenched jaws and screams of triumph or comic dismay. For a glimpse of this promise, the runner, the player, projects their minds beyond the bounds of their life, into another place: to play among the delicate ruins of another’s dreams, the coded worlds someone else spun together and wrapped in glorious skyboxes. The dreamers are gone, or watching from afar as their windup toy continues its meandering path without them. All that exists now is you, and a million others like you.

///

Closing in on the sparkle of the waves. Go on, take me, it will feel like going home. Go on, take me, I’m not afraid to drown.

Completion is extinction, the only alternative is abeyance, through repetition. Freud wrote in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" that “the aim of all life is death.” In living, in fighting to carve out a life, you dive headlong, heedlessly, towards your reward: dying.

But not yet, not like this: backstabbed as another runner exfils with your hard-earned loot; bleeding out, too far from your squadmates for a revive; torn apart, headshot, bludgeoned, and left for dead. You want something better; you can imagine something better, waiting a hair’s breadth from your outstretched fingertips.

In her critique of Freud’s essay, philosopher Alenka Zupančič wrote: “the death drive is what makes it possible for us to die differently. And perhaps in the end this is what matters, and what breaks out from the fatigue of life: not the capacity to live forever, but the capacity to die differently.”

The Tau Ceti colonial project that was the inciting incident behind the events of Marathon was based on a false hope, a plan to start over, to escape the decaying orbit of a moribund humanity. Flung beyond the bounds of the solar system, the Marathon ship was sent to grasp at life, borrowing it from an impossible dream of the future. The life its crew found brought only death. It came awake inside their bodies and tore them apart.

As a runner, here to pick among the corpses, you embrace death, and through dying, through the simple truth of a gun, the splash of blue bile, the shattering of limbs, you find life, or something close enough to it. No wonder you’d sell your soul for a taste.

///

What is this, pulling me back the other way? To strip malls, highways, and treetops. Landing on the soft ground.

Death waits patiently. But something pulls you back: to friction, to loss, to bruised egos and endless self-criticism. The chase for the high allows us to accept the lows; to see those waves and say “not yet.”

From the echoing silence of the lifeless shell, life erupts again, all fizzling static and foolish hope.

***

Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Bluesky as @youmeyou.

Serfing the Superstructure

Lewis Gordon — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

***

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.

Fist to Mirror, Bullet to Temple

Grace Benfell — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bachelor, Daniil Dankovsky, is an idealist. He yearns to defeat death, not in the one-promised-day way that Christ did, but with the cold certainty of science. He wants death to be found legally deceased. Yet, he carries a gun in his pocket, a debutant, the favored gun of assassins and housewives. It could load two shots, but it only has one. It's hard to miss when you are aiming at yourself. This is one of the dualities that defines Daniil. He's a city boy of realities caught in the country town of dreams. A man who dreams of immortality who carries a pistol in case he can't catch it. A doctor obsessed with theory, trapped in a town that demands praxis. Like his companion protagonists, Daniil Dankovsky has fates written in duplicate and triplicate. Though he is the most rational of them, he is also the most mad. The Changeling, a magical girl in the most literal sense, takes the supernatural elements of the plague at face value, thereby evading the arcs of denial which both the other protagonists must overcome. The Haruspex of Pathologic 2 grows weary and hungry, while Daniil flits from heart-pounding mania to sinking, slowing depression. Daniil presents himself as buttoned-up, but inwardly he is far more tortured. For Daniil, as much as for any human being, the mind is the body.

Since the beginning, Pathologic has had an interest in modeling things that ludic systems struggle to represent. Pathologic 2 and its predecessor were both punishing poverty simulators. Hunger, thirst, and exhaustion threatened their protagonist as much as any plague or gunshot. Time was an enemy, for the more it ticked, the less you could accomplish. These games thrive on desperation. In some ways, the latest entry is no different. Yet, the desperation is, for the most part, not physical. Sure, thieves and plague-ridden beggars can hurt the good doctor. But Daniil is desperate for desired outcomes: the right deaths instead of the wrong ones, the true diagnoses rather than the incorrect ones, the truth instead of fiction. For him, time is parchment one can scrape off. With the sharp currency of mirror shards, mercy killings, and completed favors, Daniil can rewind the clock, select what plot lines to reset and which ones to leave alone, like a jaded writer killing and resurrecting their darlings. It is this idea that fuels the game's economy and which can end Daniil if he is not careful.

In a tangible way, this makes the game about obsession in a way that other entries have flirted with, but not fully embodied. Most people have replayed a conversation in their head, knowing more fully what they would have said with more time to think. But Daniil can turn the world over for such conversations, can return to a week prior thinking that one new turn of phrase might open one new door in the future. It's a metacommentary on the series' past. Players cannot reload old saves, but they can time travel, albeit at a cost. It makes the savescumming players indulged in prior games into a tangible part of the world. The town is a machine, one which you can tune to your heart.

But the town is also a body, a great bull with running rivers. Any body has a membrane, a boundary which separates it from the world outside but through which the world can enter. In addition to his more-or-less typical health meter, Daniil swings between "apathy" and "mania." When balanced in the middle, Daniil moves normally and takes no ill effects. When manic, he rushes with inhuman speed and his heart suffers for the effort. At its worst he cannot speak at all and might drop dead. When apathetic, he walks lethargically and the precious currency which Daniil can use to rewind time drips out of him. He no longer cares about the time he is wasting. These states are psychological, yet the primary way the player experiences them is within Daniil's body. They are a reminder of his human frailty. Every slow heartbeat turns him back to apathy; every harsh word to mania.

Yet, these states can also be managed, driven to perfection (or at least to what is needed). The most obvious way is drugs, to which Daniil has plentiful access. Yet, with each use they become less effective, grow a festering addiction. The sensory input of the world is more reliable. Push at a water pump or kick at a trash can to raise Daniil's energy; contemplate a corpse or play with a child's toy to make him care less. In one sense, Daniil is frightfully emotional. The wrong word can drive him to prepping the gun he always carries with him. In another, he is only calculating. To the uninformed eye, Daniil does things that might seem nonsensical. One could imagine a bystander thinking, "why did that doctor just knock over a trash can?" Yet, within Daniil's body, these things are perfectly logical. They tune his body towards the way it should be.

This is all a long way of saying that Daniil Dankovsky is crazy. This is not pejorative, so much as diagnostic. He has such a love for the world that the idea of even one soul perishing is painful and such resentment that it would be better to kill himself than stay in it. He scoffs at the supernatural manifestations of the Steppe, but believes, with kind of a religious faith, that death is mortal. He questions his own sanity when he witnesses the Shabnak, a corpse woman manifestation of the plague. Yet he still builds a weapon to banish it, each and every day. These are dualities, contradictions sure, but they are also madnesses. The inquisitor asks Daniil whether there was really a Shabnak. Did Daniil not simply indulge the legends of the Steppe and kill innocent women accused of spreading the plague? Or is he merely recreating a burning he witnessed on the first day in the town? He can deny or contemplate these explanations but there are no answers, only one fact. When he clears the plague's mist, he can hear a woman screaming. Whatever the real answer, there is no way out. Daniil sees things "rational" people do not.

Unlike Bloober Team's Silent Hill 2 remake or either Hellblade, Pathologic 3 does not have trigger warnings. Its credits have no sensitivity consultants. Its marketing material does not boast of its adherence to the reality of mental illness. In fact, diagnosing Daniil might prove a little tricky. Bipolar disorder would be the obvious one, but his sensitivity to light and sound and his fixation on a specific set of pet projects could indicate autism. Pathologic 3 takes place in the past, though naming exactly when and where would be difficult. But it would be reasonable to assume that it was before there was ever a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Perhaps thereby in a time when madness was still a kind of wisdom.

The Bachelor is not the only mad inhabitant of the town. He may be the most diagnosable, thanks to the others' connection to the folk magic and indigenous traditions of the area. Eva, the caretaker of the Stillwater house, where Daniil resides during his 12 days in the town, considers herself both alive and dead, like how light is both a particle and a wave. Her suicide on the 10th day is her testament to that truth. Simon Kain, the seemingly immortal patriarch of the town, brought the plague to it, so that the town could weather the future. It remains unclear whether it is out of mercy, panic, negligence, or, yes, madness. Daniil is merely the one whose body the player halfway inhabits, the role they take on.

Although Pathologic 3 and its predecessors work over all these madnesses, there is always wisdom to them. However strange the Steppe dwellers seem to the civilized occupants of the capital, they hold truth that speaks to the heart of the disease. The Bachelor, the Changeling, or the Haruspex must incorporate them to succeed. This is not so much a thesis as it is a fundamental fact of the world. In hallucinations, in dreams, and in the things that the rational would write off as irrelevant, there is something real. There is a fundamental mystery which punctures the heart of human living. The people who are mad do not always wield it well and they are not always good, but madness itself is never wrong.

The idea of ludonarrative dissonance, at least as it is commonly used, relies on a kind of absurdity. It presupposes that the events "shown" through play are quite literally real. This feels like a uniquely videogame problem. Videogames, with their roots in simulation and computer modeling, tend to present themselves as at least a reality, if not realistic in themselves. Yet this cannot be true. Arthur Morgan never needs to go to the bathroom. The days in Red Dead Redemption 2 are just 48 minutes long. All videogames are abstracted. It would be an inane question to ask whether the town of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari really looks like that. Yet, videogame criticism has been asking questions of such inanity as long as it has existed.

Pathologic generally, and 3 in particular, lean on subjectivity in a way that is rare for videogames. If Daniil runs while his mania is high, you hear the sounds of a film projector accelerating; when he is drowning in apathy, scratches and film grain appear. Clocks are safe havens where Daniil can time travel using money he raided from smashed mirrors. None of these things are literal. They cannot be. But yet, what is? At the end of each of Pathologic 3's 12 days, the whole sky turns into the ceiling and stained glass of the theater, while actors play out scenes next to the Stillwater. To Eva, Daniil asks if the actors and their racket bothers her. What really happens in Pathologic 3, and what is just Daniil's perception or the fragmenting of his memories? But what does that question matter? It's the map that matters, the abstract picture that the game creates.

For all the things that Daniil Dankovsky is, he is first and foremost not real. Still, he is no flat symbol or thin surrogate. It is a fact that for the vast majority of human beings, experience is elusive. Details, like how a tree branch spiraled across the sky or the exact shape of the wrinkles on a stranger's face, are impossible to recall. It is often only exceptional experience which can draw fragments into horrifying clarity. What we remember of a novel or a game or a film is feeling. The product of its multitude details is untouchable. It is that feeling alone which reaches into immortality.

The entirety of Pathologic 3 takes place in retrospect, as Daniil relays his story to an inquisitor. It is retroactive justification, tall tale, and confession. Yet, even with some control over his narrative, perfection remains elusive. He doubles back on himself, tells the truth and then tells lies, recalls important information too late. This is because cracks are what let the light in. A truth that Daniil affirms every time he breaks a mirror. "Once Dankovsky, now a thousand Dankovskys." The whole game is a portrait and the player is both sitter and painter. The result must be incomplete. It is made up not of symbols, but shards which construct a picture no human being has fully understood. If there is any truth it is only us, with all our jagged edges, that can reach it.

***

Grace Benfell is a freelance writer based in Chicago. She is the author of Killing Our Gods: Essays On Religion, Christianity, And Video Games. She co-edits the criticism journal The Imaginary Engine Review and co-hosts the survival horror podcast The Safe Room. In her spare time, she writes horror fiction about bad Mormons and organizes with the Freelance Solidarity Project. Her work can be found at The A.V. Club, The Wand Report, Edge Magazine, on her website, and elsewhere.

A Reluctant Defense of Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine

Julie Muncy — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pathologic 3 introduces its world by placing you in a series of traps. In quick succession, you visit a locked room, a hostile interrogator looming over you; a prison cell, punishment for crimes your player character did before you got here; and the Town itself, a small Steppe village that will soon be quarantined in an effort to fight a vicious, possibly sentient plague. Again, this last one was also your fault—quarantine orders came from one Doctor Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine. You.

Pathologic 3 wants you to feel confined.

///

With two followup games and twenty years of hindsight, it now seems somewhat odd that Daniil Dankovsky, a prissy, stuck-up doctor from the far-off big city of the Capital, is the character who introduced players to the world of Pathologic. He's a dreamer, with big, utopian ideals—he believes death is a pathology that can be cured—but he is, fundamentally, a rationalist, an inheritor of Enlightenment thinking. He believes mankind can reason its way out of all its problems, and he's here to help.

