I wasn't planning to play Marathon.

Christa, a Bungie lover of the old school^[1] and particular aficionada of the original Marathon trilogy, talked it up to me non-stop since the announcement. Undeterred by the decidedly underwhelming closed technical test, the delay that that test prompted, or the plagiarism scandal of the visual design^[2], she kept excitedly sending me updates and videos. I read along interested enough, but it did little to make me want to pick up the game myself.

I'm not much for shooters. That's not to say I haven't played or enjoyed them; I played through a couple James Bond games^[4] and the Halo 2 campaign as a child, I played Splatoons 1 and 2 for a respectable number of hours, and I even cleared the original Destiny single-player content while recovering from surgery. But these games washed over me like waves; none of them inspired any particular affection for the genre or desire to play the latest thing. Certainly they are far outnumbered by the big-name shooters I've touched barely or not at all—Doom, Quake, Half-Life, Call of Duty, Team Fortress, Fortnite, Overwatch, or indeed the original Marathon games.

When the open server slam came, I didn't play it, even as more friends beyond Christa were starting to admit it might have the juice. When the game launched, I didn't get it, although I quite enjoyed watching friends stream over Discord. It was those streams, I think, that did it. Being in the moment with someone, feeling the ebb and flow of tension and release, and seeing how much of the game wasn't shooting, the thought started wriggling its way into my brain.

"What if I did play Marathon?"

As I continued watching my friends, as Christa continued sending me videos of feats of meticulous planning as well as derring-do, as I learned more about what the structure of an "extraction shooter"^[5] meant in practice, this thought grew. I found my modding work in a lull, waiting for upstream changes and code reviews, with no particular video game on deck^[6]. I decided to give it a try.

What really started singing to my soul and got me to spend the $40 USD wasn't even necessarily the prospect of hand-fun from playing the game, but rather mind-fun^[13] from engaging its design with a critical eye. Christa is fond of repeating the idea that extraction shooters are a "game designer's genre", but it wasn't until picking it up with my own two hands that I really began understanding why. The last time a game has given me this much insight into the relationship between mechanical design and player experience was Resident Evil GCN. Everything in this game is part of the texture of interactivity in a way that's just not true of other genres; every sound design choice has repercussions on how other players might hear you, every…

I think if I were making a movie I would probably subtitle it by hand before I'd let it be presesd to disc without subs

no yeah the british royal family should totally be abolished but so should the peerage. strip them of their lands, too. you wanna make sure they don't just weasel their way out of it by diversifying so just strip them of all their capital. actually while you're at it do that to the bourgeoisie as well. and not just in britain either, it everywhere. now we're cooking

The bulk of my hobby time for the past six months or so has been spent not playing video games, nor yet creating them, but autopsying them. Layer by layer I peel them apart, examining every cartilaginous connection and noting down how each muscle pulls on the bone structure beneath. I am building on the work of those who came before me, a great berth of knowledge at my back and many fine tools at my hands without which my task would be too overwhelming to contemplate. I give back to this world by crystallizing the knowledge I find into forms that may be re-used and built upon long into the future.

In plainer terms, I've been spending a lot of time reverse-engineering From Software games.

2023: Dipping my Toes

A couple years ago, my friends and I learned about Archipelago, a system of interconnected game mods and related tooling which supports what they call a "multiworld randomizer". You may already be familiar with the concept of randomizer mods, in which the items within a game are shuffled about at random while still tracking enough game logic to ensure that the game can be completed. They're popular as ways to bring fresh life to games one has already played many times over, and can be particularly fun to play in a racing context where the strategy around figuring out how to proceed can be more complex than even the game mechanics themselves.

A multiworld randomizer takes this concept and expands it beyond the boundaries of a single game. Archipelago is able to randomize items across many games and connect them all through the internet, so that a Hollow Knight player in Minneapolis can find bombs for a Link to the Past player in Seattle, which lets them blast through a wall and find a Super Mario World player's ability to run. The possibilities are limited only by the imaginations and hacking abilities of a community of volunteer developers.

My little group quickly decided we wanted to give this a try. Looking through the list of available games, much shorter then than it is now, the one that appealed to me most was Dark Souls III. I consider the From Software oeuvre to be largely masterpieces, and while DS3 isn't my favorite^[1], it was the one that was available at the time.

The Old Mod

Unfortunately, the implementation of the game was not very good. No shade on the dev—modding with these games is difficult, as I was soon to discover. They use a totally idiosyncratic game engine that was originally built for Demon's Souls and has haphazardly accrued new features ever since; the whole thing is a mass of many different custom file formats all held together with difficult-to-decompile (and in some cases intentionally obscured) C++ code. But the player experience was not so great.

The core problem was this: because it was so difficult to figure out how to do anything at runtime in these…

I bought an art from Missing and it's amazing! They do such great work, everyone reading this should commission them to make the cool wizards of your dreams!

when asked to explain the whole of Capital while standing on one foot, Marx replied "the rate of profit tends to fall. the rest is commentary; go and study"

I've been having migraines on and off for over a week now, which is a very upsetting change of pace from the one migraine I'd usually get every three to six months, but if there's a silver lining it's that I'm reading a lot of audiobooks while I more or less can't use my eyes

rotating in my mind the concept of getting a womb tat that's a medical diagram of a uterus