When Destiny 2 was released, on September 6, 2017, it was an immediate hit. For eight consecutive days more than a million people were connected to the game’s servers at the same time, shooting their way through alien hordes while trying to stop a rhinoceros-sized emperor from blowing up the sun and draining the life force from a spherical godhead called the Traveler. It would rank as the best-selling game of the month—and of the year-to-date—driving up monthly spending on console games more than 50 percent, from $477 million in September 2016 to $726 million in September of 2017. Publisher Activision-Blizzard’s stock price rallied by an even greater percentage, rising from $39 a share in January to more than $63 by early October.

The game succeeded in large part because, like a house party or music festival, its sheeny, oil-painted worlds became a pretext for human contact. In a review for Kotaku, Kirk Hamilton described how after long sessions he would fall asleep having imaginary conversations with the friends he’d just finished playing with, “comparing notes, complaining, strategizing and bickering, struggling to find a collective purchase on this great big game we all play.” It was as if socializing was just another mechanic, something that drove players deeper into the game’s storyline, missions, and exhausting economy of collectible items, upgrade materials, and in-game currencies.

The game’s developers—Bungie Studios in Bellevue, Washington, a corporate pseudo-city of glassy high-rises and block-long shopping centers outside Seattle—had encouraged this kind of obsessive response, hoping players would find the promising glint of edification buried in the game’s neon pleasures. “One of the reasons I believe people love video games as their choice of entertainment and hobby is because it’s an opportunity to improve at something. You’re gaining mastery,” game director Luke Smith said at a junket before the game’s launch. “No matter what game you’re playing, you’re ultimately getting better at it.”

To encourage that feeling, Bungie spent years refining a set of invisible systems to tilt the odds in the player’s favor. This helped create the impression that players had mastered skills that were mostly being automated in software, quietly correcting the aim of their guns, regenerating the player’s health after they’d bumbled their way into an enemy’s sightline, preventing enemies from chasing wounded players, and ensuring a vehicle’s maneuverability would never be lessened after absorbing damage. The games hid these systems well, making the players feel like they were better and more productive than they really were. “We tried to conceal how much help we’re giving the player,” former Bungie designer Jaime Griesemer said of the studio’s genre-defining work on Halo, the precursor to Destiny. He described one of the studio’s core design philosophies as “never permanently punish[ing] the player for messing up.”

This ethos extended to the studio’s competitive multiplayer modes, which for Destiny 2 included a matchmaking system that tracked more than 2,000 data points about how players performed in-game to ensure they would never be grouped against people they would have no chance of ever beating. The developers also cut down the number of weapons that could instantly kill a player. “One-hit kills are often something you couldn’t react to,” Smith said. “You don’t know how you could’ve done it better, right? And if you don’t know how you could’ve done it better, it means you’re never going to improve.”

Taken together, these invisible aids created a fiction that could be even more transfixing than the game’s lore, a parallel plotline that unspooled in the player’s self-esteem and climaxed with an objectively improved sense of self. Ironically, that feeling emerged from a state of dependency, as it required an elaborate conspiracy of automations that could only be experienced in the game. Bungie secured that dependence with its enormous economy of rare weapons and armor, which allowed players to modify the automations deployed on their behalf, as if self-improvement was something you could accomplish by tapping an add-to-cart button.

Like shopping, the fantasy of control was often more powerful than the reality having some new incremental trinket. Shopping online derives some of its pleasure from the simplicity of the input relative to the enormity of the mechanism behind the button press—the rare mineral mines, processing plants and assembly lines; the city-sized shipping boats and skyscraper-sized cranes waiting for them in port; the fleet of truckers driving overnight to regional shipping hubs, and the delivery drivers steering their personal cars through the suburbs to deposit a few cardboard boxes onto an empty stoop give the whole exercise a hedonic, compulsive gratification, which results not in people buying what they don’t need, but wanting what they don’t really want.

In the same way that most of the frequent flier miles accrued by travelers never end up being spent, a huge number of rare and legendary items players unlocked in Destiny 2 were never touched after they were unlocked. The menagerie of guns and armor mirrored the dreamy double nature of money, which before it’s spent seems to open up the world with possibility, but once committed to a purchase disappears, leaving only the smallness of the thing in your possession, wavering halfway between treasure and trash.

