Decades after space invaders first descended into video-game arcades, protecting planet Earth from hostile alien attackers remains the medium’s dominant theme. Perhaps we feel that it’s what we deserve, with all those species that reportedly collapse into extinction each day in our polluted wake. Or perhaps repelling aliens is the best way we can express the lingering, primal fears of the other without the racist overtones. Whatever the reason, Earth-defending fantasies remain vivid and routine in video games, and Destiny, released last month, is the most vivid routine yet, a molto budget blockbuster in which players flit between Earth and its orbiting moon and planets in a never-ending quest to stave off prospective immigrants.

At a cost of five hundred million dollars, Destiny is arguably the most expensive video game created. This figure, originally divulged by Bobby Kotick, the C.E.O. of Activision, the game’s publisher, was later qualified. It’s the estimated cost of supporting Destiny for a decade and includes the expected price of creating new content and sequels in order to keep players invested in this particular virtual real estate. In addition to funding the server farms needed to run a multi-million-player online game, the budget has been spent on human talent: the game features the voice of Peter Dinklage, who plays Tyrion Lannister in HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” in the role of a laconic cube-like sidekick to your nameless, voiceless defender of Earth.

Before Destiny’s launch, Activision was somewhat shy about the game’s exact nature. Post-launch, it’s clear that Destiny is a splicing of the publisher’s most successful games: the shoot-or-be-shot gunplay of the Call of Duty series paired with the persistent online playpen of World of Warcraft—a game that, at its peak, had twelve million subscribers. In Destiny, you can play alone, with friends, or with strangers, taking on missions that, in most cases, have you questing through a network of caves or across fields, eliminating gaggles of loitering aliens before the final showdown against a hulking space brute, after which the spoils are divided among the victors.

The game is primarily experienced through the sight of one of its fantastical guns. You take long, arcing jumps and dart between rocks as you, in Space Invaders’s enduring style, try to shoot them before they shoot you. As well as following an arcane storyline, you can take breaks to explore the planets, taking on a never-ending supply of mini-missions (collect ten of these, shoot ten of those) until you grow weary. Or you can play competitively against other players, vying for control of territory or attempting to rack up the greater number of kills.

While Bungie, the game’s developer, boasts that the technology that underpins all of this is groundbreaking, the output is familiar—only the grand expense and the quality of finish has the power to, at times, arrest. Indeed, the game is perhaps the ultimate expression of the contemporary populist video game; it draws together the prevailing designs of the past five years into an almost coherent whole, its various avenues designed to appeal to different subsets of players. But, in doing so, it also draws together the prevailing problems.

Video games like Destiny are entire worlds that are governed by the rules and systems that their designers lay down. Because of this, they often take on the systems of the culture in which they are created, in this case, late capitalism. You are thrust into a world, told to work (here, your work is to harvest glimmer, a currency dropped by aliens), and use the fruits of your labor to improve your equipment. These upgrades allow you to work more quickly, more efficiently, or for greater gains. In this way, the ecosystem of investment and yield is established, an Ouroboros that is both irresistible and, by design, never completely satisfying. It replicates the familiar grind of consumerism; you are made to feel constantly dissatisfied with your possessions because you have the knowledge that there’s always a slightly better gun, cloak, or helmet just out of the reach of affordability.

So you return to work in order to save up. The better your equipment, the greater your social status with other players. The greater your social status, the more they will want you on their team and the more they will envy your achievements, which are clearly displayed in the clothes that you wear (in the game’s later stages, the only way to advance your character is by equipping him or her with better items). In this way, from a certain angle at least, Destiny exposes the alluring futility of the consumerist systems on the other side of the screen. The game is designed to keep you dissatisfied with your lot so that you will continue playing and investing. Like World of Warcraft, when you peel back the metaphor, the game offers a bleak (if unintended) critique of consumerism: once you reach the endgame, you become a character that has everything in world. Everything, that is, except for a purpose.

The allure and futility is best exemplified by the “loot cave,” a hollow in a rock early in the game from which an endless stream of enemies would flee. The cave was discovered soon after the game’s launch, and word spread quickly. Players would gather around the cave and fire their weapons into the blackness, waiting ten minutes or so before running inside to harvest the items that the enemies had dropped. Here the game’s finer design details and challenge were discarded; many players simply chose to take the path of least resistance.

Bungie issued a statement about the cave when the developers removed it from the game last week. It read, “Shooting at a black hole for hours on end isn’t our dream for how Destiny is played.” It may not have been the development team’s dream, but it was perhaps an inevitable side effect of the way in which the game had been designed to appeal.

The game’s loop-like nature is not unique, but it works as effectively here as anywhere else. The only way for Bungie to maintain our interest over the long term is to create more virtual goods, of higher quality and efficiency, and to release them into the ecosystem. This, even more than the somewhat illicit thrill of cause-and-effect when a bullet leaves the chamber and, a second later, an alien dissipates into fragments of light, is what will keep people returning, what will keep people hungry, what will keep people wanting and spending more.