Behind the Times: Winning Neoliberalism in the Borderlands
This essay is about the first Borderlands game and its DLCs only. For those concerned about it, extensive spoilers follow.
Borderlands really shouldn’t work as well as it does. By all rights it should be a tedious slog, 25+ hrs of boredom in a drab sandbox full of repetitive enemy types with quest-lines that deliberately evoke the sensation of doing chores for strangers. The writing is typified by the kind of ironic detachment that would come to define Internet culture a decade later, aggressively undermining any kind of sincere investment in the plot. The vast majority of the dialogue takes the form of wry wisecracking that well, of course things were always going to happen this way.
And yet, even as I run somewhere to shoot some enemies and pick something up off the ground for the hundredth time, there’s some hook that keeps tantalizingly pulling me along. The game sneers at any kind of genuine interest in its lore or its characters, armored with a thick carapace of droll detachment, and yet I don’t stop caring about the workings of this place. Part of this is certainly my own proclivities as a player; I always get deeply invested in the world of any sufficiently engaging RPG. But Borderlands is deliberately barren. Its environmental storytelling is overwhelmingly sarcastic. So why do I give a shit about this place?
The easiest explanation is that the game’s writing is sufficiently skillful to provide characterization without the need for a straightforward plot, and it gets away with all this because of an engaging core gameplay loop. But the world of Borderlands isn’t just minimalist, it’s desolate. Where it does have stories to tell, it usually telegraphs its endings loudly, or even brazenly executes complete clichés. The game indulges in all the hallmarks of bad storytelling.
A better explanation, I think, is that all of these elements–the willfully tedious gameplay, the droll reliance on tropes, the obnoxious sarcasm–all work in synergy to produce a mood piece of sorts. What Borderlands presents is not a story so much as a sci-fi tinted impression of our own modern circumstances under neoliberal capitalism. What makes Borderlands escapist fiction rather than a masochistic indulgence is that it constructs this impression in such a way that it enables the player to overcome the various hazards of this world on its own terms. In other words, Borderlands allows the player to inhabit a world where you can win neoliberalism.
The Lay of the Land
In the game’s opening cinematic, the four playable characters are riding a rickety bus driven by the local arms dealer and odd-jobber, Marcus Kinkaid, who tells you, “it’s a beautiful day, full of opportunity!” You are dropped off in Fyrestone–a small collection of buildings held together by whatever passes for duct tape in this part of the universe–with nothing but your clothes and a couple of guns. It’s hard to imagine where this opportunity is supposed to be lying around; the “town” looks like it’s made from scrap and not fit for habitation. The area you’re dropped off in is dubbed the “Arid Badlands”, a description that aptly conveys the fact that there is little to no vegetation, or even running water. You might as well have been dropped in the center of a giant hot plate.
Your first task sets the tone for the whole game; bandits are attacking Fyrestone for some ill-defined reason, and you have to kill them and rescue the inhabitants. You “have” to do this mainly because Fyrestone physically blocks your way to the rest of this world and the moment you step foot in it, the bandits presumably assume you’re the cavalry and start shooting at you without question. The only thing you can really do is shoot back until everything trying to kill you is dead. This world is fundamentally hostile and nasty to you, and the only way to deal with that is to be nastier in kind.
Once you take care of that issue you have some breathing room to meet the locals–all half a dozen of them. The few people in the Arid Badlands that aren’t trying to kill you have work for you, of sorts. Mostly, the people you meet want you to solve their local problems, and this is what you spend the vast majority of your time in the titular borderlands doing: odd jobs for strangers.
You’re in these parts to search for the Vault, a legendary repository of alien treasure somewhere on the planet Pandora. But rather than solving a grand mystery to find it, or wrestling with some personal rivals to win it, you spend most of your efforts just doing enough make-work to convince the locals to give you the infrastructural access codes you need to move on. Your quest for buried treasure is defined by miscellaneous tedium seasoned with gunplay, like finding a man’s peg leg or shooting bird shit off of wind turbines to restart them. Both story missions and side quests task you with some chore that nonetheless sees you up against any number of bandits or wild animals out for your blood. Even boss battles pit you up against people you have no personal connection to and that you’re killing merely as a favor for someone squatting on something you need. While most of the world is hostile to you, your relationship to the remainder is wholly transactional and terse.
In the midst of all this, you’re constantly scavenging for cash, ammo, guns, shields, and health items. Pandora is literally littered with these items. Not only are there chests lying around with ammo, shields, and new guns in them, the game also has you rustling bullets and cash out of piles of garbage, bones, and even household appliances strewn across the environment. You can frequently find oddly placed washing machines and toilets with ammo and money inexplicably stowed away in them.
In keeping with Fyrestone’s ramshackle appearance, the whole game world feels like it was carelessly salvaged. Whole regions of Pandora, like the aptly named Trash Coast and Earl’s Scrapyard, are covered in enormous piles of garbage. One boss fight takes place in a dried-up mine, another on a rickety oil rig repurposed as a bandit fortress. Pandora is a place that was already nasty, and only got nastier as it was sucked dry by capitalism; everybody still here–including you–is just scuttling over the carcass looking for anything useful.
