Marathon and Masculinity
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 ...