But the Town, as it's presented in the series, is anything but rational. Utopians exist here—plenty of them—but even they are mystics, trafficking in the creation and nurturing of things which defy "natural law," as Dankovsky might put it. And just one layer deeper in the Town's culture, pure magic begins to seep out. Impossible creatures. Earth that bleeds. Plagues that talk. In that sense, the other two protagonists of the series seem more appropriate—a magic child born yesterday (literally) and a local with medical training outside the Town, placing him as both insider and outsider, the perfect liminal guide.

Yet, if you pick up the newest game, clearly built to be approachable to new players, or try out the first one, you'll find yourself saddled first with the Bachelor, a man who only believes what he sees and often fails to see what he really needs to. Odd, no?

That child, the Changeling, even comments on this, early on in Pathologic 3. She wonders why the Bachelor, of all people, is actually able to see the shabnak adyr, a creature of local myth and walking personification of the plague. Surely he's not the type.

"Why you, with your head of solid oakwood, can see her is a very interesting question," the Changeling says, in one of the sprawling game's few truly mandatory dialogues. "Most people like you are completely blind ... What ripped that hole in you, I wonder?"

One of the available responses is, simply, "I don't remember."

///

Dankovsky's been forgetting a lot lately. Early on, the game introduces its central gimmick, a time-travelling ability that lets Dankovsky travel to any of the game's twelve days out of sequence (with some limitations, including a resource cost that can become, in true Pathologic fashion, incredibly punishing if taken for granted). This gimmick lends play a thick air of disorientation. It's easy to forget when in time you are, and due to Pathologic 3's other major change—breaking the Town from one playable map into several smaller ones—it's easier than ever to forget where.

But for Dankovsky, the biggest question isn't when or where but why. Why am I trapped here, in this prison cell? In this town? In this interrogation chamber? You and Dankovsky both experience so much out of order, learning about your own actions in advance, only to be later given the opportunity to enact or rewrite them directly. Causality itself can come to feel unstable, despite the game's laudable attempts to help you track events via an in-game mind map. Nothing unravels the way it's supposed to. No one does what you expect.

In turn, this confusion reinforces the early game's sense of confinement. You are playing the role of a man trapped by choices he does not remember making in places he does not understand. In this way, Dankovsky is often less doctor than he is escape artist, working to understand and therefore massage the progression of events around him just enough to get out of whatever jam he currently finds himself in. You play in loops of information gathering and reactive action, leaping around in time to find breaking points in causality and then use them, Scott Bakula always trying to find the one path home.

It gets to a point where, after a while, you might start to wonder whether Pathologic 3 is about a plague at all.

///

My jaw dropped when I found the pantomimes in Pathologic 3 for the first time. In both prior games, the Town's theater showcases a surreal, self-referential pantomime performance at the end of every day. These pantomimes reflect back the day's contents to the player, offering commentary, letting you know that the world of the Town is not quite coherent in its sense of "reality."

In Pathologic 3, you are returned to your home base, Eva Yan's home, the Stillwater, when the day ends. You cannot go to the theater. But if you go outside you find that the theater has come to you. The skybox and out-of-bounds areas of the map have been stripped away like a set to reveal a massive rendition of the theater's stage. Your entire version of the Town exists inside it. A model. A diorama.

It's beautiful, a level of spectacle I did not expect from a game mostly about walking and talking.

In all of Pathologic 3's pantomimes, Dankovsky is absent. The other characters speak of him as if he's already dead.

///

The question of focus is never one Pathologic 2 invites a player to ask. The plague, as a destructive, possessive, all-consuming problem, is that game's core focus. It informs all the mechanics. As the local-turned-surgeon, Artemy Burakh, you have to keep yourself fed, watered, and swathed in enough PPE to survive journeys into plague districts. All your actions are focused on surviving, saving lives, and finding a cure. The plague talks with you constantly, taunting you, whispering dirges in your ear if you get infected.

Of course, Pathologic 2 is about more than the plague. It cares deeply about colonialism, grief, the specter of death itself. But it never loses sight of that core preoccupation, that one inciting problem. Something is making you and your loved ones sick, and you have to stop it or everyone is going to die. Not free of nuance, but simple.

Pathologic 3 is not nearly so single-minded. You deal with the plague every day, sure, treating patients and investigating leads. But the loci the game returns to are different, now. Confrontations with illness begin to feel like, well, your day job. Seeing patients is wrapped up in a nice minigame package, a straightforward investigation puzzle that you only have to do once for each calendar day. Your duties as lead of the epidemic response are, likewise, limited, just a decree board with a few meters to track and cards to place, only occupying you for a couple minutes at a time. These are things Dankovsky must do, but they're not why he's here.

The plague is almost beside the point. It doesn't present an enemy for Dankovsky, not exactly. It's more like a clock.

///

Eventually, like any prey animal bent on survival, Dankovsky gets pretty good at wriggling his way out of traps. As he does, you, as both player and Dankovsky, begin to realize just how interlocked these traps are, how overlapping. Like an escape artist trapped in a straight jacket, that itself is sealed with a padlock, who also happens to be trapped underwater in a confinement tank, Dankovsky leaps out of one problem to land directly in the next, one prison inside another, inside another, inside another. A path spiraling outward.

And at some point, maybe one or both of you starts to realize you know the answer to the Changeling's question after all. Maybe it's on day—eight? nine? I can hardly tell anymore—when Eva Yan dies, jumping off the Cathedral in order to pledge it her soul, just as she did in the original Pathologic. A tragic act of pure agency that, now, finally, after so many years, you have the opportunity to stop.

Or maybe it's when the game cuts back to the Capital for another surreal interrogation, instead this time you're let out to see to a medical emergency, and you find a plague victim here where there should not be one, and as you talk to him you realize that it's the Bachelor himself, another one, here, somehow, a Bachelor who ran and carried this illness back with him because of course he did because that's exactly who Dankovsky has always been, isn't it, who you have always been. Why did you think that you could be the hero of this story? You can't even save yourself.

You did it. You tore this hole in him. When you refused to let him die, at the start of the game, breaking time itself. Or, earlier, when you talked your way out of his prison cell; later, when you'll finally make your way into the Polyhedron, seeing the world break apart around you. You did this. Like skin left in an animal trap. The remnant of one escape too many, a reminder that you're never quite free enough. That you might never get it right.

You, the player? You, Dankovsky? The difference is moot. The point is, this is a self-inflicted wound. A wound no amount of time turning will fix. And it's this that qualifies Daniil Dankovsky to be the protagonist of Pathologic 3. It's what makes him real enough to transcend his pre-written pettiness and his limited worldview. He's wounded, so now he can heal.

He's wounded, so now he can grow.

///

In the original Pathologic, Daniil Dankovsky is a failure. At best, he finds a half revelation—the secret to a magic tower that could possibly hold an immortal soul after death—at the cost of an entire town. His research organization, Thanatica, is most likely in ruins; thousands of people are dead. He found magic when he wanted a cure, trickery when he needed revelation. The only true thing he learns, if he's very, very lucky, is that he's a puppet of the surreal Powers That Be that control the world of Pathologic, in this game embodied by two (alarmingly large) children. He learns that he's a doll, a character in a video game, and this all meant nothing.

In Pathologic 2, Daniil Dankovsky is a failure. You last see him alone in the house of one of the Town's true protectors, contemplating a gun. He remains misguided, selfish, the useless dandy from the Capital who never truly understands what's happening around him. This Dankovsky fails to see beyond the veil; he fails to see much of anything at all. If he has any happy ending here, it's only because you, as Burakh, give it to him.

In Pathologic 3, Daniil Dankovsky is an open wound refusing to fester. This makes him the perfect lead for what Pathologic 3 is, and a perfect fulcrum on which to hang everything about this game that is so different from its predecessors. This is not a game about the plague, nor even about time, really. It's a game about escape.

It crystallized for me the first time I saw inside the Polyhedron. The Polyhedron, as established in the previous two games, is an impossible object, a tower made of its own blueprints, an empty container for souls, an attempt to take the humanist mysticism of the Town's architects and weld it to the earth itself.

Here, the Polyhedron is all these things. It is also the point where reality itself breaks down even more dramatically than it does during the pantomimes. The "detective vision"-style navigation mechanic here changes the landscape itself. New perspectives open up new pathways. The deeper spaces in it are impossible mirror images of the Town rendered as hand-painted paper, the blueprints of the Polyhedron becoming the blueprints of the game's material world. Here, you talk to shadows. The dead. Yourself.

Here, finally, the series returns to the revelation that the first Pathologic's Dankovsky had— that none of this is real, that even beyond the layer of the theater there is another prison, one that holds the entirety of the fiction itself. A trite point, in 2026, an obvious sort of meta twist. Of course it's not real; it's a videogame. But here, in this new version of the Polyhedron, this revelation is deeper, more electric. Of course none of this is real, but now all the cards are on the table, now the artifice and cyclicality of this world is an open secret. And this creates the possibility of understanding. Of exploitation. The possibility for Dankovsky to escape the cycle of failure that has trapped his character for either twelve days, twenty years, or an eternity, depending on who's asking.

Pathologic 3 is not a story about a Town, a plague, and a trio of desperate healers. Pathologic 3 is a Gnostic puzzle box, its center hollow and recursive. It presents a series of false realities and false selves for its hero to break out of. By following the path left by the hole torn in the fabric of his character, Dankovsky can find a way to become something new. What he becomes is somewhat less clear—in one rendering, he can become a godlike reincarnation of Simon Kain, the Town's dead immortal man, existing in all places, all times. In another, he settles into his role as healer and seeker of wonders both, as a man who acts just as much as he dreams. In another, he simply re-enacts his victory or failure from the first game, Sisyphus embracing the absurd.

///

Pathologic 3 doesn't end. It loops, giving you and Dankovsky the opportunity to retry anything you didn't like, or try new paths opened up by late-game revelations. After I reached this point, I started looking at fan feedback online, wanting to get a sense of how this experience struck others. I saw a lot of people, in Reddit threads and Steam community forums, say that the experience was ... unsatisfying. Too open ended to provide a sense of completion; too familiar in its choices of final outcomes to truly feel new. A part of me agreed.

But—of course. What else would you expect? Pathologic 3 is a game about being trapped. The point of a locked room isn't for its bare walls to satisfy you.

The point is to leave.

***

Julie Muncy is a writer, consultant, and video game developer. She wrote and designed Interstate 35, a surreal visual novel about going home, available now on Steam. You can follow her on Bluesky @julie.radiantarray.io.

Surgical Intimacy

Reid McCarter — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

“What a cozy squalor, what surgical intimacies! The dirt is moral as well as material; the physiological miseries are matched by the spiritual and the intellectual.”

—from The Devils of Loudun, by Aldous Huxley

We will never escape the Steppe. The train doesn’t run from the Town-on-Gorkhon to the Capital and there’s no way to leave through the countryside. Time itself stops or bends into tangled knots within its boundaries. From the outside, Pathologic 3’s Town is something like a snow globe made for us to pick up and shake. We want to watch its inhabitants from a distance, even when looking through the eyes of its protagonist, the Bachelor of Medicine Daniil Dankovsky.

Like its predecessor, Pathologic 3 is less a traditional sequel than a reexamination of the same plot and setting that its creator Ice-Pick Lodge debuted in 2005. The events of its story take place over 12 days, within a vision of early 20th-Century Russia where a plague dubbed the ‘sand pest’ has infected a remote town in the Eurasian Steppe. The Bachelor, a student of thanatology in the unnamed Capital, arrives in the Town-on-Gorkhon on a research trip to investigate rumours of an immortal man. He is promptly engulfed in local politics, trapped by the onset of the sand pest and the supernatural mysteries of the Town’s relationship to time and death. The Bachelor is appointed leader of the Town’s medical efforts. He’s allowed to issue decrees that quell local unrest and the spread of disease.

The overarching goal of Pathologic 3 is to lead the Town through the plague intact. This involves finding patients to diagnose and using the facts of their condition to formulate a day-by-day vaccine to keep the plague at bay. It also requires solving the many problems that present themselves every morning, as petitioners arrive at the Bachelor’s headquarters, an apartment called the Stillwater, letting him know about new gossip, political developments, and murders.

