I was first exposed to Borderlands about 6 months ago, a friend and I were checking out the demos at the Singapore Games Convention and happened to find the demo stations for Borderlands free. We played the demo.
For three and a half hours.
In retrospect, that should have been a warning of the game’s addictive qualities, but those were more innocent times, oh if only we could turn back time.
Life would continue on, pretty much as usual, after that first taste of that game, it would occasionally come up in some of my conversations, but that was it. Little did I know that the seeds of addiction had already been planted and was quietly taking root.
It began innocuously enough, based on the positive reviews and gameplay videos on the internet, my brother and I decided to buy the game. I do not think that the game had as strong an effect on my brother though, he is a stronger man than I.
That was … maybe four weeks ago now. Four weeks spent, if not playing the game then thinking about it. Little else distracted me from my inebriated stupor, at times I become almost a fixture, sitting statuesque in the middle of the couch, controller in hand, mouth opened slightly in fevered concentration, keeping just enough self awareness to not drool all over my shirt.
The game is insidious in its seduction, it teases the player with just enough to keep him interested at first, a rare gun here, a skill point there. Just when you begin to notice the repetitive MMO like nature of the quests, your character becomes a little more powerful. Maybe you start to gain the ability to regain health or to regenerate ammo for your guns. It is almost superficial but it keeps you from wanting to put that controller down.
I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve said to myself, ‘Just a few more levels and I can get the skill to increase the effectiveness of my Fire Hawk Incendiary Pistol’ or ‘I think I’ll just do another Sledge run to see if I can get a better gun’.
It is not like the game doesn’t have its flaws. The load times between areas are glaringly long, so that’s the time I use to go to the toilet or grab another drink from the fridge. It would not be a stretch of the imagination to believe that that was its intended purpose.
There is a lot of noticeable texture pop-ins, this is particularly evident when you just enter a new area and the game doesn’t even seem to care to hide it. The frame rate also takes a hit every time there is more than three things happening on screen at the same time, it jumps and stutters like a mentally challenged kid trying to recite the alphabet while skipping rope. It even lags in the goddamned start menu! What other console game can get away with that?
The plot is as thin and insubstantial as a disposable undergarment improvised from a couple of plies of Kleenex. There are some genuinely interesting characters but you don’t get to interact with them much at all, they are as approachable as a back alley drug dealer, you know they probably got some really interesting conversation in them but they just want to do their job and be done with you.
I’m not even sure what I’m even Doing in Borderlands, earlier I compared it to an MMO, and it is like that, but the big difference is there isn’t anyone else around. In any MMO the driving motivation is a persistent sense of progression of your avatar and much of this is usually derived from comparing yourself to others. This isn’t the case in Borderlands, sure you gain levels and you can show off your character in online play, but it doesn’t have the same gravity because you are always limited to four players at a time and no real way of distinguishing yourself from other players.
So why can’t I stop playing it?
The short answer is: Loot.
There was a couple of times in those four weeks when I was granted fleeting moments of lucidity, I tried to breakdown what exactly I was doing when I played the game. This is what I scrawled on a piece of tissue with either ketchup or blood, I’m not sure which because I threw it away before I thought to lick it.
“Kill anything that moves that is not a claptrap, get better guns to kill things.
Kill some more things to get better guns… kill”
There is an experiment where a scientist observed animals in a box deprived of stimuli, except for a lever which when pulled would cause a mechanism to give out pellets of food. Interestingly, the animals were observed to pull the levers faster if the mechanism gave out the pellets at random rather than at regular intervals, sometimes the animals would pull the lever even if they didn’t need the food.
Borderlands is like that box only instead of food pellets you get guns and instead of a lever you have Skags. It is also more fun to shoot skags than to pull a lever for food pellets… I think… I’m pretty sure…
You know what I think I’ll go play Borderlands just to make sure.
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