Since Escape From Tarkov first tormented with its unforgiving survivalism, extraction shooters have been rightfully seen as some of the most unforgiving video games around. For those unfamiliar, these are games where you scour the map for plunder (like a kitted-out assault rifle) with the goal of finding an extraction point to exfil with your newfound shiny loot. If you die before getting out, you’ll not only lose the new stuff you grabbed, but everything else you brought with you into the map. These games tend to feature some variety of killer robots, mythical monsters, or other AI-controlled enemies tuned to inflict pain, but the biggest threat is a more unpredictable one: fellow humans who are almost always eager to knife you in the back and steal your spoils. If you thought getting no-scoped by a pre-teen in Fortnite was demeaning, imagine if they also got to pillage your still-warm corpse.
The high stakes and difficulty are part of the genre’s appeal, but a duo of recent entries in the space have attempted to pare things down a bit so newcomers aren’t instantly terrorized by thousand-plus hour veterans with killer aim and even more killer equipment. Arc Raiders and Marathon are both sci-fi extraction shooters released in the last six months that use a lot of the same tricks to entice newbies, with the biggest one being that you can load into matches with a “free kit.” Unlike Tarkov, where running out of supplies means you’ll literally have to bring a knife to a gun fight, you can get a complementary beginner loadout in both these games with the basics needed to survive; they don’t come with the best guns, but they can still be enough in the right hands.
Given that the intended audience for these two games is the same—newcomers to extraction shooters—and the ultimate goals are basically identical—get out with good loot—you would expect people playing Arc Raiders and Marathon to behave pretty similarly. They do not. Against all odds, Arc Raiders has become a bastion of pacifism and cooperation, while Marathon is a cutthroat hellscape where people let hollow point rounds do the talking. Together, they make for a perfect one-two punch in showing how design and storytelling decisions influence how players act, so much so that even academics have taken note.
In an interview with The Guardian, Arc Raiders executive producer Aleksander Grøndal mentioned he has been contacted by a neurology professor eager to study human behavior in the game and by a criminologist who was “intrigued by how players are interacting with each other,” referring to how they are mostly hanging out and cooperating instead of shooting each other in the head. It’s unusual enough for people to treat each other with any modicum of kindness online, but it’s even more remarkable that this is happening in a game where killing someone allows you to jack all their belongings. To put it into numbers, Grøndal said that roughly one in five players have never killed someone else, and half have taken out fewer than 10. The idea that half of Arc Raiders’ community has a lower body count than you’d accrue in a 10-minute match of Call Of Duty is a feat of collective peace on par with the 1914 Christmas truce.
This friendliness makes a bit more sense in the context of the game, because while Arc Raiders is set in a post-apocalypse, it’s a relatively hopeful one. As a Raider, you’re tasked with helping out the underground community of Speranza by going topside to battle murderous machines, taking on optional quests to help out this collective. The plot is literally about aiding others, all while battling a common threat. The game’s central looting loop has also made it a good idea to team up with strangers to take on these bots rather than to go it alone. An extra pair of eyes can help keep watch for incoming drones or a rare hostile player going Mad Max mode. The relative friendliness probably also comes from there not being quite as big a payday in gunning for other humans as in many other extraction games, as many of the easy-to-come-by starting weapons are powerful.
By contrast, Marathon players are absolutely ruthless. Encountering a fellow Runner who doesn’t shoot on sight is about as rare as Gold-grade spoils, making it so that every tiny decision you make, like when to sprint or open a noisy door, carries weight. A slight misstep could mean a cloaked Assassin blasting you with a WSTR from behind. Much of this tension is clearly by design. From the first time you set foot on Tau Ceti IV, you’re swallowed by a dismal hypercapitalist future where even your body is corporate property. The premise is that you’re a Runner, a human consciousness that inhabits a mechanical body to scavenge from a dead colony at the outskirts of space. The main issue is that you’re not the only one here, and on top of a united Earth government, which claims it owns everything under the sun, there are also rival Runners doing jobs for corporations that want a piece of this far-flung planet. Marathon is set in a cyberpunk dystopia where individualism and cruelty reign supreme, and most of the characters you meet are corpo AI who whisper in your ear not to trust fellow players.
One faction, Arachne, is a death cult that not only preaches the value of killing and being killed, but that actively incentivizes the player to do so with missions and rewards for hunting down other Runners. (Admittedly, death has a very different meaning in a world where Runners’ consciousness can be transferred from one artificial body to the next, but still, these rebirths take a toll.) Groups like Arachne aren’t the only thing tempting you to do violence. Each area funnels players toward points of interest where they’ll inevitably clash, whether that’s deadly exfil points or buildings loaded with loot. There isn’t much inventory space to store your spoils in between matches, meaning after a few good runs, you’ll inevitably end up carrying around equipment you’d rather not lose, naturally leading to a more guarded and less trusting atmosphere. This air of suspicion gets worse once you realize just how violent and decisive the game’s firefights can be, with even a fully kitted-out Runner dying to a few knife stabs. And then, beyond these many incentive structures and diegetic reasons to go in blasting, there’s the greatest temptation of all: Bungie is one of the best studios ever at making it feel really good to shoot virtual guns. Wouldn’t it be a waste not to test out your shiny new Longshot on the most dangerous game, to hear the ring of your rifle as a MIPS round punctures a synthetic body? Arachne needs its pound of flesh, after all.
But even beyond these clear carrots and sticks, the difference between the two games’ communities feels deeper, as genuine and unique online cultures have formed around each. Arc Raiders players have fully leaned into the social vibe of the game, with Grøndal citing that around 95% of players use the proximity voice chat feature. This tendency toward shooting the shit instead of each other has been documented by YouTuber The Serialist, who spliced together dozens of conversations with strangers. Some get surprisingly intimate, diving into insecurities, life issues, and questions about what it means to raise kids. The anonymity and fleeting nature of these interactions seem to open people up. That this weirdly friendly ecosystem has survived the game’s immense popularity is a minor miracle. Marathon has evolved in the complete opposite direction. Many fans of the game embrace its meanness in sardonic memes about Arachne’s murderous religion, or in references to the dread of unknown footsteps. The shoot-first mentality is so deeply ingrained that even after Bungie recently added a new system to incentivize teaming up with strangers by rewarding exfilling alongside them, trust is still hard to find.
It’s not surprising that academics and researchers have been fascinated by what’s going on with the extraction shooter genre. It basically reads like a social experiment where participants are exposed to different incentive structures and narrative contexts that make them role-play as either a salt-of-the-earth survivor banding together with others or a self-interested assassin beholden to all-powerful moneyed interests. Both games began from the same starting point, but have ended up in very different places. While it’s probably best to leave grand statements about humanity to social scientists, the contrast between Marathon and Arc Raiders’ player bases makes a pretty convincing argument for just how malleable people can be (at least when it comes to video games).
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