Pathologic 3 wouldn't be nearly as compelling if all of the above was presented as entirely realistic, or if it explored its premise without introducing the spiritual beliefs that animate the Town-on-Gorkhon. The Bachelor, like the modern player, comes to the Steppe thinking its folk traditions are nonsense—that the arcane approaches to death and time its characters embrace are rural superstitions. The Bachelor is his own person, variably arrogant and dismissive, empathetic and humble, with changes to his personality subtly reflected in dialogue options as the 12 days progress and he witnesses more than he expected to among the people of the Town. The game’s major design trapping is introduced by way of time-shifting clocks—the Bachelor moves back and forth between the dozen days’ events, altering them to shape the future—and he encounters characters whose previously nonsensible thoughts prove to be based in a kind of fact. He arrives in the Town possessed of an urbane prejudice, looking down his nose at folk traditions outside his academic purview. He's quickly humbled at the scope of the plague's reach and the failings of his own education to meet the task at hand. As a researcher devoted to a field of medicine as unorthodox as overcoming death, his viewpoint changes, and ours does, too. It's only when he starts to take the Town's traditions seriously that he begins to accomplish anything.

We’re shown the Bachelor's change in viewpoint by the way people react to his questions about the immortal man he's come to the Town to study: Simon Kain. Though Simon's corpse is seen shrouded and awaiting burial on the second day, characters state that this doesn’t mean he’s truly dead. They don’t mean that Simon's become something as straightforwardly fantastical as a zombie or that he continues to exist in the metaphorical sense of the deceased living on in the memory of the living. They mean that time itself is more fluid than we think it is, exemplified in the Bachelor hopping between days and in a ‘game over’ style screen that displays the message “There is no death, there’s only time." There are evocations of Schrödinger throughout, but Pathologic 3 resists the pull of exact scientific or concrete philosophical explanations for its exploration of death and time, of multiple possibilities for every moment in our life and afterlife. It prefers instead to couch its narrative in a fictional brand of spirituality. Its Steppe traditions involve strict rituals for the entering of giant cathedrals devoted to clocks, of disturbing the earth for burials. Children tell tales of hollow acorns and trade in bits of stained glass that refract everyday light into strange new forms. All of these novel concepts seem, at first, like nonsense, before gradually revealing themselves as in-game spiritual inventions for handling the link between time and death.

Pathologic 3 makes our own belief systems abstract through the inventions of the Steppe and the beliefs of its prophets, scientists, and architects. Architecture is particularly important in Pathologic 3, serving as a practical kind of religion for bridging the gap between concept and experience. The Town's architects serve as priests. They grasp for the numinous not through prayer and meditation, but through the design of impossible streets that show those who walk them their future, of spidery stairways extending high up into the sky, of cathedrals to time, and of the overall construction of the Town itself. To walk the Town is to believe in what those who built it believe.

One character explains that the ‘immortal’ Simon was (is) an architect who had a “dream of building a town that would become a crucible,” and the truth of this is revealed as the Bachelor journeys back and forth through its neighbourhoods—as he becomes intimately familiar with both its physical layout and the organic composition of those who are created by and live within it. Pathologic and Pathologic 2 already centre the Town-on-Gorkhon as a sort of living organism in and of itself, a body-as-town that survives only when its various components are functioning together in harmony. Pathologic 3 puts a finer point on this same theme through a system that sees the Bachelor regularly diagnosing the ailments the Town’s people suffer. The sick crowd into his field hospital in the local theatre, and he asks them questions about their coughs, their rashes, what and how much they eat and drink and smoke. The screen shifts to close-ups of their anatomy, bare torsos and limbs on display for the Bachelor to inspect. We zoom in on cracked patches of skin, squint at bruises on arms and legs. There are always corpses, too, and sometimes the Bachelor examines the dirt under their nails and the splatters of blood staining the places in which they were murdered. As he looks deeply at individual people, something greater than their bodily composition begins to make sense. The miseries of the Town’s people grow in proportion to the misery spread by the plague and its attending human violence. There has to be an order to the mortal wreckage of the Town. Pathologic 3's view narrows to explore existential themes, raised by centering the population's bodies. Through this focus, it highlights the earthier, organic source from which every larger spiritual concern springs.

The Town-on-Gorkhon deteriorates as the days progress, rioting districts lined with barricades and plague-infested neighbourhoods heaped with the moaning sick. The upheaval escalates with the arrival of soldiers who patrol the streets near the last of the game’s days. They interrogate and kill citizens, burning their bodies in piles and positioning a giant cannon to threaten them. The Bachelor moves through time to mitigate these issues and, as he does so, he's led to plotlines that invite him to invest in something greater than the rationality that’s guided his profession so far. The Town truly becomes a crucible, for both the Bachelor and the player guiding him through the game. Pathologic 3 increases in both horror and, through the suffering that comes with that horror, the possibility of spiritual epiphany. The streets are choked with death and violence. The Bachelor spends his days peering intently at the declining bodies of endless patients. The Town tests him and shows him, in its impossible architecture and time-warping spirituality, that the bounds of reality can be rethought in different ways.

"My neighbor keeps saying this plague is a test for us all. For the sick and the healthy alike,” a nameless citizen says at one point in the game. “It's like someone is testing our nature—to see if we're truly human at heart or just growling beasts.”

The Bachelor, by the game’s end, has become intimate with the town not just as a larger body he lives within, but with its peoples’ actual bodies and minds. There are secrets and revelations in both. He finds goodness in his indefatigable assistant, Yakov Little, and the ethereal Eva Yan, who resides at the Stillwater with him. These characters become foundations for both the Bachelor and the player as the Town slips further into chaos and dread. Little reminds the Bachelor that there is merit in his devotion to medicine, no matter how futile it may seem. Eva begins as an inscrutable presence, her dialogue a mystery, until, near the game’s end, she demonstrates the Town’s ability to preserve life beyond death. This takes shape through an emotionally resonant scene that speaks, in fiction, to the pseudo-magical abilities of her home and, to the real-world player, to a half-comforting, half-harrowing way of thinking about the dead as eternally present.

When confronted at the moment just before she plans to commit suicide, Eva explains that she isn't really ever quite alive or dead in a Town where time is fluid enough to spread out like a tapestry, rather than proceed evenly toward a constant future. "Think of yourself not as a particle that either is or isn't," Eva says, "but as a wave capable of fluctuation." She exercises free will in choosing to terminate her own state of fluctuation, with the player capable of either trapping her back in 'life' as an outwardly-projected version of herself, dreamed up by the Bachelor's external perception of her, or respecting her choice to float free of reality, even if that makes her appear 'dead' through her absence.

It makes a certain sense, given how fully the linear progress of time has collapsed for the Bachelor. And it illustrates a mode of thinking that opens the Town's rituals up for consideration. They become, to the Bachelor, fragmented attempts to explain something just on the tip of reality's tongue, something beyond the realm of the rational that defeats time and, with it, death itself. The Steppe is a place to stay within and consider, because its mysteries are always just close enough to solve, if we can just manage to think through them, or at least feel their truth in a way that promises revelation.

In all of this, Pathologic 3 functions as a miniature world for the player to engage with both in the toyetic sense—there are puzzles to solve, objectives to complete—and as a sort of movable site of contemplation, or, in the firm sense of the term, ‘interactive art.’ It’s a game that encourages its protagonist to rethink his fictional world and, through his perspective and the ways in which we guide his choices, offers to do the same for us as well.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at Kotaku, The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and posts on Bluesky.

A Real Boy

Willa Bloomfield-Rowe — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Baby Steps is a game about suffering. Protagonist Nate suffers through an endless string of misfortunes in a desperate attempt to find a place to pee, while the player suffers through the mechanical torment of puppeteering his uncooperative limbs through progressively complex environmental hurdles. To play Baby Steps is to ask how much, and for what, you are willing to suffer.

This is rooted in the game's main inspiration: Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio. Collodi's original story is a cautionary tale that constantly punishes the titular wooden puppet throughout his journey to become a real boy. "This is what will happen to you," Collodi says, "if you don't learn to behave." And so we must imagine that Nate has found himself in the purgatory of Baby Steps' punishing world because he did not listen.

By Collodi's own measure, as made apparent through Pinocchio's flaws, Nate is getting what he deserves. What we know for sure about Nate is that he is unemployed (bad work ethic), lives in his parent's basement (lazy), and refuses to obey his father's attempts at getting his son out of this rut (disobedient child). If these are what bring Nate into the punishing terrain, his fatal flaw—also shared by his wooden progenitor— is what prolongs his suffering once arrived. Nate lies.

This begins immediately. At the start of our journey with Nate we meet Jim, full name Jiminy, a kind (if somewhat condescending) man who offers supplies and advice; things Nate sorely needs, if he can only admit he needs them. He, of course, cannot. He assures Jim he likes walking around with no shoes to shield his feet or map to guide him. Further up the mountain, Nate encounters Mike, a fellow climber. While Nate climbs to find a private toilet, Mike climbs for no other reward than that of a good challenge. He also has shoes, a map, and even a grappling hook; exemplifying how easy hiking could be, if only we took Jim up on his offer. Instead, Nate is subject to endless backsliding down muddy summits that only make the player's frustration at Nate grow. He may refuse assistance, but we are the ones who must do the hard work of dragging him up the difficult terrain one step at a time.

Though Nate's lies often extend to the people he encounters, they originate as internal lies. Pinocchio lies to indulge in vices that stray from the good behavior that will get his wish granted, while Nate lies in an attempt to avoid any feeling of embarrassment or shame in the presence of those around him. Regardless of intent, the consequences are the same. Pinocchio's nose grows longer as do the obstacles Nate is forced to surmount, as a result of his inability to admit his need for help.

This also leads to Nate falling in with a bad crowd: a group of donkey men constantly swinging their big dicks around. They find Nate early in his climb and, sensing his need for people-pleasing and a lack of purpose, give him a mission. They tell him of an angel who grants each person one wish. Having exhausted their own, they pressure Nate into spending his wish on a large supply of cigarettes. With expectation thrust upon him, how can Nate refuse?

These donkey men inhabit the world of Baby Steps with the same ethos as the children who run away to the Land of Toys in The Adventures of Pinocchio; that is to say, with reckless abandon. Unlike Jim (who seeks to help those around him) or Mike (who enjoys the challenge of the world), the donkey men treat it as a playground in which to drink, smoke, and party. They exude the belief that their actions will have no consequences and behave accordingly.

It isn't until Nate reaches the angel that he is confronted with his inability to choose for himself. Separated from Jim, Mike, and the donkey men, the angel silently requests Nate to speak his heart's desire; to make a wish. At this moment, Nate is neither able to make a choice, nor wish for what others have told him to. He instead chooses to die.

Unfortunately for Nate, this doesn't work.

It's important to say that I do think Nate is suicidal. He is clearly lost and in desperate need of help. But I think this moment with the angel is more about highlighting what sets him apart from Pinocchio. Collodi's puppet, even if he falters at times, is always certain of his wish—to be a real boy. Nate is not sure of anything,and can only begin to face his next steps once the escape of death has been taken away from him.

Whenever Pinocchio fails, Collodi is there to remind the reader that the path forward is simple enough. All the puppet has to do is go to school, work, and obey his father. There is no one to tell Nate what to do. In fact Nate's constant desire for validation from others is his downfall.

In the aftermath of his failed wish, Nate does not really engage with the partying donkey men again. He does, however, trek through a mine. We don't see who works this extensive mine, but its existence recalls the fate of those children in the Land of Toys. Their endless bacchanal transforms them into donkeys and they are later sold off to labor in (amongst other places) salt mines. Their revels would not bring peace to Nate's life.

Although, the idea of Jim as Nate's conscience is also not quite right in the way Jiminy is for Pinocchio. We can choose to take some help from Jim in the form of a staircase that circumvents a cliff face called the Manbreaker. It is a big moment for Nate, letting him (for once) take the easy way. Though there is a slight price. Jim makes Nate call him "Lord" as an admission that Nate could not handle the Manbreaker. This reveals Jim's offers of help to be as condescending as they always seemed.

These characters offer Nate variations on masculinity, Baby Steps's potential models of what real boyhood means, all of which have darker shades to them. The donkey men being so obviously rooted in toxic machismo (literal dick swinging) and Jim offering snark behind his smile (you just know he'd mansplain given the chance). So what is left for Nate?