Rise and Grind
If Borderlands is about one thing more than anything else, it’s the guns. They are at the core of the game’s mechanics, and therefore define how you interact with this world. The most basic effect is to reinforce the above; your relationship to this world is either hostile or mercenary, nothing else. The sum total of your options for interacting with anything in this world is: shooting it, picking it up, or accepting a payment from it to go somewhere else to shoot or pick up something.
This extremely narrow range of options reinforces complete detachment from this world; you’re just here to shoot stuff and get paid. But the way that you iteratively change your load-out over the course of the game has a deeper effect. In Borderlands, you’re constantly finding new weapons, some banal, some exotic, some totally unique. The “looter-shooter” formula pivots on this quest for new and more powerful tools for shredding your enemies, and there’s a kind of mean rush in picking up a weapon, testing it out, and realizing it absolutely melts enemies that once vexed you. This rush isn’t just competitive, it’s vindictive; self-improvement solely as a means to bring your frustrations low by destroying them. Coupled with character upgrades that grant you new abilities, this world simulates a kind of Social Darwinist meritocracy where only the strong survive constant, vicious competition.
What saves this experience from being frustrating and humiliating whenever you come across an enemy just too far up the difficulty curve to deal with is how the game masks failure as iteration. In-universe infrastructure provides a canonical explanation for re-spawning mechanics; posts scattered throughout the world save your DNA so that when you die, you get reincarnated at the cost of a set percentage of whatever cash you have on hand. You can buy new guns, ammo, and health items at vending machines scattered throughout the world, and spawn new vehicles from thin air in certain places. The game’s world is undergirded by an infrastructure that exists solely to insulate you from the ultimate consequences of failure.
The opportunity for endless iteration makes obstacles merely temporary. If you’re having trouble with some mission, you can walk away and do some easier side missions to level grind and hunt for better guns. This iteration has a snowballing effect, especially if you are diligent about completing all the side quests. By the late game in both my solo and co-op runs, my friends and I were consistently over-leveled for every mission we accepted. While co-op enemies remained challenging due to buffs, late-game enemies in my solo run were pushovers. Early in the game I had to rely on sniping, running away to heal after killing a few enemies, and carefully managing cash; by the end of the main game, I could simply run right up to groups of enemies and mow them down. I had so much cash I stopped even looking at the cost of new guns at vendors, and I virtually stopped needing to buy ammo due to ammo regeneration perks. I had thrown off the few material problems this world did saddle me with and had become even more invincible than reincarnation had already made me.
The post-game DLCs are, in part, a joke about how invincible you are. You confront a zombie apocalypse, a mega-corporation putting a bounty on your head, and a robot uprising, all of which throw massive numbers of enemies at you that at this point you can usually shrug off. The efforts of the Atlas Corporation to kill you as revenge for your actions in the main game are now simply a roadblock, in some cases literally. I found myself mostly running past hordes of robots and the undead not because they were too tough but because fighting them was a tedious distraction. Why bother when I have places to be and money to make?
Up with the Sickness
There’s a kind of spiritual rot at the core of this vicious world that Borderlands is portraying, and it explores that rot mainly through the story DLCs, starting with “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned”. It depicts a zombie apocalypse on an island called Jakob’s Cove; you are there because the titular Jakob’s Corporation is paying you to investigate why they lost contact with their facilities on the island. Even more so than the rest of the game, the predictability of the cliche is the point.
From the moment the DLC’s opening cinematic plays, the conclusion is foregone; Dr. Ned is to blame. When you first meet him, he makes an ostentatious show of fixing an elevator at an excruciatingly slow pace while you are stranded at the bottom, fighting off waves of zombies. His character model is a re-skin of an earlier character in the main game, but with a cartoonishly twirled handlebar mustache. The story leaves absolutely no ambiguity as to who is personally responsible for this disaster.
There is one person who couldn’t see Dr. Ned’s culpability coming, a tragically credulous side character by the name of Hank Reiss. Hank came to Jakob’s Cove looking for work in order to support his family. You learn about his journey through a side quest where you collect audio logs that convey messages to his wife. In those messages he expresses absolute, sincere faith in Dr. Ned’s abilities and desire to to keep him and his coworkers safe. He ultimately volunteers to have a “cure” for the metastasizing zombie plague tested on him, which turns him into a monster himself.
This is a strangely bitter note in a game that hinges entirely on sarcasm. Hank’s letters to his wife aren’t really played for laughs; in them he expresses genuine trust and optimism, in complete dissonance with the world around him and your own attitude. Hank was betrayed, and there’s really nothing funny about it, however predictable it is. You shake your head and perhaps chuckle as you listen to Hank with your knowing cynicism, but what’s really more laughable? Is it Hank’s good faith, or your denial of the obvious as you go through the motions of pretending you don’t know Dr. Ned is responsible up to the moment you find superfluous hard proof that he was experimenting on his assistants?
