Why I really hate Borderlands Part two

       So I was reading through (again)  this near novel review of Borderlands http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/ and I couldn't help but cringe. The reviewer (who isn't the author of the blog) is an uppity writer who assumes she has it all figured out because she has a clear vast knowledge of video games and how they work. Now I'm going to be frank. This reviewer disgusts me. She talks about Borderlands as if it's the second coming, and attests its true depth and magnificence to, drumroll please, how it perpetuates addiction. This is exactly what we shouldn't be doing in the industry. Using Token economies and reward schedules to enrapture people in a never ending cycle of achievements is wrong when it's a means to an end (where the end and the mean are the exact same thing). But be assured, she believes it's a good game, so she has noted other aspects as to why that's the case. I'm here to tell you that all of the other aspects are wrong. I'm going to explain why they're all wrong. Let's begin.

The dialogue is horrible

      The dialogue is horrible. Not because it's poorly written. But because there isn't actually any value to be gained from listening to it. It doesn't work to establish any sort of setting or characters. Every single person you come into contact with (aside from a few like that annoying claptrap machine) is basically a stepping stone for you to grind more. There is no "aha moment" where you find yourself being drawn to a character. In fact, I challenge people to tell me a character in the game, whose actions and dialogue make for a very convincing and unique character. Why actions you might ask? Because talk is cheap. Words aren't enough to convince people of real characters. Let's take Fallout 3 for example (a game that mirrors that disgusting setting of borderlands, while being artistically adept). Remember that weird town at the bottom of the map called Andale?  When you go there you engage in a lot of well written, zany dialogue. All of it alludes to how the residents of the town might be cannibals. You know what's the icing on that cake? THE FACT THAT THEY ARE ACTUALLY FUCKING CANNIBALS. When you walk into this

Are those actual skeletons?

And then you're presented with these answer choices (dialogue): 

I don't like it when people shove kitchen knives in my face

You feel something because the game is making characters real by reinforcing what they say with their actions. Oh by the way, he shoots you if you choose the other two answer choices, just further reinforcing that cannibals are deranged. So no, I didn't chuckle in Borderlands, nor did I even bother to care about the quests I did. That's because it didn't mean anything. And don't go arguing, "if you read the dialogue by itself, you'd really find it witty". Who else but Forensics teams, sit around all day reading dialogue that don't weave together a coherent plot (no offence to any forensics people reading this blog). No one. It's boring. You wouldn't let someone sell you a book that removes all the text but the dialogue, would you? If you answered yes, then you're right, borderlands has witty dialogue and you should probably stop reading now. 

It isn't fun

              Fun is as subjective as it gets and depending on what you find fun is going to determine if you think I'm a genius or an idiot. Luckily, you can forgo reading my opinion here and just look to my post on Realm of the Mad God (http://retrospeccced.blogspot.com/2012/08/realm-of-mad-god.html). It's quite brief and if you take 5 seconds to play the game, for free, with no download or significant lag (http://www.realmofthemadgod.com/), then you can determine if we have similar outlooks on what's "fun". If you find Realm of the Mad God pure fun (not saying it's amazing, just that it's fun), then you're in luck, I agree. If you think it's boring because it doesn't have amazing graphics and more options for loot, then we do not see eye to eye on fun. 

             You see my personal philosophy on "fun" in video games is simple. It needs to come from the game play (answer choices aren't fun) and it needs to be creative. If your fun is game play driven and creative, then chances are I'll find your game fun. Now I don't hold a check list while playing a game, waiting for the moment creativity takes over. I just know when I'm having fun that it's fun. That was just a quick analysis of what I subconsciously use as a criterion. And don't get me wrong, your game play doesn't need to be groundbreaking to get my creativity pass. I find Mario Tennis to be creative because bullet bills get shot at you while you serve (exaggeration, this doesn't actually happen). In fact, I just don't want something that get's bland and boring quickly. Oh hey Borderlands, I knew I'd find you somewhere in this section. 

      Before I disagree with her opinion on what constitutes as fun, I'm going to explain why Borderlands isn't fun to begin with. First, you do essentially the same thing in Borderlands. It's the same collection of quests we all know and love from any good MMORPG. Collect x amount of this. Kill x amount of this. Kill guy x. This will be cycled over and over and over, till you instinctively know how the NPC is going to cleverly word the same basic task. And to top it all off, while you're doing the same thing you can also, (drumroll[ wow two drumrolls in one post]), kill the same thing. Yes, the enemies you kill in borderlands will for the most part be exactly the same all throughout each section. When you face new enemies it's a rarity that becomes old almost immediately because chances are you'll be given several other missions to kill those very same rarities for the billionth time. How this doesn't scream out "boring repetition" is beyond me. In fact, the very action is basically the embodiment of repetition. You do the exact same thing. It isn't even masked well, like the way WoW does it (not to say WoW doesn't turn into repetitive mush as well). 