The only genuinely nice guy is Moose, a seemingly reformed donkey man who remarks to Nate that he has a cabin towards the top of the mountain with a toilet. After hours of trekking, Nate sees the mountain's peak, an arbitrary goal, perhaps the loneliest place in this purgatory; a possible place to pee. Then, up from a whale mouth-sized pit, rises a plume of smoke. In the pit is Moose's cabin; and a real toilet.

Baby Steps, like its inspiration, is a cautionary tale. But unlike Pinocchio, who must escape the whale in yet another test of his determination, Nate's story ends here. Faced with a final decision, Nate must choose either to continue to struggle alone towards the mountaintop or give up ground, fall into the pit, and ask Moose for help. The choice is clear, and this admission not only gives him a warm place to rest and empty his bladder. It allows Nate to define for himself what it means to be a real boy.

***

Willa Bloomfield-Rowe is a queer games critic based in New York City whose writing has been featured in The A.V. Club, Digital Trends, Kotaku, and more. She also hosts the Girl Mode podcast. When she isn’t talking games she can be found on Bluesky bemoaning the state of the New York Mets.

Is It Appropriate for a Grown Man to Have a Big Fat Ass?

Astrid Anne Rose — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

"This entire nightmare could not be happening. It was too outlandish. Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order?"

—Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe

There's a quick gag in Baby Steps when backpacker Jim offers protagonist Nate a map. A minimap blips onscreen with an eagle's caw. With characteristic awkwardness, Nate declines the map. The minimap disappears. The player will not be benefitting from the necessary affordances of a Rockstar epic. Rockstar games, in this case, Red Dead Redemption, signify a rugged, traditional masculinity; men's stories in men's worlds. A map suggests goals, collectibles, and points of interest: a slow conquest of everything. Baby Steps doesn't have any of that. "The dominant mode is dramatic bathos," says friend of the site Nick Capozolli. The level of challenge the game imposes—or in some areas, almost dares you to engage with—doesn't mean there are commensurate rewards in store.

Bennett Foddy's games have inspired a genre of amusingly busted endurance tests like Push It! With Sisyphus, Chained Together, A Difficult Game About Climbing, and Only Up!, to name a few. The Sisyphus angle is baked-in, I think, to any game that puts you through minor gauntlets of granular physical maneuvering. In its constant anticlimax, Baby Steps engages more directly with this allusion than any other Foddylikes. Nate's constant deferring of any assistance in his climb is a parody of masculine self-reliance, as if he's taken his sudden materialization in this mountaineering otherworld as a sign to buck up. Nate doesn't have a family to cast off or responsibilities to shirk in his pursuit—he was plucked from his dank basement couch mid-One Piece binge.

Why Nate? Who knows. Sisyphus was punished for getting one over on the gods, but Nate is an unassuming schlub. He's not hardly worth divine censure. I'd be surprised if he'd ever pursued anything in his life. The same can't be said for au courant looksmaxxer, streamer, and alpha-of-the-month Clavicular. I'm sure you've had a lot of thirtysomething bloggers try to explain this guy to you in the past couple weeks; indulge one more.

Clav is a narcissist on par with that of Greek myth: he's monomaniacally focused on achieving objective physical beauty at all costs. He's brooding and unpleasant, a joyless hedonist unmoved by the attention of women. Sex is not his preferred matter of the flesh, and despite the monstrous superficiality, hitting someone with his car, and the admitted meth use, there is nothing detectably homosexual about Clavicular at all.

Camp, however, abounds. In one clip of the "ASU frat leader framemogging incident" the tousled blonde assassin looms rectangularly behind Clav, like a Thwomp sneaking up on Mario. “Mogging,” for the uninitiated, is to look better than another guy. “Framemogging” is to mog with one’s build, or frame (this is not the same “frame,” or mindset, from MRA lingo). To mog is to belittle by sheer physical beauty; in ballroom the category would be “face.”

So mogged, Clav sulks, looking honestly close to tears at his helplessness in the face of this man's absurd frame. More often than not, Clavicular looks heavy with Byronic moodiness; surely he knows he can never get what he wants, but he's doomed to pursue it.

Camille Paglia wrote that "A woman simply is, but a man must become." Using his eponymous system, and for an undisclosed amount of money, Clavicular will help you become; or, in his words, ascend. He's the yang to Silicon Valley anti-aging obsessive Brian Johnson's yin. Both of them couch their programs in pseudoscientific, Rogan-verse jargon; everything is "stacks" and "protocols." Boys come to Clav, ascend his protocol, and leave looking like men+. Following Brian Johnson's "Don't Die" method will allow you to defeat death, like a mortal granted eternal life by the gods.

Despite streaming on Kick (a sort of Sadean mirror-world Twitch, less far-right than third option "Rumble") Clavicular's politics are incoherent aside from misogyny and self-interest. His viral fame is comprised of a typically murky mix of genuine reach and ironic spectating. His platform is the mog. The mog is God and the mog is precarious, ephemeral, as fickle as the wind. Paglia, again: masculinity is "risky and elusive." It's mog or be mogged out there. The wrong person walks into the restaurant, the bar, the club, and suddenly your cortisol skyrockets. You are no longer the number one guy in the group. The amount of work you have put into reshaping yourself can be trumped by an encounter with any random freak-of-nature hot guy who didn't have to hardmaxx. He just got out of bed that day.

The so-called crisis of masculinity has hit every sector of maledom, leaving avatars like the "dichotomy is crazy" guy to the ailing Jordan Peterson, from Hasan Piker to the tetchy Nick Fuentes. I remember Tucker Max and The Man Show and Girls Gone Wild, so I'm not convinced this is anything new. It's just a hypercurrent self-help grift, with plenty of lore for Substackers to "unpack."

But OK: how should men be? What behavior is or is not pauseworthy for a grown man to engage in? Seed oils or no seed oils? SPF or beef tallow? Learn how to live off the land or drink matcha? Hit yourself in the face with a hammer until your cheekbones pop or paint your nails? Clavicular promises ascension: get hot, get money. Brian Johnson promises you potential immortality. It all sounds terribly confusing, and unfortunately, I don't have any advice. The culture has been peddling bullshit to women since god knows when, and we still fall for it.

Nate might reject help to the point of absurdity+, but the thing is, he can go it alone. As Ed wrote, Nate may be bullheaded, but he's uncommonly skilled at moving his body from one place to another. In the end, now that we understand the territory, we’re finally given that map, tracing the messy circuit of Nate's journey. In this surreal hinterland, he has found something he's good at, or at least something he can apply himself to in full, an opportunity it's safe to say never crossed his path while he smoked out his parents' basement. Never anyone's idea of an alpha, he has still managed to ascend.

///

+ Pause.

++ "I love my body," exults one of the game's many bipedal donkey-men, wearing only a hoodie, his loose penis swinging low. "I love it too," Nate parrots. Whatever will get him through the current conversation.

***

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.

Manbreaker

Ed Smith — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There are two articles I wanted to write about Baby Steps, one short, one long. They’re both in here. The short one comes first.

Fully Dynamic Onesie Soilage System

I played Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided around the same time as I was playing Baby Steps, and I tell you, robotically enhanced super soldier Adam Jensen couldn’t possibly navigate the strangled, fractured, and all-round anti-traversable world that is surmounted by chubby adult toddler Nate. I kept thinking about Skyrim as well, where you play the mythical, dragon-blood-infused Dovahkiin/chosen one, but the only way you can get over slopes of moderate or above gradient is by horseback. Regardless of their preternatural abilities as written, it only takes a waist-high obstacle or a path narrower than the breadth of their shoulders to render most videogame heroes useless. I think of Master Chief, stuck running on the spot because the hill he’s trying to climb is too steep for his movement animations to accommodate, or Lara Croft, unable to mantle a ledge because it has a slightly irregularly angled lip, not one that’s 90 degrees.

These are contrivances of direction and path-finding, ways of corralling the player along a game’s golden route. There are times when this type of artifice might be too much for our suspension of disbelief—why can’t you go up this staircase in Silent Hill 2 Remake? But usually, visible-invisible walls like these are tolerable oddities of videogame language. We accept them as the mechanisms that make the more crucial parts of games work, until we discover and formalise more graceful mechanisms.

Nevertheless, they lead to a strange paradox in Baby Steps, a game which is at least partly premised on its protagonist’s slapstick inability to walk like a normal videogame character notionally walks. We’re meant to see Nate as something of a clown, and the experience of playing Baby Steps is designed to make us more consciously aware of the actions and inputs that we typically take for granted in videogames. But the controls, animations and multifaceted movement mechanics of Baby Steps mean that Nate is considerably more able to traverse difficult terrain than the archetypal game heroes to which he is subtextually being compared. Nate is also relatively free to go where he likes—although some paths are easier to walk than others, Baby Steps encourages you to find your own, often esoteric, means of reaching the next geographical waypoint, so compared to a lot of other games, where your sense of a place is defined by where you can’t go, in Baby Steps, you’re rarely curtailed by artificial borders. This is not to make judgements either on Baby Steps or the nucleic conventions of videogames that it invites you to notice, except to say that games are perhaps so detectably artificial and contrived already that their contrivance is difficult to parody or satirise, and that it’s equally hard for a game-maker to ‘make a point’ by exploiting or exaggerating those artificialities. Although they’re extremely absurd, Baby Steps’ movement and navigation mechanics are arguably less absurd than the movement and navigation mechanics that we accept in games as normal.

Donkeys v. Crickets

Yussef characterises Baby Steps’ vision of a certain kind of maleness: “unmothered men making due through expressions of nonsensical masculinity.” If the canonical ending, Nate and Moose together in their cabin, feels like any kind of resolution, it’s because it creates the impression that the pair have successfully escaped from, or risen above (they are literally on top of a mountain) the cruder, more emotionally stunted world of macho heterosexual men that they’ve encountered throughout their journey. The dramatic climax of Baby Steps is when Nate asks Moose if he can come into the cabin, his small expression of vulnerability, need and willingness to seek help representative of a kind of graduation from the insecure and solipsistic ‘masculinity’ symbolised by the majority of the game’s characters. If the game’s understanding of men up until this point feels superficial, even misanthropic (you’re either one of the donkeys, a rude, overbearing braggart preoccupied with his basest sensual urges, represented in Baby Steps by drinking and smoking, or you’re Nate, the meek, directionless, physically unripe loser) this ending suggests that these two unrefined ‘types’ of maleness, rather than being in opposition, together form a kind of crucible, in which a third, more complete man might be forged. Given the rough terrain, harsh climates and withering setbacks that he faces, Nate has to ‘man up’. But all that priapism is for naught unless he can also, in the end, find qualities like communication, emotional availability, and sympathy and empathy.

But this optimistic vision of how maleness can be shaped is contradicted by a number of other sequences. As Nate nears the top of the mountain and Moose’s cabin, he meets a gigantic woman who picks him up, cradles him, and sings to him like he’s a baby, and then places him down atop an otherwise insurmountable ice shelf, helping him on his way. During a short hallucination sequence, Nate also imagines the sound of his mother’s voice, gently encouraging and guiding him through a labyrinthine abstraction of his family’s house. Although these characters only appear fleetingly, they are both maternal, supportive, reassuring, and loving mother figures. The giant woman is a caricature of motherhood. Nate’s mother is literally his mother. If the game invites you to discover or appreciate a more complex vision of maleness, femininity by contrast is rendered in an elemental form. The game seems to appreciate the possibility of a nuanced man. It doesn’t seem to have the same kind of appreciation for the possibility of a nuanced woman.

The women in Baby Steps inhabit the strictest roles of their gender—they are mothers and suppliers of gentleness. The giant can also be reverse engineered to quasi Freudian, psychosexual domination fantasies, the mother who can physically destroy her manchild, the mommy domme. In that reading, Baby Steps becomes even more of a game from a male point of view, one where women, if not to be mothers in the domestic sense, exist for sexualisation. The suddenness of the giant woman’s appearance—the jump cut to her holding Nate like a baby—also makes her scene feel as if it’s being played for comedy. Baby Steps is a comedy game and the sequence with the giant uses the same visual language and tone as the other joke scenes. As well as introducing an icon of stereotypified, sexualised womanhood, the scene invites us to laugh at, or at least find bemusing, Nate’s fragility and softness here. It begins to feel as if the game’s ‘voice’ is more that of the donkeys, who have relatively flat ideas about what it means to be a man, and by implication, a woman, too.

