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…