    Also,there isn't any skill being displayed here. For a shooter, it's pretty manila and I found myself early on being able to plow through enemies, never having to work for anything. New abilities and new weapons  never intrigued me because I found that a simple rinse, wash, repeat, can get me through dealing with enemy baddies. I mean sure there's always that nuke ability you get that makes you go gun crazy for about 5 minutes, but then you fall right back into that same brain numbing groove of killing monsters. There are no points for creativity in this game. It encourages rote killing an that's exactly what you need to do to maximize your efficiency in the game. And since the game is all grind, efficiency is the only thing you should be striving for. 

   

Acknowledge counter examples

         Now is Borderlands completely devoid of fun? Well not exactly. It is, however, completely devoid of long term fun. For example, I admit that jumping in low gravity is cool, but that gets old after an hour. And vehicles are fun too, but that also gets old after an hour because it takes no skill to use them. Abilities, as I mentioned before, can also be fun, but after mastering them, there is no more fun to be derived because skill isn't a factor. When elements of fun are just shiny objects being tossed at the player instead of being a shabby, yet reliable, set of building blocks, then you have the recipe for a short lived amount of fun in a game. 

If you don't agree with my notion of fun, then please don't tell me you agree with her's

      When the author begins her fun tirade, she starts with an example of what isn't fun (basically she cites a shooter that had stunning graphics, but flat game play, that "unsuccessfully" copied Borderlands). This is what she says "The fun it [ Rage] offers is ephemeral: typical fire-and-forget mediocre-shooter fun." Funny, that sounds exactly like how I described Borderlands' fun, short lived and typical. She doesn't ever explain why Borderlands is any different. Instead she decides if she's going to hate on one game, might as well raise the ante by hating on an entire genre. The genre she decides to toss her general unsubstantiated criticism towards is the RPG. She claims that too many RPGs have become too realistic. A fair argument, that she again furthers by an example that doesn't fit the norm. She cites Fallout 3 (oh hey, what a coincidence) as an example of a good RPG that isn't too realistic. She then ponders the fantasy of a Fallout and Borderlands mash up (sounds more like a nightmare). Not once does she ever explain why Borderlands itself is actually fun, but instead leaves it up to the reader to trust that Boderlands is the exact antithesis of the two negative aspects she highlighted.
     But don't worry, she talks about the intangibles that make the game so memorable. Now we're both in agreement here. Intangibles can take a bland game and turn it into an amazing game. But what she cites as intangibles is laughable at best. First, she talks about how awesome the design team was to come up with the idea of making "angry midgets". She even comes up with a mock design team convo that paints them as the cool, risk taking nerds that are into all the same stock weird stuff that make games so gooey at the center.


This is her mock convo:

"Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we had, like, angry midgets?"


"Uh, don't they prefer to be called Little Dudes?"


"Not on Pandora. On Pandora they prefer to be called aaaaAAarguhgh as they shoot your ass with a shotgun so big that it throws them onto their backs." 

"Woah! There's no *possible* way Legal will let it through, but it does sound fun! Let's go with it for now."

She gained that kind of impression from this enemy. 

Isn't he adorable?

And if every shred of information I gave you so far was the whole story, then maybe she'd have a case. Too bad this is also an enemy they debut right from the beginning.

Hey, you're just like the other guy, but taller!

Look familiar? It should because they're essentially the SAME FUCKING GUY. Let me give you my impression of the development team

Idiot1: Hey, our deadline is almost up and we've only come up with one enemy

Idiot2: Fuck, I don't want to miss another deadline 

Idiot 1: Yea man, I was just getting good at this whole "having a job thing" 

Idiot 3: Hey! Why don't we just take the first guy we made, make him shorter, and change his eyeballs to a different color. 

Idiot 1 and 2: That's perhaps the stupidest thing I've ever heard, but we're pretty much out of options, so...

[end scene]

If you find the notion of shooting an angry midget truly inventive and uniquely funny, then congratulations, you have the humor of a four year old, and even that might be an overestimation. 

Conclusion: Stop perpetuating addiction as a goal to aspire to

          That pretty much entails every reason she gave as to why Borderlands is fun. From there she gushes on for several pages on why it's such an addicting game. She explains with precision and scarily concise attention to detail what aspects of the game serve to push along the behavioral psych hamster wheel that is "the game". She even puts in bold a microcosm of what could be construed as her own philosophy when it comes to the purpose of games. She writes "fun isn't enough to create addiction". And she's right. Fun is a liberating experience that can cause a temporary indulgence that might be misconstrued as addiction. Addiction is constricting and sucks the life out of someone, replacing it with its own rules. Fun is eye opening, allowing someone to transcend the boundaries of their world for a few moments, creating a necessary break from reality, while giving a person ammo to combat with it. Fun is vitality. Addiction is degrading. And while I do think some of the addictive nature of video games is unavoidable, the day we start measuring games based on how mind numbingly addicting they can be, is the day video games cease to be works of art or even forms of entertainment. Instead they become drugs, that take advantage of how we think, slowly enslaving us into believing in their own system for self worth.