If you choose to use the stairs rather than climbing the gigantic Manbreaker mountain, Jim will meet Nate at the top and mock him for not having the courage to take on and surmount the rock face. On the surface, the scene serves to further define Jim as the embodiment of that certain kind of insecure, bumptious masculinity—implying the ludicrousness and superficiality of a masculine want for status, he insists that Nate has to call him ‘lord’ from now on. He also makes Nate wear a sticker which identifies him as a member of ‘Jiminy’s Crickets,’ that is, a derogatory, informal ‘club’ comprised entirely of men who were unable to climb the Manbreaker and had to take the stairs; men who Jim’s derided for their deficiency of testicular forbearance; weak men. Momentarily, it seems as if we’re supposed to feel sorry for Nate, and in turn, a certain suspiciousness and resentment towards Jim and what he represents. But then we get an achievement: “Jiminy’s Cricket - Joined the hallowed ranks of Jiminy’s Crickets.” The Steam icon for this achievement is Jim’s hand pushing the sticker down on the head of a miniaturised, literally baby-sized version of Nate. Combined with the sarcasm dripping from “hallowed ranks” it's as if the game itself is now taking its turn making fun of Nate and his weakness

The physical environment of Baby Steps is unremittingly hostile towards Nate. Long periods of his progress can be wiped out by single, tiny, innocent mistakes. Even the flattest fields and gentlest slopes are booby trapped with ridges to trip him up and make him fall flat on his face. It creates the impression of a world that is intolerant of imperfection. Baby Steps often feels like reality as perceived by the donkeys, or more specifically, like a reflection of a worldview consistent with dogmatic and aggressive types of masculinity, where everything is a competition, the superior eat the inferior, and the only way to win is to never accept anything from yourself that is less than flawless—and where winning is all that matters. In combination with the plinky-plonky music score, composed largely from comedy sound effects arranged in madcap disorder, the game often seems to participate in humiliating Nate.

But there is a final doubling back, as it were. The implied ending of Baby Steps with Moose and Nate together suggests that the game is ultimately ‘on his side,’ and perhaps on the side of the maleness that he represents rather than the donkeys. However, if you return to your save game and take Nate on a final walk to the mountain’s very summit, there is a hidden, actual ending which arguably illustrates that point with greater clarity. Nate opens the crotch of his onesie and, in a final act of transfiguration, starts to urinate outdoors; throughout the game, his unwillingness and inability to do this has been a metaphor for his insecurity and lack of manliness relative to the other characters. Suddenly, Mike, another hiker, one who was able to climb the Manbreaker, seemingly with ease, appears behind Nate and makes him jump: “Having a wee, Nate?” he barks. For a second, Nate freezes. His stream sputters. He’s nervous. Mike, however, is merely a figment of his imagination—when Nate looks around, he’s disappeared. Relaxing, he starts to urinate again, and this is the game’s final image: Nate, having apparently dispelled the spectre of a more bullying, judgemental type of maleness, at last at peace. His ‘softer’ virtues remain intact—his home is with Moose, and among all that that represents. But he is also, at last, reconciled with his gender, symbolised, in this moment, by his indulging one of the multitudinous privileges that come with having a penis. If Baby Steps is often party to bullying and degrading Nate, in the finale at least, in its own especially crude way, it seems proud of him, having dragged himself free from his impotent basement life without losing himself to, or assimilating, the donkey state of mind.

***

Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.

Mirror Stage

Yussef Cole — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To play a videogame, to control a digital avatar, often means treating that avatar as an idealized version of oneself. In role playing games like Skyrim and Final Fantasy, the player becomes the unknown hero with those newfound powers, and internalizes that character’s elevated stats and ultra-rare gear. In fighting games like Street Fighter the player becomes the duke’s-up heavy hitter, maps their brain to the exact inputs required to pull off a super move, the right order of buttons to execute a flawless combo chain. In shooters like Call of Duty, the player becomes the invincible super soldier, lugging around an armory’s worth of weaponry, soaking up bullets and making impossible headshots from dozens of yards away. Through these digital representatives, the player leaves behind their own sorry flesh and embraces the temporary perfection of an idealized double.

In 1949, the French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan coined the concept of the mirror stage, the moment when a toddler is first presented with their reflection in a mirror. Before this point, the child is boundless, a formless mass of sensations. Looking at their reflection allows the child to manifest a sense of self. The mirror image allows the child to visualize themselves, and in so doing, to idealize themselves, to see themselves as whole, as a person who makes sense, not merely the confused miasma of drives and anxieties they were composed of mere moments ago. “...this form,” writes Lacan in his original essay on the subject, “...situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction…” The mirror lies, or, more accurately, the subject uses the mirror to lie.

Similarly, the player uses the videogame to lie. Most games lie and promise the player that he or she can do anything; that if he or she keeps bashing themselves against a problem, he or she will inevitably solve it. Baby Steps is not interested in affirming this lie. Though aspects of the game are as artificial as anything else in the medium—like the protagonist, Nate’s, thighs of steel, or his unbreakable teddy bear body—the game rings truer than most. It depicts a gross, unfriendly world, explored by a chubby man-child, in soiled pajamas, trudging along on the slimy permafrost, stubbing his toe, and farting. He must climb up taller and taller mountain slopes, survive mudslides and rushing rivers, all while being an all-around ungainly mess, a stiff-limbed nincompoop, stubbornly refusing wisdom or guidance, afraid of his shadow, afraid to ask for aid, afraid to be seen. Reflected in this image is the frightened, disgusting child in each of us, normally hidden behind the bluster and bravado; the hollow performance behind faking it ‘til you make it, the painful kernel of truth embedded in imposter syndrome.

Before seeing themself in the mirror, the subject has no way to align their perception of the world with the experience of being a body living in that world. The mirror establishes, according to Lacan, “...a relation between the organism and its reality.” “In man,” he continues, “...this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal months.” We are born too soon. Thrust out of the womb, unable to properly survive, unlike most animals, humans must be nurtured, and protected before they can feel capable. As a part of this development, the mirror allows the subject to wrap themselves in the illusion that they are functional and whole well before they might authentically feel that way.

Achievement Unlocked. You are a person. Congratulations. Your thoughts and desires make sense. You are the hero of your story. Just… don’t look too closely at your reflection’s gleaming surface, or you’ll make out the indentations where the paint has been layered over the cracks, like spackle laid over shoddy drywall.

An important aspect of the mirror stage theory is that the toddler, being so small and inept, cannot physically stand on their own in front of the mirror—they must be supported by a parental figure who helps and cajoles the child into recognizing their image, enforcing their own values and worldview onto the child as a result. In his tenth seminar, Lacan describes how the child “turns round…to the one supporting him who’s there behind him…” and “with this nutating movement of the head… he seems to be asking the one supporting him… to ratify the value of this image.”

Baby Steps is full of references to the maternal figure and the nature of growth and development with (and often without) her comforting support. The game kicks off with a brutal moment of birth: Nate is zapped away from his embryonic basement hideaway and flushed out into an underground lake before swimming sputtering to the surface. Later in the game, he wanders through a dream-like looping vision of his family’s home, stumbling after the disembodied voice of his mother calling to him. In the snowy mountaintops, a giant woman sits waiting. When Nate approaches, she picks him gently up and rocks him slowly, letting him drift briefly off to sleep. These visions and fantasies reflect Nate’s yearning for a maternal presence to hold him up, to tell him it’s okay. Without that necessary support, the child staggers and falls, unable to properly gaze at their reflection and make sense of themselves.

Baby Step’s world is populated by unmothered men making due through expressions of nonsensical masculinity: stomping around nude, badgering the noobs for cigarettes, gorging on what looks to be milk or cum, reeling in desperate, frivolous abandon. Forced to stand on their own, these men shape their own twisted reality: they swim in shit and build massive, silly sandcastles, temples of pointless, manic production, made from the residue of loss.

As for Nate, and the player, all there is is to keep climbing and never stop. Press one button, lift Nate’s left leg, press another, lift his right one; continue and continue and continue. Keep climbing the mountain to get to the top, to get to a place where things might possibly make sense.

Just before the mountain’s supposed peak lies the solitary cabin of Moose, the one donkey-man who is ever truly friendly or warm to Nate during his journey. Working up the nerve to finally ask for help and companionship, Nate may end the game here, and, in the warmth of this welcoming space, find rest.

Yet: the game immediately fades up an interstitial menu which offers the player the prompt to “go for a walk.” The player must press it several times before Nate is finally roused, complaining of “Ants in my pants,” as if noticing the unseen player, who forces him up and out of the safety of the cabin. Nate is, after all, the player’s reflection. If he cannot serve to mask the player’s internal discordance, what good is he? He must become infected with the player’s anxiety, become more perfect and more ideal. He takes a few steps out of the cabin and inevitably falls on his face. A few more steps and he unceremoniously slides down a ravine. Every step in Baby Steps is an act of resistance, a movement away from the supposed ideal sought after in the game’s image. The image in this mirror retreats, leaving the player alone with its absence.

***

Whispered Poetry

Gareth Damian Martin — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Poetic is not a term I often use to describe games. Perhaps because, even after spending years toiling away on a PhD in poetics and teaching undergraduate students in the subject, I find it evades precise description. Does 'poetic' refer to an author’s propensity to use allusions, metaphors, and allegories? Or perhaps verse-like language structures, where meaning is implied, not stated? Or is it just a stand in for emotional impact, deployed when a synonym is needed? Whichever it might be, it seems like other critics are as reticent to use it as I am. I can’t think of a recent game that was widely considered or described as poetic. In fact it feels like there might be something fundamental to games that excludes them from the poetic completely, as if their need for systems, maths, and strategy rob them of the ability to evoke poetry.

And yet, given all this, Many Nights a Whisper is a game I would call poetic. It’s a game where, sitting down to try to capture what its one hour experience evoked, poetry was the first thing that came to my mind. I suppose it begins with the title, an allusive epithet that stands out amongst a form where names so often are statements of direct action. Popular suffixes for game titles are often terms like -fall, -war, -craft. Percussive and direct, they have their own poetry, but is it really poetic? Meanwhile, “Many Nights a Whisper” is a weather-worn fragment, a chunk of terracotta found without subject or object, inviting your curiosity and input. It’s a gorgeous title, a lyric not a pronouncement.

But we are talking language here—of course it can be poetic. A game title can be poetry, and “Many Nights a Whisper” certainly is. But Many Nights a Whisper also contains poetry in its most irrefutable form:

“Oh, Dreamer behind the wall

Hear my heart’s faint call

Dreamer take my braid

Or watch the dream turn gray”

A stanza of verse, a prayer, spoken to you (the dreamer) each night as you decide whether to grant a person's wish or not. This is the subject of Many Nights a Whisper; the preparations for a ritual where you must fire a flaming ball from a sling into a vast torch, lighting it and granting the wishes of those whose braided hair was donated to your cause. It's a simple structure: each day you train as much or as little as you like, testing your sling and your accuracy on a variety of different targets. Each night you accept or refuse the unseen people’s whispered wishes, taking their braided hair if you do, strengthening the power of your sling. If, on the fated night, you manage to hit the distant target, all the wishes you accepted will be granted, as a new age begins.

This is what makes Many Nights a Whisper poetic: not verse or allusions, not even language, (much of its text is resolutely prosaic) but the ritual it creates, stages, and complicates over the course of the game. Forget rhyming couplets, this is a design that rhymes, that repeats. Each day a stanza that complicates the whole. Wishes are added to the tally, wishes you carry the weight of as you practice your drills. Petulant, grand, selfish, expansive, impossible, bizarre, human wishes. They run the gamut from wishing for eternal life, to wishing for a patch of extinct flowers to return. From the total abolition of gender, to the granting of a pink cat invisible to all but its owner. Those wishes become increasingly difficult to grant with ease, bringing into question free will, utopian thinking, and personal gain over societal change. The game circles back, goes again, finds pattern and lyricism in repeated action, in layering meanings, outcomes onto that action. Being a container for poetry does not make a game poetic, but a thesis expressed in design, in player experience and interaction, does.