The real joke–and the real horror–of Dr. Ned’s island is a double reversal. The zombie apocalypse is an ostensibly horrifying disaster on its face that is so predictable as to be trite. But on a third look you realize that if all this was so predictable, why didn’t anyone stop it? Aren’t the Jakob’s Corporation’s investigative efforts just an elaborate show of pretending they didn’t know this was coming to avoid legal culpability? Why do you go through the motions of pretending you didn’t know what happened the moment you stepped foot here, when corporate contempt for workers and managerial malfeasance collude to end so much life so often and so predictably? Why are you laughing when this should be making you angry?
You don’t bother trying to save Hank. When you find him, howling at the moon, you kill him too.
Changing the World, No Step at a Time
Despite all this horror, Borderlands doesn’t have the heart to even hope this world can change; any attempt to enact that change is treated with either pity or cynical contempt. Take General Knoxx, the man in charge of the Atlas Corporation’s efforts to kill you and ensure Atlas’ dominance of Pandora. He quickly goes about improving Atlas’s operations (in one instance an audio-log describes him rolling out new technology that saves Atlas some 12% of its energy costs). However, his dialogue is characterized not by pride but bitter, jaded exasperation, as his immediate superior–an Admiral–is a literal infant placed in his position by bald-faced nepotism.
Where Knoxx is trapped in a humiliating position within corporate structures, the Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Claptrap–a reprogrammed version of one of the game’s chipper helper robots–is similarly humiliated by them as an outside force. In “Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution”, the titular robot is reprogrammed by the Hyperion Corporation to kill the Vault hunters. But instead of going about the task, Claptrap foments a doomed robot uprising against capitalism on Pandora.
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which Borderlands thinks this effort to overturn the power of capital is laughable. Claptrap has littered Pandora with Soviet-style propaganda and loudspeakers broadcasting his maxims, but routinely flubs his lines or lets slip that the revolution is mostly a vehicle for his own misanthropy. The robots swarm you in fights because any one can’t pose a real threat. At this point in my solo run, I was so over-leveled that every mission was marked “trivial”.
Borderlands is extremely cynical about whether this challenge to capital is even sincere, let alone competent. Claptrap’s bluster frequently shifts into undirected misanthropy. Late in the game, he works himself up into referring to himself as the revolutionaries’ “master” before audibly regretting being too honest in his megalomania. The only reason the revolution even happened was because of Claptrap’s reprogramming by the Hyperion Corporation; the revolution itself is directly attributable not to the independent desires of the exploited, but to the machinations of corporate functionaries.
The climax of the DLC is a boss fight against Claptrap himself that takes place at the bus station outside Fyrestone where you started the main game. When you defeat Claptrap, you use a device provided to you by Hyperion to reprogram him back into the servile and chipper helper-robot from before. The message is clear, “nothing has changed, nothing will change, nothing can change, don’t make me laugh.”
What Pandora Does to a Motherfucker
On Pandora, sincerity–your own and others’–is not to be trusted. Any genuine interest in learning about this place or in changing it renders a person villainous, pitiful, or both. For his loyalty and diligence, Knoxx is humiliated. For his vision and rebelliousness, so is Claptrap. Ned’s scientific curiosity is overtly malicious. Hank’s good faith is tragically naive. Patricia Tannis, the archaeologist who helps you reassemble the key to the Vault, is driven mad by loneliness and deprivation and falls in love with her voice recorder. She betrays you to the Atlas Corporation for good measure.
Your own player character has no dialogue, but they are decidedly not a neutral mask. I played Lilith in my solo run; whenever I killed a group of enemies, she would laugh, “I’m really good at this!” In my co-op run, my friend played Brick and I often mistook that character’s vigorous panting and grunting for enemy screams as he reveled in bare-knuckle slaughter. These characters are not noble or kind or emotionally invested in their surroundings. They are mean and detached, deriving catharsis from being nastier than their environs.
So if I can write all these words about what a cruel and jaded vision of the world this is, what’s the answer to my own question? Why do I give a shit about this place, and these people?
All this sarcasm is deeply familiar. Pandora is cruel, absurd, and seems immutable, not unlike the United States today. The end of history, as it turns out, sucks. And when confronted with so many reasons for fear, disappointment, rage, and grief, you naturally seek to guard yourself. A nasty and cold world makes you nasty and cold in kind, as a basic survival response. All this cynical laughter is the sure sign of a callused soul.
Playing Borderlands feels like commiseration. You muse out loud that, “wow, this place sucks” and the game responds, “I know, right!? But what if…it couldn’t hurt you?” Borderlands dares not dream this place can change because we’ve all been burned before by hope that turned to despair. The only thing left to imagine is that you beat this absurd capitalist gauntlet, and even that requires immortality and superpowers for you to have a chance.
Neoliberalism, on this planet and ours, makes meanness and cruelty appear to be a survival necessity. Borderlands assures you that yes, this thing that’s happening to you is happening to all of us and we don’t know what to do about it either. Pandora operates by absurd and immoral logic that is instantly recognizable to denizens of the 21st century. That sanity check is a cold comfort…but it is comfort nonetheless.
