Rewiring my brain through playing Marathon

Have you ever thought you had a strong distaste for a food (like brussels sprouts), but then one day you try a dish with that food at a restaurant (say, Uchi in Austin) where they prepare it in a way that tastes so good that it makes you rethink your preferences?

That just happened to me, but with the video game, Marathon, by Bungie Studios. (creators of the Halo and Destiny game franchises)

Now, I'm not here trying to shill for the game in detail (though if this influences you to try the game out for some reason, go with God), but I did want to explore how I got to this point and apply bits of this journey to other forms of culture in life, especially with the mentality and perspectives that we bring into certain experiences.

Marathon is what people in the gaming space call an "extraction shooter." It's a genre that's become fairly popular in the last couple of years, with titles like Escape From Tarkov and ARC Raiders coming to mind as the biggest games in the genre. Essentially, the main gameplay loop that defines these games involves dropping you into a map with equipment of your choice, scavenging or taking by force any amount of treasures/gear, and then physically extracting from the area within a certain time limit like Arnold getting to the choppa at the end of Predator.

The catch is, that if at any point you die or fail to extract, you will lose everything you brought in and/or scavenged during the run.

Permanently.

It's a pretty wild concept to internalize for most people, I'd imagine. Over the years, video games have pushed towards more player-friendly progression, such as a constant chase for better stuff to hoard or constant save points because no one wants to lose hours of their time. Even in Player Vs Player (PVP) games like Call of Duty or Fortnite, dying means only a few seconds before you respawn with the same stuff you had before.

The notion of losing everything you're holding permanently in an extraction shooter for any number of bullshit reasons (someone snuck up behind you by chance, or you mistakenly fell off a cliff, or your cat tripped your cable modem in the real world) was a huge turn off for me and I swore it just wasn't for me. I'm not a huge gambler and I'm not really into playing games to grief other people. (you could definitely play an extraction shooter with the sole goal of making other people's lives miserable)

I even tried playing some early tests of Marathon last year and also came to the same conclusion. The idea that I could lose the stuff I earned in the game permanently combined with other issues (I hate managing inventory space, much like I hate spring cleaning in my house because I dislike the mental load of sorting what to keep and what to get rid of) had me pretty convinced the game and the genre were simply not for me. I really hate the notion of time investment with the possibility of "losing" that progress.

But a funny thing happened to me a couple of weeks after the game released early in March of 2026 - I tried the game with a couple of friends and I slowly started to have a series of epiphanies that led to me not only tolerating the game, but actually finding myself thinking about the game outside of playing it.

So what happened?

I think the biggest realization for me was getting over "gear fear" or the notion of losing my stuff on a failed run. Obviously it sucks when it happens, but it wasn't as devastating as I thought it would be because the weapons and items are easily replaceable and there's lots of ways you can still play the game even if you lost everything you owned. I began thinking about gear as temporary tools that only served me to fulfill my goals rather than being the goal themselves.

This idea of not "owning" the things that I got in the game was a similar perspective shift as I had in the 2010s when all-you-can-listen streaming music became a thing - you don't necessarily need to "own" the thing if you have readily available access to it and can listen to any song you wanted, whenever you wanted. In fact, when I thought about it, it was a little freeing, because now it lowered the bar to try new music both physically (as in storage space) and also cost-wise it was negligible to try something new. Similarly, in Marathon, I'm incentivized to risk using the gear I get because otherwise I'll run out of space to store it all (the game gives you a limited amount of vault space to hoard things).

Essentially, I stopped treating the game as a constant loot treadmill to continually acquire and hoard better and better stuff. Instead, I prioritized completing the contracts that the game's different factions gave to me as those put me on the path to gain permanent upgrades for my account as well as unfolding the game's narrative. (I'm a big stories guy so this is a bigger motivator for me than just wanton wealth accumulation or player griefing)

As my goals with the game came into view, each attempted run began to feel more like progress, rather than wasted time into dead ends. My brain started to think of good learning moments from each run to build on whether it was knowing the map geometries better or different entry points to mission objectives. If I got killed by freak occurrences like a bad enemy robot AI spawn or another player getting the jump on me in the first 2 minutes my brain knew to not to feel discouraged because it was out of my control.

Failure was just an excuse to try again immediately (yeah, that's a clichéd statement, but it's true!). I found myself not being deterred by failure, but rather motivated to try a different approach or simply play better in order to succeed.

If you're reading this and slowly starting to see the journey parallels with accomplishing something in real life, congrats! We might be having similar mental perspective breakthroughs!

The future might be bleak, but Marathon fucking rules.

- Zack Zwizzen, Kotaku reviewer

The brilliance of Marathon is that it's an expertly crafted playground engineered to create moments of absolute cinema. There's anywhere from 8-18 players in every run, each having potentially different motivations for a run (though overlapping motivations can make for some explosive interactions), along with enemy AI robots and environmental gimmicks all doing their own thing. It's basically an instance of the TV show Westworld waiting for the players to drop in and do what they do. No run is ever the same, and oftentimes you're going to get a crazy story out of it.

I've had my share of wild moments where I not only complete my contract mission objectives, but also manage to loot some truly valuable stuff, so you can imagine the growing knot in your stomach and anxiety that there is a LOT riding on not dying at that point. It's an almost indescribable thrill that you makes me appreciate the daredevils out there who love bungee jumping or skydiving. Every move I make from this point on has a growing sense of urgency and risk - your brain realizes this and flips on to lock in mode.

At that point, the only thing standing between you and victory is getting to that choppa and surviving until you are airlifted off safely. As Eminem would say, his palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy.

There's been many a time where I've gotten killed and lost every, but there's also times where I've managed to escape sliding into the exfil point as 0.01 ticks to 0.00 on the countdown timer. (the former probably happens to me more than the latter - but yay human psychology because I only remember the wins vividly!) Let me tell ya, the emotional pendulum swing between those two outcomes is immense.

Marathon is a game that is unforgiving, harsh, and difficult, but it's surprisingly fulfilling because it got me to rewire my brain to tackle it. I don't always want to play it because it demands a lot of mental bandwidth, but when I've got the energy, there's few experiences like it. I can't recommend it to everyone because it's so demanding, but what I can recommend is that you leave your mind open to be convinced. If not for this specific video game, hopefully it can inspire you for other things in life? You never know when a new perspective might just turn something you've previously dismissed into a new love. That feeling of unlocking something new must be what Neo felt by the end of the first Matrix movie.

Like my brussels sprouts opinion, it just took the right recipe and the right mindset to get me there.