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Here are some recent thoughts of mine: I am playing too much Destiny. Also, games might be an expression of the futility of the human condition.Two things are keeping me playing Destiny at this point, although they are really the same thing. The first is the most obvious - it is the grind. I'm chemically predisposed to respond compulsively to mechanisms which provide randomised rewards on the way to advancement along an arbitrary scale. Being aware of the ultimate futility of this doesn't blunt the compulsion for me (or indeed for my friends: an email I received this very morning from my Raid group - because that's a thing - reads: "Definitely up for getting this done - I need to increase the potency of my internet space man, guys, and that hasn't happened for a couple of days.")
The other reason I keep playing is that there's something I love about Destiny's fiction. I use the word fiction instead of story because it's fairly obvious at this point that Destiny doesn't have a story. So by fiction what I mean is the one-shot over-arching stuff - the restoration of mankind, and the reclamation of a future that is a recognisable extension of ours. This is the thing, really: that Destiny's science fiction is local, and its future seems reachable. These are our lunar modules on the moon, our spindly scaffold tech. We're nearly there. We will be.
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