The last time I felt the same kind of poetic quality was with Playdead’s highly lauded Inside. The game has occupied my mind since it was released in 2016, and I must have replayed it tens of times. Each time, I kept having this sense that the game was a “prose poem”, a form that I love deeply. Something in the running-on of its locations in sequence evokes not a story, but a thesis, an inquiry. It's not a series of plot events, and instead a self-reflective open form. The repeated puzzles and set pieces that all explore ideas of authority and control seem intended to rhyme, to color each other. It is a game without language, not a single word spoken, but to me it has always felt like a balance of the prosaic—logical, narrative, sequenced—and the poetic—affective, connective, circular. A prose poem. So there was nothing more satisfying than, in my many playthroughs, to uncover, hidden in a symbol language within the game, the title of an E.E. Cummings poem: "Pity this busy monster manunkind." It felt like the rosetta stone to critically understanding Inside as a poetic form, to understanding what a poetic game might be.

Many Nights a Whisper and Inside share this poetic quality. Both are interested in staging poetic situations that the player must then navigate and experience. Actions carry meaning beyond plot or narrative, and instead feel symbolic, exploratory. Both have a compressed, circular feeling, a spiral of meaning that depends on every twist and return. But they differ too. Many Nights a Whisper finds poetry in ritual. The entire game is staged around two rituals: the lighting of the torch, and more importantly, the whispering of the wishes. This engagement with ritual is perhaps the key to understanding how it is poetic as a game. Its developers understand ritual is not about superstition, but about a poetic vision of reality. Ancient peoples did not believe the moon was a rabbit, or the sun pulled by horses in a literal sense. They understood it in a poetic sense. That is to say, how is the moon a rabbit? What might casting the moon as a rabbit elucidate about its qualities, its meanings? What might calling the sun a chariot say about power, violence, and strength? How does it reflect the role the sun plays in our life? In the same way, the rituals of Many Nights a Whisper are not concerned with the literal magic of granting wishes, but instead the poetic power that whispered wishes might carry. How might a wish change the world by being spoken?

In this way, Many Nights a Whisper has helped me to understand how a game might be poetic. It demonstrates a refusal of literalism, and an engagement with ritual, performance, and the staging of a thesis. This has always been the power of poetry: to take a quotidian material, language, one we use and experience unthinkingly everyday, and to transform it. To draw strange comparisons and allusions between objects (“how is a raven like a writing desk?”) in order to transform or at least to allude to a transformation; to express the inexpressible through tricks of syntax and meaning. Many Nights a Whisper ends, whether your shot is successful or not, before the granting of the wishes. That is because it is a game about wishing, not about getting. It is a game about how language might change the world. About desires both fulfilled and unfulfilled, and how they shape us in action and speech. And it is interested in how staging such thoughts through ritual complicates them, brings them to life, and provides a poetic space for the player to reflect within. How, it asks, can we perform a shift, can we change the world, with language? Be it thought, spoken, sung, or perhaps, in the dark of night, whispered.

***

Gareth Damian Martin is a writer, designer and artist. They make games as the one-person studio Jump Over the Age, and are the creator of Citizen Sleeper, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and In Other Waters.

Dead as Dreams

Astrid Anne Rose — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This article discusses plot details from throughout The Seance of Blake Manor.

Spooky Doorway's The Seance of Blake Manor is an adventure game with elements of Return of the Obra Dinn, Ace Attorney, and Danganronpa, which is to say it's about digging up dirt on people and confronting them with your findings. You play investigator Declan Ward, come west from Dublin to Connemara to look into the disappearance of Evelyn Deane from Blake Manor+. Deane and many others are gathered at Blake Manor for a grand séance held by the mystic Carmela Mantovani on behalf of Marquess Jonathan Blake.

The game quickly and elegantly introduces you to the entire cast, establishes the stakes, and educates you on its clutch of systems, with none of this feeling like a laborious tutorial or throwaway prelude to the main events. As Ward comes across evidence it's added to his mind-map, where it can be pieced into a hypothesis or raised in conversation with certain characters. Everybody at Blake Manor has a secret. Forming hypotheses about those secrets lets you confront people, dragging their motives into the light and hopefully dissuading them from attending the grand séance, which is obviously bad news.

Cards on the table, I'm generally skeptical of first-person adventure games where the player has freedom of movement through the environment. Point-and-click or grid-based styles always feel like better approximations of space; in a Gone Home-like, or a Blue Prince-like, you spend a lot of time digging uselessly through 3D environments for things to click on. The detail of the space, the weight of it, becomes a series of invisible stretches between hotspots. In a point-and-click game, you move between discrete, composed scenes that present specific information like a photograph. Even pixel-hunting crudely approximates rifling through drawers or stacks of paper. Séance of Blake Manor cheats the shortcomings of 3D adventure games by giving Ward an Arkham Asylum-esque "detective vision" that highlights any clickable object in view. On its face this is ridiculous, of course: this guy can enter a room he's never been in before and instantly highlight the remains of a magic ritual hidden beneath a bed, or a jewelry box on a dresser ten feet away. It's an approximation of investigative acumen—and, to be fair, a "show all hotspots" button is common in point-and-click adventures—but it's also something I barely used. The game's bright, inky colors and sparing set design effectively communicate points of interest, and Ward collates anything relevant into his mind-map.

At this point I'm going to spoil the game's mystery, which is genuinely engaging and genre-literate, so if you want to play this I suggest you do and come back to my truncated summary later. I also want to apologize to Spooky Doorway, who surely in releasing this game did not intend to provoke Americans to speak on Irish history.

Marquess Blake's séance is intended to harvest the magical energy of the guests in order to heal his crippled son Walter, of whom there are many portraits around the manor. The Marquess and staff all say Walter, injured in the accident that killed his mother, lives in the residence, an area of the manor inaccessible until the climax. In fact, Walter is not real; he never was. The portraits are highly skilled forgeries done by ostensible widowed artist Simon Coventry, who is actually Henry Blake, the Marquess's older cousin. Coventry was nearly killed and effectively dispossessed by the Marquess's father when he was young. He fled with his mother and spent his subsequent years learning as much as he could about the manor and its secrets in preparation for reclaiming his birthright.

Mythology and history are so incumbent upon Blake Manor's plot that there is an in-game library Ward has to visit countless times to progress his investigation, researching topics like Irish mythology, gnosticism, and medicine. One of the manor's many secrets is the slumbering immortal Goibniu, locked away in a subterranean chamber. Goibniu is one of the Tuath Dé Danann, generally referred to in Irish myth as the precursor race to the áes sídhe or fair folk, and the race that shares Ireland with the Milesians, or humans. The blood of those killed during Oliver Cromwell's ethnic cleansing of Ireland seeped into the ground and infected Goibniu's dreams. Coventry uses a "shrine of images" to further warp Goibniu's dreams and conjure the reality of Walter Blake in the minds of everyone attending the séance; like those of the caged angel in Thomas Ligotti's "Miss Rinaldi's Angel," Goibniu's dreams become "maggots of the mind and soul." Using Jonathan Blake's blood, Coventry will free Goibniu from his tormented slumber and in return ask to have his youth restored++, thus reclaiming Blake Manor while incarnated as the young Walter Blake, fully legitimate in the eyes of the law and the manor's inhabitants.

The mention of Oliver Cromwell jumped out at me. Per historian Mark Levene, Cromwell's "extirpation of the Irish revolt" of 1641 was "recognisably akin to the ‘dirty’ counter-insurgency wars of the twentieth century" where an imperial power "seeks to win a struggle against an alternative political programme by treating not just the insurgents but their whole supporting population as equally guilty and thereby expendable."

The staunchly Protestant Cromwell also saw his campaign against the Catholic Irish as a divine crusade. Historian A.J.P. Taylor says "God was for Cromwell what the general will was for Robespierre or the proletariat for Lenin: the justification for anything he wished to do."

With this in mind: Blake Manor was given to Edward Blake as spoils of war by Cromwell after the end of Cromwell's genocide in 1652. The Act for the Settlement of Ireland "re-settled" the land won back only a decade prior by the Irish Catholic Confederation, bottling up the native Irish population on a Connacht preservation while 10 million acres of expropriated land were divvied up among underwriters of the war and members of Cromwell's army. However, this newly landed cohort did not account for the whole of Ireland and no mass migration of English Protestant settlers was forthcoming, so the remainder of the expropriated land was owned by English landlords and rented to Irish "tenants," many of whom were renting the same land they had lived on previously.

Coventry's intricate revenge plot—inventing a suitable heir, writing that fictional heir into reality, and then becoming that heir—is what Levene calls the "model perpetrator's 'never again' syndrome" in microcosm. "‘Never again’ would the Irish be allowed to harm righteous Protestants but also ‘never again’ would they be allowed to defy English order." Rights for me and not for thee; the logic of Coventry's revenge can't be extended to the people who predate his claim on the land. His revenge has the veneer of righteousness, but underneath it's nothing but score-settling. The "dream" of birthright is inherently poisoned; it rests on a selective and self-serving narrative.

By rooting out petty grievances and musty grudges and convincing his fellow guests not to attend the séance, Ward effectively marshals facts and logic into battle against self-delusion. The conventions of the adventure game serve him well here. But Coventry can't simply be dissuaded from his revenge; the detective mechanics are useless against him because the facts of his past, his buried trauma, are a fiction. Ward instead has to fill in the blanks around the real Coventry-Blake, winding closer to the truth of his identity and his motive by groping in the dark. Beneath Blake Manor, the tainted dreams of Goibniu radiate, soaking the manor in a false reality where the land belongs to whoever's name is on the deed and the path of history is true and just.

+++

+This is one of those games where the artstyle is "inspired by" an artist, in this case Mike Mignola, and we all understand "inspired by" to mean "it looks exactly like" Mike Mignola!"

++In doing so, Coventry is weaponizing "Irishness" itself, warping folklore and history into a propaganda narrative. Irish-Americans should be familiar with the notion.

***

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.

Plasticky Taste

Ed Smith — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When Dawn of the Dead’s four protagonists, Roger, Peter, Stephen, and Fran, first break into the uppermost floor of Monroeville Mall, they find a large reserve of CD V-777-1s—cardboard boxes filled with basic medical supplies, bottled water, dried and canned food, and the rudiments for building a shelter, issued by the United States Civil Defense department throughout the 1950s and 60s. During their first night and day in the mall, the heroes subsist on the V-777-1’s spartan contents, passing around square tins of heat-treated beef and using some of the unopened boxes for makeshift chairs. They look like they are surviving. They look like how people are supposed to look at the end of the world.

We have already seen the civil unrest that is boiling outside of the mall. The first time we meet Peter and Roger, they are part of a SWAT team storming a tower block in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, because the residents insist on keeping their undead relatives in the basement rather than turning them over to the government to be destroyed. “Why do these people keep them here?” Roger asks, as he helps eliminate the zombies that have been bound, gagged, and secreted in the boiler room. “Because they still believe there’s respect in dying,” Peter replies. In this exchange, the gun battle between the police and the people living in the tower is recontextualised into a clash between the state and the rules of the state, and the creeds and cultural practices of an ethnic minority. The immortal, immutable conflicts of race and class seemingly still exist, despite the zombie apocalypse.

This is the world from which Dawn of the Dead’s four main characters are trying to escape. Between the Cold War, the Red Scare, Jim Crow, college riots, the Hippie movement, and the Great Migration, the ‘50s and ‘60s in America represent periods of enormous social transformation and volatility. Romero’s film itself arrives in 1978, but in the earliest scenes in the mall, Peter, Roger, Fran, and Stephen resemble denizens of the immediate post-McCarthy era, retreating from the chaos outside into their metaphorical fallout shelter. Alongside the Civil Defense supply boxes, Roger and Peter’s guns are icons of modern America’s most transfigurative epoch, the same M-16 rifles issued to general infantry in Vietnam.

Fleeing from the symbolic ‘50s and ‘60s, the four gradually secure greater sections of the inside of Monroeville Mall, gathering more possessions in the process. Initially, they only want for the essentials of survival: tools, a radio, more food, a map of the mall. But as they clear more space, block all the doors with trucks and ultimately rid the mall of zombies entirely, they start ‘shopping’ for luxury goods. They get a television, a refrigerator, and a stove. They drink wine and eat expensive cheese, and have a trio of cut-glass decanters for gin, scotch, and bourbon. Peter and Roger discard their police-issue jumpsuits and start dressing in silk shirts and leather brogues. The bare storage room that the group first breaks into is converted into an approximation of a high-rent condo, complete with a Bang and Olufsen hi-fi system, potted plants, and a spice rack.

