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Marathon and Masculinity

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Going into Marathon’s release, I hadn't played a PvP shooter in a very long time. I'd played games adjacent to it, like an occasional dip into Destiny 2 or the odd firefight in DayZ. It had been over 10 years since I'd played a pure PvP shooter like CoD or Battlefield.  So it was very unnerving, when playing Marathon, to start having moments where playing the game made me feel like a Man . I don't really tend to have experiences like that in my life, in fact a lot of the time I don't feel gendered (which may very well be an AMAB privilege thing) so it came as a bit of a shock to me as a queer nonbinary person, plunging myself into masculinity after so long away.  Marathon is a game about extracting profit. Load into a map, grab as many valuables as you can hold, and exfil without dying to wandering AI, or other people doing the same thing. There are sometimes missions, there's a plot if you look pretty hard for it, and a hint of gambling with how expensive your ...
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Sumar Conflict Log 1

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  Journal logs found beneath Ancient Mecha City. From a computer terminal in bunker ruins on the planet Sumar - 3rd planet from the star Orion - dated 2577 in the Age of Darkness DUST-DOGS/TERMINAL_19/CARGO ROTT/2577_10_29 50 years ago we came down from the The Graveyard to try to make a home for ourselves on Sumar. A corp took The Crypt and with all that firepower we just couldn't keep up anymore. We settled the ruins beneath Old Mecha, made nice with the other scavs, tried to hide from the bigger fish. And then Orion burnt out.  Lucky for us, we found an overlooked bunker with a couple frames, and over time we managed to kit them out with what we could cobble together from the ruins. Radio activity has picked up, and we intercepted some talk about the “Eternal Flame”. Looking it up in the bunker’s records, turns out someone knew Orion’s fate, and tried to forge a relic that could reignite his flame. It's most definitely someone's mad ravings, but it gave us a taste ...
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Emergence and Progression in TTRPGS: A Fool's Ramblings

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bonus stinky evil cat I’ve been thinking a bit about why I have enjoyed running Cairn and why I haven’t been enjoying D&D 5e or Lancer recently, and I think I have stumbled upon an answer: Emergent vs Progressive gameplay. There’s lots of writing about this, mostly around videogames, so I’m going to talk about these terms as I understand them, but I’ll also try to include some other writings that I’ve looked at. Emergence is when simple rules interact with complex systems. Think Chess or The Sims. Simple rules, like, “a pawn can move one space forward” or “Sims need to eat” come into contact with a complex system, like a human brain crafting a grand strategy, or a simulation of an entire world.  Progression in games is a newer phenomenon (according to Juul) where there is a series of challenges, and there are strict rules which the player must follow in order to solve them and eventually reach the end. For the most Progressive game, think Mario. Run right, jump, maybe throw a f...
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