Seven years after its release, when I finally bought my own copy of Destiny 2—for $1.99, from the used racks of a half-abandoned GameStop in central Brooklyn—I knew there was little chance I would like it. I hadn’t liked the original Destiny when I played it in 2014, and didn’t think much of Bungie’s earlier work outside of the first Halo game. Even still, I tapped my credit card on the reader at the register and added a near-imperceptible amount of new debt to my perpetually swelling balance. After the promotional mania surrounding the sequel’s launch, I felt a pull that was as much social as aesthetic. It had the same sentimental charge as discovering old elementary school friends on Facebook, making it seem for a few happy moments like all of one’s life in between then and now had been a weird dream, and reality was still just the simple idles and kinship of the fifth grade version of yourself.

Instead, I discovered that there was almost nothing left of the original game to play—an experience more like becoming Facebook friends with a series of empty classrooms instead of old childhood friends. Though the code for all the missions, cutscenes, and characters—and the dozens of weapons, armor pieces, and collectibles that accompanied it all—was still on the disc spinning in my PlayStation 4, none of it was accessible. It was as if the entire game had been retracted and transformed into an elaborate digital shopping mall haunted by animatronic mascots who kept telling me I needed to buy a new season pass or bundle of downloadable add-ons to do anything meaningful. As if the game knew how little I had paid for it, and reciprocated.

Though I hadn’t been all that excited to play in the first place, it was a shock to be locked out of a game I had just bought and thought I owned. Like most games today—Fortnite, No Man’s Sky, Roblox, Sea of Thieves, Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, Candy Crush, or Clash of Clans—Destiny 2 wasn’t designed as a self-complete creative work, but an ever-changing bundle of software that players purchased a limited license to access under terms the developers could continuously alter. The disc and the code it contained was no more a guarantee of ownership or access than a hotel keycard after a reservation had expired.

Like a hotel, the game was bathed in an aura of excess and indulgence, both in the enormous scale of its visuals and the mind-bending number of bespoke weapons and decorative items players were rewarded with for finishing missions. This created an opportunity to participate in a kind of phantom version of the luxury spending that has come to predominate the US economy, with more than 50 percent of all consumer spending each year coming from the top 10 percent of earners—people who make $250,000 or more a year—accounting for more than one-third of the country’s total gross domestic product each year. So people without the disposable income to blow on a luxury suite in Mallorca—the median salary for a competitive gamer in 2023 was around $44,000—could still shop for imaginary luxury goods by spending their own time as if it were a currency, assembling digital estates of rare and exotic artifacts, like a gun made of bones or a helmet shaped like a fishbowl filled with vapor.

Even if you keep your software up to date, Bungie will still regularly take certain items and armor out of circulation, so that the least useful acquisitions might still end up with a seductive glimmer of scarcity. “In the Legendary tier, for now, we’re not making things that you can keep forever,” Bungie’s Luke Smith said, in another post-release interview. “That is ultimately a path to not having anything to pursue.”

The genius of this system is that it creates a way for players to compulsively shop in perpetuity without ever having to confront the fundamental disappointment of acquisition. In part because what they are shopping for isn’t an object but simply a better version of themselves. And if you don’t keep playing, it can start to feel like you are losing a part of the self you could have become if you had kept playing.

When I first started playing video games in the early 1980s, they had seemed as much like an urban legend as an art form, a rumor you heard repeated on the playground and in grocery store parking lots, wherever kids loitered waiting for their real lives to begin. We told each other stories about strange experiences that had spun up from an arcade machine on the other side of town or the cold plastic cartridges we traded each other or occasionally talked our parents into buying for us.

These stories gave us access to a secret language you could use with strangers to find some intimacy in the spaces where you might otherwise not have known what to say, conjuring an entire world with a few short words describing the drunken fugue of Kraid’s Lair in Metroid, the magnetic arc of a one-timer shot sailing the goalie in NHL 94, or the dreamy floating geometry of jump kicks and dragon punches in Street Fighter II. And even though we all played in isolation there was still an impression of being together and belonging, trying to find some trace of what someone else had experienced on the screen even when we were completely alone and going glassy-eyed pressing buttons in cryptic patterns in our bedrooms.

