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 | Marathon Infinity: the Story: the Intro | |
| Posted By: Philtron | Date: 12/7/20 5:53 p.m. |
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So, someone asked if there is a coherent story summary in Marathon Infinity. It is my favorite Marathon game so, against my better judgment, I decided I would go ahead and write it. Brief Primer: This is not the summary yet. This is more an overview of what I learned to prepare you for what's to come. I actually think it’s better to have this at the start so that you understand my perspective once going in. Per Hamish’s suggestion I’ll post bits of the story episodically over time, so it’s more digestible. However, considering how the storytelling works it really is best to look at the big picture when analyzing the story. For example, Infinity can be split into five distinct Chapters that may represent different timelines (or seven Chapters if you get creative somehow and want to beat that dead horse of a joke some more): Prologue
Prologue and Chapter 2: Rage follow Durandal and can be confirmed to be in different timelines. However Chapter 1, 3, and 4 all follow Tycho and start and stop in such a way that you can consider them to be part of one timeline. Or three timelines. Or two timelines where two Chapters are in one timeline and a third Chapter is in a different timeline. It’ll make sense once you can jump back and forth between them. Same thing with the failure levels. My previous assumption was that the failure levels portrayed why the preceding timeline would end in disaster. However, once you can look at the big picture it becomes clear that possibly two of the three failure levels have nothing to do with their preceding timelines. They seem completely disconnected from the prior Chapter’s events. When you’re playing the game, it’s not easy to notice this, but once you’re looking at a summary of the story, it becomes pretty obvious. On literalness and diegetic storytelling: I believe that a key to understanding Marathon Infinity’s story is to understand that many parts of the game are non-diegetic or are not meant to be taken as literal canon. For those that don’t know: Diegetic means something that is part of the world a story takes place in; Non-diegetic means something in a story that is only experienced by the audience and is not present in the world of the story. So, the music in Lord of the Rings is non-diegetic: the audience experiences it, but the characters are not actually hearing it. The music in the movie Baby Driver is diegetic: the main character is actually hearing the same songs the audience hears because he is playing them on his iPod; the experience of the audience is the same as the characters. In most video games, most of what the player experiences (aside from like menus,etc.) is diegetic: the character experiences it as well. However, in Marathon Infinity, for example, there are things that I believe are non-diegetic, such as the dream levels. I don’t believe the main character ever literally goes through a dream level or has literal dreams represented by the levels; I believe these levels are just experienced by the audience and meant to convey tone and mood. Another example: I believe that with some of the failure levels, the main character isn’t actually present in them; we, the players, see what happens here, but I don’t believe the main character is actually there. There are other moments like this. But I’m not going to get into it all. Main Character: For this reason I refer to the Security Officer as “the main character” to underscore his role in the story and to distinguish his experiences from those of the players’. Things I’m Ignoring: I’m mostly focusing on the plot that the main character goes through. I am ignoring the Pfhor terminals and most of the Pfhor narratives because they’re not directly connected to the main character’s plot. They’re more like flavor or worldbuilding. This summary is already pretty long (about 10,000 words and 50 pages) so I wanted to trim as much fat as possible. I’m also ignoring the dream levels. Dream levels: I’m not going to speculate or analyze the dream levels. I don’t have the time, and I don’t believe they should be treated literally or diegetically, anyway. I personally think these are just meant to convey a certain sense of tone and atmosphere to the players, and are not in fact experienced by the main character. I have some justification for this, but I really don’t want to get into it. I also don’t think there are any direct symbols or allegories happening between the dream levels and the rest of the story. But, it doesn't matter that much because I'm not going to analyze them. What’s Up With the Story? Like, you know, just in general, dude? I believe that, to a degree, Marathon Infinity is not meant to be treated as a literal narrative. I think it’s more like an artistic exploration of the possibilities of the Marathon universe and isn’t concerned with creating a cohesive, canonical plot. Consider the Marathon art of Craig