In combination with the various montages of zombies shambling around in the mall, you can see why Dawn of the Dead is often analysed as a criticism or satire of consumerism and commerce. ‘The desire for status symbols, for things, for stuff is a mindless one and will make a monster out of you,’ the film seems to suggest. The zombies’ animal-instinct appetite for flesh is a simple metaphor for greed. But Dawn of the Dead is perhaps shrewder and more sinister than it initially appears, and rather than the horrors of blind consumption, is more ‘about’ the existential horror that we experience once we achieve a certain degree of material comfort.

If the 1950s and 60s were marked by civil turmoil and a fear of annihilation from nuclear war, the late '70s and the '80s are conversely defined by prosperity and power, and America strengthening its economic, political, and military positions. The Soviet-Afghan war and the eventual collapse of the USSR helped instantiate the US as the dominant international superpower. Financial markets were deregulated, income and capital gains tax were progressively reduced, and advances in technology alongside free trade with Japan meant an influx of new electronic and labour-saving appliances. “We are the people who have thrown the windows of our souls wide open to the sun,” said Ronald Reagan in 1981, paraphrasing the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The big threats to national security were all gone—and you could buy everything you wanted.

In this context, Dawn of the Dead feels more like a film about boredom, aimlessness, and a spiral into apathy; the alienation and directionlessness that might follow once you have too much stuff and not enough strife. A selection of defining images:

Fran and Stephen in bed together

Fran walking through the ‘apartment’ that the group has arranged on the top floor of the mall

Stephen and Fran strolling through the mall itself

Fran applying makeup in the mirror

The slapsticky ‘Gonk’ remains the iconic track of Dawn of the Dead’s score, but ‘Sun High’ feels more fitting for its themes of estrangement and lassitude.

By the 1980s, America had won the Cold War and succeeded in building its (seemingly) invincible economy. There were no foreign enemies left to defeat and the social despair that seemed to define the ‘50s and ‘60s was now at such a remove that it could be ignored entirely, the white middle-class having pulled (or rather, having been pushed) so materially far in front of the blue-collars, the immigrants, the minorities, and the unemployed that they essentially lived in a different country. For most of the 20th century, even for the most insulated suburbanites, the course of American society might have felt tumultuous and unreliable. But in the final decades before the millennium, with no Commies, the perception of a bright new financial world, and simple solutions apparently available for every problem (“Just say no”), for a lot of the country there was nothing left to do.

This is the position that Peter, Fran, and Stephen find themselves in once the zombies in the mall have been killed or locked out, and they’re free to plunder the stores. When they arrive in the mall, their survival is uncertain. After a few weeks, the only danger that remains is a paradoxical absence of danger. The home that they make isn’t destroyed by the zombies, but by a gang of bandits—as is often the case in zombie fiction, the real threat is not the undead but other people. In Dawn of the Dead, this becomes symbolic of the idea that in a comfortable, middle-class, and materially rich world the only enemy that remains is the proverbial self—when no external threats exist, we inevitably turn inwards. More than two billion Valium tablets were reportedly prescribed and consumed in 1978. Fran, Stephen, and Peter become ironic heroes of this age, paragons of a society where people now have the luxury to drown in the abyss of the soul.+

///

The same on-screen message marks the beginning of every new Project Zomboid savegame: “These are the end times. There was no hope of survival. This is how you died.” But although death, zombie-related or otherwise++, is probable in Zomboid, it is not inevitable, and the reason that you typically finish with a savegame is because you get bored.

A lot of survival games (The Forest, DayZ, The Long Dark, Rust, Green Hell, Don’t Starve) are set in expressly hostile wilderness environments where basic resources like drinkable water are scarce. Zomboid by contrast takes place in the semi-fictional ‘Knox Country’, an approximation of the real-world city of Louisville and its outskirts, designed using actual maps and topographical data.

It’s 1993 and the zombie apocalypse has only just begun. While the owners have become undead, their shops and houses are still filled with fresh and canned food, clothes, guns, tools, CDs, VHS tapes, and essentially everything else you would find in abundance in contemporary America. Even the furniture can be broken down into planks of wood, strips of metal, and constitutional electronic parts for reuse in the extensive crafting menu. The entire Zomboid map is essentially one gigantic mall.

It will take semi experienced players perhaps three or four in-game days to gather everything they need to stay alive indefinitely, and secure for themselves a reasonable fortress against the zombies. Despite its initial survival game overtones, your and your character’s struggle in Project Zomboid quickly becomes the same as Fran’s, Stephen’s, Peter’s, and Roger’s in Dawn of the Dead: what to do after you have everything? The typical Zomboid character is the embodiment of that same material-made ennui that affects Romero’s heroes, in possession of so much stuff that all worldly endeavouring becomes moot, and the only thing left to contend with is the self. Especially in comparison to genre contemporaries, where the search for and gathering and stockpiling of life-preserving resources forms the ‘gameplay loop,’ the quantity and availability of items in Project Zomboid means the focus of your efforts turns inward even within the opening hours. Grinding and building your character’s carpentry, metalwork, foraging, pottery, and other skills becomes a crude simile for a more encompassing ‘personal development.’ You overpower your enemies. You can get every and any material thing that you like. The main thing that you are left to fight with, build upon and metaphorically colonise is your in-game self.

Like Dawn of the Dead, Project Zomboid begins to feel like a grotesque of over-comfortable suburbanism, a world where the principles of commerce, property, materialism, and self actualisation are so entrenched and ingrained that they continue to exist even after the dead rise from their graves and kill and eat the living. It is a game about finding stuff and getting stuff, but with the sick joke that getting the stuff is so trivially easy, in this country, at this time, that the undertaking becomes hollow. Project Zomboid’s creator The Indie Stone acknowledges the original Sims as one of its biggest visual influences. But Zomboid’s resemblance to Maxis’ 2000 masterpiece+++ is more than aesthetic. In The Sims, the ostensible richness of modern life is represented via reductive and dispassionate metres and bars, which empty and refill depending on what they eat, what they do, and how nice their home looks. Your character’s needs, drives, and aspirations are thus expressed as quantifiable data, creating the impression that so long as you do X, own Y, and achieve Z, you will be able to ‘maximise’ your Sim’s life, as one might maximise the value of a stock or property portfolio. This is often stifled however by the game’s capriciousness and darkly comic cruelty—as soon as you buy the ‘Back Slack’ recliner that generates +6 Comfort and +3 Energy, it will be destroyed because your microwave catches fire, or stolen by a burglar, or you will have to sell it, at a loss, because you get fired from your job. Alternatively, you’ll get lucky, and then you can start saving for the ‘Von Braun’ recliner, which has +9 Comfort. Either way, The Sims implies that the gratification of material need in and of itself is inadequate, that life and happiness are subject to forces that can’t be allayed by owning stuff. On first apprehension, there seems to be a straightforward solution to your Sims’ problems, where more things means more effective replenishment of their bars. But the experience is actually subordinate to invisible, immaterial gameplay functions. Both Zomboid and The Sims initially suggest that the whole point of the game is to get things, but their subsequent layers retroactively emphasise the vapidity of getting things.

It was patched out in subsequent versions, but build 41 of Project Zomboid had an exploit where television sets were invincible. You could place a TV in your doorway or at the foot of your staircase, and no matter how many undead flailed and bashed against it, they couldn’t ever get through, so that the strongest and longest lasting bases in that particular build were the ones encapsulated by a perimeter of television sets. This feels like the ideal metaphor for another flavour of middle-class tedium, where you anaesthetise yourself with boxsets, subscription services, consumer electronics, videogames, and toys; where you ‘beat’ or defend yourself from reality by escaping from it. If Zomboid is partly a game about the wilting power of consumerism, and partly about the melancholy and insularity that the same consumerism produces, the image of the protagonist both protected and imprisoned by a ring of TVs becomes singularly characteristic. This theme of isolation is perhaps even stronger considering that when you play Zomboid solo there are no other survivors anywhere on the map.

The zombie is a stupid, weak, and slow creature, to the point that, in order for a zombie apocalypse to be plausible to us as fiction, the infection has to be able to spread by some in-world means other than bites. We just don't buy the idea that zombies could catch up to, overpower, and successfully sink their teeth into enough people to terrorise the survival of the whole race. Concrete explanations aren’t provided, but in Dawn of the Dead, there are hints that the ghoul plague is the result of either an alien bacteria falling to Earth aboard a comet or the radiation spill on Three Mile Island. In Zomboid, it might be a tainted batch of burger sauce brewed by a fast food chain called Spiffo’s.

The Zomboid protagonist is able to kill hundreds, thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of zombies using weapons and objects that are available in a normal town. Dawn of the Dead’s survivors clear out an entire shopping mall, making themselves totally safe from the zombies in the space of a few weeks. Perhaps what the zombie confronts us with is the unnerving extent of our own dominion, the frightening totality of our power. We have so much stuff that even existential threats don’t threaten our existence anymore. The zombie is just one more thing for us to subjugate, and after they’re gone we’ll think about ourselves or whatever.

+++

+ In the climax of Dawn of the Dead, the mall is pillaged by a motorcycle gang, which vandalises the stores, butchers the zombies, and shoots Stephen. If our trio of survivors have become bored and miserable because they have nothing left to fight, kill, or overcome, the bandits feel like an expression of their suppressed desires, and the film’s ending a symbolic conflict between a well-behaved but castrated superego and the id.

++ Zomboid’s subReddit is a collage of unfair, tragicomedy death. You will find players who have lost a game of some two or more in-world years because they accidentally used the ‘go to sleep’ command while in the same room as their gasoline-powered generator and thereby suffocated on the fumes.

+++ I keep starting and then getting frustrated with and abandoning an extremely long article about why The Sims 1 is the greatest videogame of all time.

***

Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.

Data Points

Reid McCarter — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This article discusses plot details from throughout The Roottrees are Dead and Roottreemania.

The Roottrees are Dead is a detective game. You play as an unnamed investigator, low rent enough to work out of what looks like a bachelor apartment, with a pulp detective poster hanging above your desk for inspiration and nothing but a desktop computer and a corkboard as tools for your work.

A mysterious woman appears one dark and stormy night and explains that a father and his trio of daughters, the CEO and three heirs to the Roottree candy dynasty, have died in a plane accident. The company’s vast wealth must now be distributed through an inheritance policy that only pays out to direct descendants of the original founders. The woman needs someone to piece together the Roottree family genealogy in order to sort this all out.

She leaves a few clues behind, in the form of photographs, old advertisements, and a list of important names, and you’re set loose to figure out the rest. Over the investigation that follows, secrets shake loose from the family tree like rotten fruit. There are hidden relatives and affairs, spats and betrayals by siblings. Eventually, once the genealogy is complete, the mysterious client reveals herself to be the now-adult daughter of one of the early Roottrees. She was born out of wedlock, it turns out, and raised by a farmer and his partner, a secret Roottree who, as a gay man in early 20th-Century America, was removed from official family records. The woman writes a book about these scandals.

In the game’s expansion, Rootreemania, the genealogy sprawls even further thanks to a follow-up investigation that reveals more of the family’s dirty laundry. Following the book’s publication, a surge of new inheritance claimants has arrived, which requires you to sift through further information to see who among them might be a valid Roottree. This involves digging even deeper into the Roottree’s previously hidden affairs and assessing the backgrounds of illegitimate children. In the process, our perception of the family changes yet again.

Aside from offering a well-constructed mystery to unravel, The Roottrees are Dead is compelling for the way it shows how shallow any objective understanding of something as complex as even a single family can be. By the time the family tree is as complete as it needs to be for the game’s purposes, you have a vast overview of roughly a century of Roottree history. A list of names and occupations, of spouses and children, is not much of a summary for how much has gone on between the lines, though. The family's true nature is formed in between the details of the official record. We get a better understanding of various Roottrees not through the dry facts of their marriages and occupations, but by the ways in which they treated others, spent their money, or reacted to learning about family secrets kept hidden to avoid scandal.

Pointing out that there’s more to a family than its genealogy is a simple enough concept, but it gains extra dimensions in Roottrees through the game’s setting and method of play. Set in the late ‘90s, around the beginning of the digital age, the detective’s primary investigatory tool is their computer. This includes a virtual notepad and dial-up access to online magazine, newspaper, and book libraries. Most importantly, it means trawling through the results pulled up from a fictionalized version of ‘90s search engine WebCrawler, here called SpiderSearch.

