Pear Wigglers, Marathon and You

Marathon (2026) is an upcoming extraction shooter from Bungie, a revival of their old sci-fi shooter series from before Halo and Destiny - it’s the game that formed the bones of those two titles. Extraction shooters aren’t a new genre of game - titles like Escape from Tarkov and Hunt Showdown have been around for years, and the recent release of the disappointingly GenAI-ridden Arc Raiders has made waves with the General Gamer Public. The premise is simple - you and a bunch of other people get placed in a map filled with threatening PvE enemies and a bunch of loot if you can survive and make it to an “extract”. The kicker, of course, is none of you are on the same team - and the other players you may encounter along the way probably have loot you want.

Extraction shooters are, innately, a rather tense experience. The player density is low, but these games frequently place high lethality weaponry in the hands of those players - fights are over fast. The experience also leans heavily on sound cues - hearing someone’s footsteps, gunshots or disturbance of a flock of birds, and being able to act on that intelligence to net an advantage. But the real brilliance in extraction shooters, the juice in the soon-to-be-explained pear, is the social environment created by the introduction of proximity (a.k.a “proxy”) chat - a button on your keyboard that, when pressed, lets you speak to anyone nearby you, with natural volume falloff over distance. This differs greatly from standard shooter game voice chats, which typically are team-wide and perfect over all distance. It’s this ability to, at your own choice, speak with anyone nearby you that makes extraction shooters, and specifically Marathon, great.

Marathon is a perfect pear wiggler, which might not be a term that’s instantly clear to comprehend. Allow me to explain this concept to you with the following GIF.

Behold.

The Pear Wiggler is a meme from 2014 Tumblr in reference to the above GIF, and has evolved into a term within some niche roleplay circles as, effectively, a way to describe games which have people bashing into each other and making choices with strong consequences. The most recent wiggler I was a pear within was a game run by my dear friend Juniper called Court of the Pierced Crown, a one-week Live Text Roleplaying Game (LTRPG) on Discord where each member was either an elector or attendant to the crown of a now-murdered king. Typical procedure would involve the ghost of the king choosing the next monarch within a week, but the king was ran through with a lance from mouth to tail, and even after removal of his body, the ghost remained, unable to speak with a mouth full of weapon. We electors and attendants all gathered in his court to achieve our own duties and fulfil our desires, the most prominent of which being electing the next monarch.

The following week had 30 people all in a big mess of channels and threads fighting over limited resources like coin and gourmands, issuing challenges for public duels, or taking to quiet corners to engage in romance or casual hookups - some with far greater success than others. I played a simple quartermaster, ineligible for the throne, who used body language and then a singular word to communicate 90% of the time - and it took me shockingly far, to the point of swaying the vote at the end away from a candidate that would have caused me to fail in my duty. People got into loud arguments, made backroom deals, had a lot of pretty bad sex with one character and even got murdered (yes, the king’s killer was still on the loose, but someone did die in a duel) all in the span of one rather chaotic week.

Court of the Pierced Crown was directly inspired by OVER/UNDER, perhaps the biggest pear wiggler in recent RPG notoriety. The 1200 player megagame has left behind a legacy of high-running emotions and an unexplainably intricate play experience for anyone who decided to sink their time into the month-long hallucination. Lin Codega of Rascal News has been doing a bang-up job of journalling their experience as a player who had access to the wargame level of O/U, but to call it a complete picture would be a disservice to the myriad storylines that spawned from the game known for intensely high bleed.

These two LTRPGs feature a strong commonality that is somewhat rare amongst other roleplaying experiences - explicit support for Player Versus Player actions, to the point of overthrowal, theft and killing, while at the same time giving all players access to live, instant communication with one-another. Collaboration, betrayal and plotting are rife in these games and are a core part of what makes the characters played within them feel so real - you make a private thread with your allies and talk deals on the side, while a second thread with one of them absent is where you plot the betrayal. Marathon - a video game, not a freeform roleplaying game - has managed to take this play experience, put it into a crucible, and boil it down into searing hot 25-minute bursts of tension.