Over time that wish to be together overtook any aesthetic or expressive conception of games, and the industry adapted by shifting toward the development of open-ended online games, like Destiny 2, Fortnite, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Call of Duty: Warzone, Minecraft, and Roblox, which consolidated people’s time and curiosity in an even more efficient and profitable way than the packaged goods model had.

Players themselves seemed to have been transformed from customers into proprietary assets that publishers acquired and managed, their communal emotional responses to the game treated as a kind of intellectual property to which game companies made a legal claim. This logic was laid out most clearly in an expansive series of lawsuits filed, and mostly won, by Bungie against a handful of small groups who sold cheat code bundles for Destiny 2 and other games. “Destiny 2’s PvE modes can also become intense affairs because players can obtain highly visible in-game achievements as well as special physical merchandise linked to certain achievements by completing very challenging content within specific timeframes,” the company argued in a court filing. “The idea that players could qualify for these difficult-to-obtain awards by using cheat software, or that they are progressing more rapidly in order to become competitive by using cheats, cheapens the experience for legitimate players.”

Despite the fact that cheating software is used by an infinitesimally small group of players— just 6,756 downloads according to one of Bungie’s lawsuits, for a game that sold more than 16 million copies and peaked at 316,000 concurrent players on PC—Bungie saw it as a direct attack on their business. In part, that’s because they view the feelings players experience in the game as theirs — a proprietary code written in the emotional landscape of the player.

These feelings are just as important, if not more, than the underlying code or art itself: for players, they become the primary draw, and over the years, the continuous churn of players keep the games feeling alive. Human unpredictability supplants level design, filling in the gaps of what otherwise would have had to be authored design work, making the automation seem more alive—feelings themselves become both content and currency, a kind of rarefied behavioral wealth. Even more than the new downloadable content released each season, players consumed one another’s behavior with every update, feeding off the communal excitement, like tourists lining up to kiss the Blarney Stone or take a picture with an unemployed actor wearing a Mickey Mouse costume at Disneyland, our imaginations operating like player pianos feeding on perforated sheet music rolls that reproduce a looping setlist of alien enemies and randomized loot drops.

Those kinds of experiences became especially appealing in an era of grotesque abundance, with more than 100,000-plus games available on Steam alone—alongside more than 100 million songs available on Spotify, a near infinite number of movies on Amazon, Netflix, torrenting networks, and still-new video genres on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch. Having access to so much more creative work than there is actual time for is paralyzing, and the idea of watching or playing just for oneself feels especially lonesome. There is a comforting sense of continuity and belonging that comes with giving in to the small handful of familiar and formulaic titles that permanently occupy the best-sellers lists like beacons poking through the consumerist fog.

Ironically, when I finally started playing Destiny 2, it felt like everyone was cheating, shooting me with magical accuracy from behind, before I’d even seen them. I’d be dead almost before I knew I was being shot. And when I shot at others it often felt like I could land five or 10 consecutive direct hits without registering a single kill. Despite the serial failure, I found it strangely cathartic to accept my own ineffectiveness. I was so bad at the game, and had been away for so long that I had perhaps broken its own matchmaking rules, conceding every match and moment to players who’d spent years mastering the invisible automations in between the controller and screen. That seemed like a more interesting problem: trying to get even one kill against other players with an impossible advantage.

In that split second between dying and respawning at some new point on the map, I felt a small burst of anger about the time I’d just lost and a manic comfort in thinking about how much more time I still had left ahead of me to spend on sprinting back into the fray. I felt rich in time itself, a currency I could spend in perpetuity and never run out of. And the deeper the game drilled into my imagination, the bigger the gush of time I felt I had to spend on it. I imagined myself as one of those tycoons who only gets richer from the tax write-offs when they try and give away their money, even though in reality I was an unemployed writer spending $2 on a credit card to play a video game.

I felt high on the idea that I had even more time to spend than money, and the more I wasted my time, the richer I seemed to grow in it, as if my mind had become a mint that was printing out sheets of hundred-dollar bills faster than anyone could spend them. In each our own way, we’ve all become over-leveraged in fictions none of us can afford to pull out of, without collapsing the walls in on everyone around us. Press X to continue. ◼