Mullins. He portrays events in Marathon that never happen, or can’t happen within the game, and plays around with imagery and ideas that aren’t really canon. In the Marathon Scrapbook there is a quote from Mullins about why he did this for the Marathon art: "I always liked to freely interpret the designs and situations in the game. I worried that the purists might not like that, but the Marathon universe is very large and so much takes place off-screen and is only hinted at in the terminal texts. I wanted to keep the feeling of expanding what was only suggested and go beyond what was already there. What, the marine with the Pfhor staff? Huh? Why not? So much was already done to try and get around the limiting factors of the games rendering engine. The terminal texts suggests that same variety that I hope my pictures do... It was enjoyable to start something and let it evolve and not know where it would end up. Too much of my commercial work is to spec anyway." I feel like Greg K. (and Double Aught in general) approached the story of Infinity with a similar mindset. I think that’s also what they were playing with in relation to the spellings of Yrro/the Jjaro and S’bhuth/S’boath: there isn’t a single canonical Marathon universe that they’re presenting for us. Rather we are shown an exploration of the different ideas that could take place in the Marathon universe. That’s what I think Marathon Infinity is doing, but it kind of muddies this idea by also trying to weave in the narrative of time travel in an attempt to tie everything together. Are things really that confusing and/or ambiguous? YES! Marathon Infinity is my favorite Marathon game and one of my top ten games of all time precisely because of its storytelling. I used to think I had a pretty good handle on the story and could understand what was going on, at least in general. I was wrong. I now realize that Marathon Infinity’s story is more complicated and loose with its plot than I had ever feared. Plot points contradict other plot points in unjustifiable ways. The state of timelines is often not made clear or consistent. The state and location of various actors in the story is unclear in various places. Events happen for no discernible cause, characters react in ways for no discernible reason, some timelines may or may not be connected, some of the white terminals are probably Thoth but most of them probably aren’t unless of course you’re not activating Thoth in “Strange Aeons” in which case maybe all the white terminals are Thoth but then who are you activating in “Strange Aeons” and aside from that, all or none of the white terminals could be or not be Thoth regardless of who is or is not activated in “Strange Aeons” for a variety of reasons I'm not going to get in into here (I may get into it in the summary, I don't remember). Anyway... The first half of the game is pretty easy to follow along with. The second half of the game, however, descends into incomprehensible chaos and uncertainty to an unprecedented degree, and let me just say that if this is all some sort of “the medium is the message” style of storytelling to communicate what it’s like to battle a cosmic being of incomprehensible chaos and uncertainty, then WOW, hats off to Greg Kirkpatrick and the team. (the second half of the game is not actually incomprehensible, I just said that for the fun comparison, but it is very confusing and uncertain, that’s for sure) One of the characters in Infinity describes the W’rkncacnter as being “Doubt” (the opposite of “Destiny” from a certain perspective) and I can attest that as I learned more and more about the story, I began to doubt my understanding of the story more and more. “The medium is the message”, indeed. Ironically, as the players become less and less certain about what is going on and what they’re supposed to be doing, the main character becomes more and more confident about what is going on and what he needs to be doing. That’s genuinely fascinating. I feel overwhelmed, can you make this a little more comprehensible: Here’s one way to look at Infinity: a collection of short stories that portray the alternate histories of Marathon that have taken place. But then the collection uses the framing device of “timeline jumps” to loosely and inconsistently connect the different short stories together. Another way to look at it, for comic book fans: think of it like one of those special “What If” issues that have different stories that portray what would have happen if, like, Batman was a vampire or if Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive centipede, or whatever. Except each story is being viewed by some character with cosmic power who uses his power to actually travel to these alternate realities, as a loose way of narratively connecting the different universes. I think viewing Marathon Infinity through these lenses goes a long way in being able to grapple with it’s storytelling. So, I might be busy this week, but I’ll try to make the first actual summary post soon. Get ready.
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