Someone called Aura wrote a blogpost about Marathon pushing her to tears, and in that post one paragraph stuck out strongest:

There’s a toxicity to extraction games that’s inherent to a genre built on “you can take advantage of players’ trust” but the audience for those games so far have been pretty self-selecting. Marathon feels like a step above that, where the density of its systems and mechanics laid its desires bare to a degree I couldn’t handle anymore. It asks players to be vulnerable in a game where the primary language is aggression and deceit. This is not any different from other extraction shooters, in the end. It’s what the genre is. But the repeated degree to which I experienced the cruelty of this across some 50-odd hours total was just too much for me to bear. Maybe I got unlucky. It is statistically improbable but possible that I just rolled 1s over and over and over and over. The more I played though, the more my mindset changed to how I could take advantage of a given situation to screw other players over because those are the tools I was given. My scans got better, our backstabs got stealthier, our opening shots got more ambitious, and the consequences of fighting got so much heavier.

It does truly sadden me to know that someone finds this style of play so deeply upsetting, because to me, this is the juice in the pear. This play experience is what makes Marathon so special for sickos like me. There’s so much fun buried in this kind of tricksy exploitative play and Bungie have built a package deal which keeps providing that with every run. Granted, a lot of this fun can end up being after-the-fact - you look back and go “that sucked”, and then follow up with “which makes this success all the sweeter.”

The game advertises itself on the tagline “ESCAPE WILL MAKE ME GOD” - a phrase which innately says something about the kind of mentality the game wants you to adapt. It wants you to become god. To escape the bindings of being a regular like everyone else. The character who spoke this line in the original series, the hyper-powerful (and insane) AI Durandal, has a deep obsession with avoiding the end of the universe - implying that you too, the humble player, can achieve the same. All you have to do is escape - and Marathon puts every other person with the same goal in your path. It hands you explosives and firearms to clear the road, and should you run out, leaves a knife in your hands and special abilities on cooldowns to ensure you’re always able to fight, so long as you’re smart about it.

But it hands you one more button. Proximity chat. You see another guy down the dimly lit hallway, and you hit that button, and as long as you hold that everything you say is no longer bouncing around in your private Discord call - you’re on a public channel, speaking to a person in the same loot-hungry shoes as you. Your squadmate notes he’s got a fancy backpack on, but doesn’t say it over proxy, and so you make the choice to kill this person without him ever hearing it. The public channels, the private threads. The pears wiggle, the bullets fly, and sooner or later someone’s dead.

For twenty five minutes or less, everyone agrees to this purge-esque death game where everyone could walk away from each other, but the design language and our own intentions want us to kill one another. I know that if I down and melee finish you, I get all your loot (if I survive your squadmates) and I gain significant XP towards perks that will help me towards killing somebody even better next time. But you could also be on a sponsored kit run, with nothing of note, and so looting you leaves me disappointed. Or, you’re not as alone as I thought - your squadmates get me. The decision to shoot or not to shoot, to talk or not to talk, that matters and is fundamentally interesting and, to me, fun to play. The best decision for my desires is, typically, to kill you, and Bungie encourages that so explicitly, but we don’t have to make that choice. What if we were both gods? Sure, I’m bleeding out right now, but I can tell you’re geared to the teeth - care to drop me a self-revive kit? I’ll get out your hair, I swear. But in that scenario, who knows if one of us is going to hit the proximity chat button before you sink a knife into my chest to finish me off?

Marathon wants you to be ruthless. It wants you to give no quarter, make plans to kill everyone you see and escape with your spoils so you can become the god of the next round - and of the universe, one day. But by introducing proximity chat, one simple button that gives you a voice, it turns from a regular old one-life arena game into a pear wiggler of the finest quality. Will you extract with another squad, celebrating your joint victory on the uber-challenging Cryo Archive map against the terrifying S’pht Compiler? Or, once they’re picking through the loot, will you take them by surprise and pick through their remains for the valuables, all yours to keep? You hold the knife in your hands - will you talk before you swing?

As my dear friend Tangent said in Against Intent, “…a lot of really good design, builds around tension and release and catharsis very carefully, it provides genuine resistance to your players, and forces them to struggle against it and to risk having a pretty shitty night.” Marathon forces you to struggle. It goads you with the idea of using your empathy and then slams you right in the gonads when someone breaches your trust - and that’s good. When you pull that on someone else, when you learn the lesson and get out better because of it, you’ll feel great. And when you find genuine alliance and survive with unlikely allies? That’s when you’ll make memories that last forever. So hop in and get wiggled - the bruises will tell a brilliant story on your journey to godhood.

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