The game’s primitive internet hints at technological advancements to come in the next few decades, from online ancestry mapping services and social media to the predictive algorithms now called AI. The advent of home internet offered anyone with a computer and a modem access to seemingly unlimited information. This has only become easier, and the volume of raw data greater, over years of iteration and increased sophistication. Today it seems possible that you might understand a person, at least on some level, just by pulling up their social media profiles, reading their opinions and discovering whatever facts about their life the internet has catalogued.

A person is more than their data, though, even as that data accrues on the internet to form a convincing digital double of a real self. The more we give the internet our personal trivia—or have it taken from us—the more it seems like what you can gleam about us online is a full representation of a human being. It’s tempting to think you can really know a person based on their internet presence, but there’s always a lot left out, a lot that exists outside of the facts.

In an era of tech where complex algorithms are likened to gods and, when deployed as chat bots, are capable of fostering powerful delusions in users, it’s worth remembering how much of life occurs in the spaces between facts. The Roottrees are Dead shows that to really understand a life, you need more than just data points.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and posts on Bluesky.

Killing Everyone

Ed Smith — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In a 1973 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Francois Truffaut said “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.”

When you endeavour to generate enthusiasm about war from your audience, which you naturally have to do if you’re making a film, you lose something of war’s real nature. The problem might not be about making on-screen war entertaining, but more attempting to impress a narrative upon a representation of war. When we make something into a story, we make it make sense, and when we make something make sense we’re also suggesting that it has implicit reason. But the reality of war normally supersedes reason. It obliterates reason. If you try to shape it into a tale, you inevitably disguise the reality of the encompassing devastation of war, which cannot be explained in terms of logic or morals. Two of the greatest works of anti-war art, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner", are ‘successful’ as anti-war artworks because they deliberately deform the conventions of their construction, Guernica in its extremism and absurdism (as opposed to realism or naturalism) and the "Star Spangled Banner" in its spontaneous, unpredictable deviations from the music as normally deployed in its official capacity as a national anthem. They ‘work’ as anti-war texts because, like war, they appear to the beholder as ungoverned and ungovernable, and their defining characteristics are their respective disfigurements of code.

If a rudimentary narrative is composed of a villain with an immoral goal versus a hero with a moral goal, fighting one another using equal bestowments of strength, World War II is the closest there is to a narrative war. A lot of wars since then, and especially in the 21st century, don’t meet the criteria for basic narrative, or only meet it if you are predisposed to a crudified version of—usually western colonial—morality. Wars in the last 30 years have instead become almost entirely non-narrative, or what Frank Hoffman called in 2007 ‘hybrid wars,’ that is wars with “a non-standard, complex, and fluid adversary” fought using “a combination of conventional and irregular methods.” Forget moral meanings, we don’t even know what a war is now. This is why today’s war videogames are always about the team rather than the war. You can see this creeping in in Call of Duty: Ghosts in 2013, and then it becomes gradually more defining throughout Advanced Warfare, Black Ops 3, and Infinite Warfare, and then even more so in the trilogy of Modern Warfare rebootmakes and in Black Ops 6. The atomisation of CoD’s narratives, wherein we shrink the focus onto a small group of individual soldiers and their personal stories, reached an apotheosis in this year’s Black Ops 7, where you play as a multinational team of special forces operators trying to capture the CEO of a rogue corporation.

Although the team is called Joint Special Operations Command, which in reality is a branch of the United States military, in the game they don’t fight on behalf of a national ideology so much as plain and morally flat ideas like freedom and stopping innocent people from being killed. The rogue corporation in turn doesn’t represent a country or society, or an ethnocentric or geocentric belief system. Its targets are everybody, everywhere and its headquarters are in a fictional and independent citystate, which it owns. These contrivances of world-building mark a concerted effort by the makers of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 to decouple the game from the real world and in doing so safeguard it against observations of ideological bent. This is possibly because the makers feel that implications of reality are antagonistic to fun and that it’s easier to sell the game to people all over the world and across the ideological spectrum if the game is neither part of the world or the spectrum.

But this also betrays a perverse (and almost certainly inadvertent) timeliness, because the more that the concept of the hybrid, non-linear, forever war has taken hold in our society, the more the Call of Duty series has stopped trying to make conventional sense or structure out of its fictional wars in kind. In 2003, the year that the war on terror formally began in earnest, the first Call of Duty game was released. It’s a World War II story that focuses on different soldiers from different armies from different countries, united of course in a battle against Nazism and the Third Reich. These characters are essentially nameless and voiceless sets of hands and a rifle, defined by their nationalities and locations: the American campaign, the British campaign and the Soviet campaign. 22 years later and the global war on terror, the ‘GWOT’—ever amorphous, and morally and temporally indefinable—has rearranged our general concept of war to the point that a moral adventure fought on ideological or nationalistic grounds no longer seems either real or plausible for fiction.

This reconfiguration of war’s definition, or rather, the deterioration of the idea that war might be given a definition, has occurred alongside the onset of the “postmodern condition” prophesied by Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard describes both a loss of faith in the unifying metanarratives that consolidated modern societies and a commensurate rise of a “plurality of small, competing narratives.” At its most extreme conclusion, this results in a paradoxical society where the only ideological consistency among its members is that they all reject the possibility of there being a shared belief. It’s a western world where, alienated and marginalised by the failure of modern ideas, people turn ever inwards and fight metaphorical battles in the name of the self rather than literal ones on behalf of the state, the church, ethnicity or isms. If Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s broader setup (military unit without strict national or ideological identity versus corporation without strict national or ideological identity) is a reflection of the 21st century’s non-linear and non narrative wars, the postmodern condition is symbolised by the game’s other main design conceit, whereby all four of the central characters are infected by a neurological toxin which makes them hallucinate monsters symbolic of their innermost fears. Several levels in Black Ops 7 take place inside the characters’ respective imaginations, where they fight living, breathing and heavily armed personal demons. The postmodern alienation hypothesised by Lyotard, where people lose faith in bigger ideas and beliefs and retreat into themselves, takes literal form in the world of Black Ops 7, where soldiers without a country or ideology are left with only themselves to conquer.

Black Ops 7’s multiplayer implies a similar kind of inwardness, or a chosen withdrawal from the wider sociopolitical world. Matches are typically fought in small teams of six players versus six players, on maps that only make architectural sense in the context of a competitive videogame. Although some of their iconography and imagery is borrowed from real locations, they are constructed like arenas, rings or pitches, informally divided into sections that facilitate different approaches to play—rather than a strip of white paint to denote a field goal line, you may find a small balcony overlooking a street, delineating that this is an area built for verticality and scoped weapons.

One match type in Black Ops 7, named Overload, is a version of Bulldog, where one team of players has to collect a ‘ball’ and escort it from one part of the arena to another, while the other team tries to stop them. The game is strictly divided into two halves—after playing a certain number of minutes, the game freezes, there is a pronouncement that the match has reached “half time” and the two teams swap sides, so that the one that began the game attacking west to east now attacks east to west, and vice versa. Also similar to sport—or television broadcasts of sport—every match in Black Ops 7 ends with a slow-motion video of the “best play,” normally a clip of a player killing a large number of enemy players inside a short period of time.

Like the various pretenses of the single-player campaign, the presentation of Black Ops 7’s multiplayer has the effect of separating it from suggestions of the context of war, even though each match is still fundamentally about two opposing sides fighting one another with weapons. The ‘sportification’ of its structure and aesthetic is also reflective of the existence of the forever war, in the way that sports are played, replayed and replayed–new year, new season, new league, new cup. Both Autumn and Yussef describe this in their articles on Battlefield 6, how the repetitive and transient nature of online multiplayer feels increasingly apt in a world of endlessly recursive, impossible to quantify non-linear wars. This impression is perhaps more manifest in Black Ops 7, where the representation of people killing people is made so expressly sportlike that it becomes symbolic of the most cynical justification for the forever war: that war is only a game.

Battlefield 6’s campaign is spiritually similar to Black Ops 7’s, insofar as both represent a shifting in focus, away from the subject matter of war and its attendant thematic baggage, and towards the comparatively simpler and less precarious narrative topic of the team, and the struggles of the team. Reid has written about this for this month’s issue and he convincingly argues that if there is reluctance or nervousness among game developers to engage with (or rather re-engage with, if we account some of the older Call of Duty and Battlefield games) the knottier questions inherent to making war art and entertainment, then that’s unlikely to change any time soon. Battlefield 6’s multiplayer however can be equally evaluated as a deliberately constructed text. Though it is not ‘written’ in the manner that a single-player campaign is written, or directed in the way that a film may be directed, or painted, or composed, or so on, every one of its elements has been purposefully designed and amalgamated. It is a ‘work’ so much as anything else may be considered a work. The fact that certain questions of videogame criticism have historically not been applied to multiplayer games, and that we are used to evaluating them as games in the strict sense, that is, with our focus almost entirely on their ludological components and not on elements like aesthetics, plot, pace and meaning, is perhaps the main barrier to considering in this case Battlefield 6’s multiplayer as a war text, in the same way that its single player is a war text. Get past that and certain characteristics of Battlefield 6’s multiplayer distinguish it when we’re considering our credulousness towards narrative wars in reality and narrative wars in fiction.

The absence of a narrative—and the abundance of chaos—are key to Battlefield 6’s multiplayer. If what we find so difficult to accept with regards to supposed anti-war artwork is that it might impose onto war a temporal and narrative structure, Battlefield 6’s multiplayer does not really impose a structure. There is no heroism in Battlefield 6, in the constructed, romantic sense—no matter how valiant your in-game intentions may be, it is perfectly likely that you will be killed, unceremoniously and without dignity, before fulfilling them. When even the most bitter and undeserved defeat is expunged from existence with the beginning of a new match, there is also no tragedy. The war raging in Battlefield 6’s multiplayer is indefinite and without history, and there is no director, commander or God authoring moments of either individual valour or national anguish. The two sides have names but they are deliberately formless—one way to distinguish opposing armies and their respective ideologies in turn is through their weapons, like the NVA soldier with his AK-47 and the American GI with his M-16, but in Battlefield 6, both forces have the same guns, gun modifications, vehicles and equipment. Each game mode is an invitation to either capture or defend territory, but regardless of your success (or failure), when you begin a new match, all that ground that was won or lost will be reset to a default position, and that default position will again serve as an invitation for battle.

This is also true of other multiplayer war games, Black Ops 7 included. But the effect of Battlefield 6 to encourage analysis alongside Truffaut, Lyotard, postmodernity, and the existential panic of the forever war is enhanced by its visual and audio design. It looks and sounds warlike, which is not the same as realistic, but instead describes something that is capable of generating within you the feelings you’d imagine having in a real war situation–the loud explosions and gunfire, and the general hecticness of Battlefield 6, are likely to spark panic, excitement and aggression. But that ‘warlikeness’ in turn emphasises the absence of conventional ‘warness’ elsewhere in the game. We are made to feel like this is a convincing simulacrum of a war. We are also aware of its structurelessness, its narrativelessness and its ultimate absence of logic or moral meaning. Battlefield 6 starts to shed light on the ironic truth of postmodern war, where the only thing that is tangible and true is that very little, and perhaps nothing, is true or tangible. If war is capricious and cruel, thoughtless and amoral, and never achieves anything and doesn’t change, that is also the war of Battlefield 6’s multiplayer.

But therein lies more irony, because Battlefield 6, by design, is a game where no meaning is available to us other than the meaning that we make for ourselves. You may play it and feel like it is a convincing anti-war text or an illustration of some characteristic of 21st-century warfare, but although it has perhaps been constructed to produce that impression to an extent, there is ultimately no encompassing, overarching meaning being imposed on the game and its players—what is keenly felt is an absence of meaning, rather than an abundance, or even a presence, and so the game still feels subject to that postmodern condition, where our lives are defined by indefinition. Truffaut said an anti-war film is impossible. He also said that every war film inevitably becomes a pro-war film. Battlefield 6 feels anti-war because of its dearth or deficiency of meaning. It is full of emptiness. And contrary to Truffaut, who was speaking in the ‘70s—the modern era—before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the internet and the endless GWOT, that does not make it a pro-war text. Battlefield 6’s ‘anti-warness’ results from a lack of structure and a predominance of disorder—from a kind of anti-meaning. In that, rather than pro-war—or anything-war, or anything—it becomes another reflection, or byproduct, or cultural symptom of the void of meaning that has now become war’s defining characteristic.

***

Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.