The Thinking Man’s Doom: Why The Marauder Rules, Actually

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #188. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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We are what we’re afraid of.

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I’ve spoken at length in this column about how I feel the primary strength of playable horror experiences is their ability to craft an inverted power fantasy, one where the player is made very aware that they are entirely and utterly at the mercy of the code constructing the play-space. This does not mean, however, that I am immune to enjoying more standard power-trip videogame experiences, where the player is an untouchable God who rips and tears his (always his) way through hordes of puny enemies. In fact, I consider myself an avid enjoyer of the franchise most known for ludicrously overpowering the player to achieve theatrical and gory ends: I freaking love Doom.

The recent release of Doom: The Dark Ages brought much joy and merriment to my household. And while I definitely see the ways in which id Software has tweaked the formula, I absolutely agree with Matt Purslow’s assessment for IGN: the fundamental combat design of Dark Ages owes its core to the Marauder, the most hated enemy from Doom Eternal. I do, however, disagree with Purslow’s conclusion, which is that the developers took lessons learned from the frustration of the Marauder fights and crafted an improved version for Dark Ages. Rather, I think Dark Ages (while still definitely fun) is a sadly watered-down version of the thing I loved most about the controversial Marauder: how much it made me think about how to play.

By way of context (and perhaps apology, if this column gets too far afield), my day job is a professor in an English department. Specifically, I teach writing – all the way from freshman composition to pre-law writing to graduate seminars in rhetorical theory. In graduate school, my two primary focuses were games studies (specifically, the rhetorical and educational opportunities presented by games) and writing pedagogy (how do we most effectively teach people how to communicate via the written word?). My dissertation brought these two things together, with a project wherein I described how games have unique educational affordances in how they teach us how to play, and how we are trained to remember and apply our learning throughout play. This basic idea, that we learn something and then have to remember how to apply it later on, is called the “transfer” of knowledge. And the Marauder is the single best example I have ever encountered of a game making you engage consciously in transfer.

Okay, so, I recognize that “academic opines on the educational brilliance of a mechanic” is not a super marketable selling point on its fact, but follow me here. Thinking back to how the Marauder caused endless frustration among the player base of Eternal, we recognize within their complaints (that it “disrupted the flow” or that it was “too different” from the sections of game around it) the exact same type of complaint we all used to have about high school Algebra, or whatever subject we didn’t care for. “This is dumb,” we’d say. We didn’t understand it, it made us think really hard, it felt unintuitive, and most importantly we knew for a fact that we’d never use any of this nonsense again. Both complaints, about math and the Marauder, are born out of a lack of transfer in some capacity. All of the things the Marauder asked of us (to watch the scene of battle, to swap weapons on the fly for the best advantage, to time our attacks and dodges carefully) are not fundamentally different from what we did in all the other battles in Doom Eternal (nor is it different from what we do in Dark Ages), it just feels different – the pacing is slightly altered, the enemy is hardier, our focus has to be narrower and our response times faster. Regular fights are the homework, and the Marauder is the test: same basic principles repackaged to make sure you can actually apply them and not just engage in rote button-mashing. So, yeah, you must think harder about the Marauder, because the Marauder is how you prove you’re good at playing Doom.

Now, I am obviously not trying to tell anyone that they are objectively incorrect for not liking the Marauder (except maybe I am); what I’m pushing back against here is the idea that the Marauder was a bad piece of design, that distracted the player from what the experience was “supposed” to be. Doom has always trafficked heavily in the idea of “flow,” or that sort of subclinical hypnosis where we focus in on a task and things feel easy, mechanical, thoughtless. Most games do this because flow feels good and it makes it easier to get people to play for longer periods of time. But what’s important to know about flow is that flow states frequently create “memory black holes” in the player/reader/student/whatever, where after someone exits the state of flow, they can’t articulate what they did, why they did it or why it was effective. Flow is, in short, a nightmare for trying to teach any sort of generalizable skill or anything that requires higher-order thought.

So, even as I play and thoroughly enjoy Dark Ages, I feel a small sadness for the watered-down parry system we all must live with, because it simply doesn’t engage us in the conscious recontextualization of the mechanics required for true abstract mastery. And maybe I’m the only one that cares about that, and that’s fine. But I wonder if this onus towards passive flow is holding the industry back, and what mainstream games could be if more of us were willing to do the hard work to understand them.

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Emma Kostopolus loves all things that go bump in the night. When not playing scary games, you can find her in the kitchen, scientifically perfecting the recipe for fudge brownies. She has an Instagram where she logs the food and art she makes, along with her many cats.