Learning In Pandora

For those unfamiliar with video games, it is easy to assume that the mind of a gamer is filled only with urges to murder and destroy while they play. This, however, is not the case. Even in the most violent of shooting games, much critical thinking, analysis, and, dare I say it, learning, is involved. In order to demonstrate this, I will evaluate a game that is comical, yet incredibly violent. 

Borderlands 2 is a co-op FPSRPG, or cooperative first person shooter role playing game. This means the player sees through the eyes of their chosen character and has some influence on the development of that character, while gameplay is centered on gunfights. Playing with friends is also strongly encouraged in the game. For those who do, tougher challenges and better rewards are promised. 

Players first set foot in the hilariously violent world of Pandora in the first Borderlands. They are given a choice of one of four characters; Mordecai the Hunter, Roland the Soldier, Lilith the Siren, or Brick the Berserker, each of whom came to Pandora in search of the Vault: an enigmatic place believed to contain powerful alien technology and promised to bring fame and riches to those who open it. The players are guided on their quest by a mysterious woman called Angel who appears occasionally, via video chat, to point the “vault hunters” (the players) in the right direction. In the end, though, it turns out she has her own motives for helping the player. When the vault is finally opened, a godlike pan-dimensional monster, called The Destroyer, attempts to escape it, leaving it up to the player to stop it. Angel uses the vault hunters to stop the Destroyer. 

In Borderlands 2, players return to Pandora as a different set of vault hunters. This time, the characters are Maya the Siren, Salvador the Gunzerker, Axton the Commando, and Zer0 the Assassin. Each has once again come in search of fame and fortune as there is rumor of another vault. However, some things have changed in Pandora since the opening of the Vault, mostly due to it releasing a new element called Eridium. Angel’s deception in the first game is revealed to be an order from Handsome Jack, the president of the Hyperion corporation (a weapons and robotics manufacturer), who has been taking Pandora over, grabbing all the Eridium he can, and killing every bandit and vault hunter he finds. After he attempts to kill these new vault hunters, they team up with the first set, who are still very bitter at Angel’s betrayal, to stop him from opening a second vault. The player is once again guided by Angel, who appears resentful for her having misled the previous Vault Hunters, and is inclined to betray Jack this time. 

When a player starts out in Borderlands 2, they are not given much information. Brief explanations pop up on the screen for the basics of the game, such as controls and different aspects of the menu. These pop ups are short, and for the most part, off to the side of the screen. I have started the game three times so far, and I did not remember them being there, which is preferable since most games follow a standard for controls, and experienced gamers can get going without the annoyance of a lengthy tutorial. For those new to the genre or games in general, the pop ups provide a helpful hint to get them going. The more complex aspects of the game, like fighting, looting, and managing skill trees, are taught through other methods.

James Paul Gee, Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University, has put quite a bit of thought into these methods that video games use to teach. In his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, he fleshes out 36 individual Learning Principles that are common in good video games. Six of these are used heavily throughout Borderlands 2, and in order to observe them in action, I had my friend, Pamela, play through the first few missions.

The first principle, the Active, Critical Learning Principle, is self-explanatory. Things are learned actively through doing, not passively through reading instructions. Apart from the basic tip pop ups and skill tree descriptions, this is what Borderlands does. For example, no tutorial is given on looting, which is an essential aspect of the gameplay. There are many different types of containers to open, but at no point does the game pause and say “hey, here are the containers that you can open, and this is what will be in them.” Instead, the player is left to investigate on their own. This is something that Pamela, who has played very few video games, picked up on rather quickly. Even though she was not sure why she needed to loot so much at first, she soon realized that most of it was ammo for the various guns she was acquiring. Had she played on further, she would have eventually come to understand that different sorts of containers held different prizes.

One method Pamela used for finding loot-able containers was to look for the neon-green indicators. Every single container or object in Borderlands 2 that can be interacted with has a green symbol on it. This brings me to the next learning principle: the Semiotic Principle. This principle involves “coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems.” In other words, it’s all about linking images, words, actions, symbols, and artifacts together (Gee 221). I could write an entire paper on the use of symbols in Borderland, but I’ll narrow it down to just one example: guns.

The first Borderlands set a Guinness World Record with 17,750,000 different guns (Yin-Poole). That is a fact, not an exaggeration. Gearbox Software (the makers of the Borderlands series) used a procedural algorithm to combine different parts of guns that they designed, so every gun the player sees is a random configuration that this algorithm dictated. In the sequel, Gearbox added more even more parts and increased the number of combinations.  Randy Pitchford, CEO and president of Gearbox, has stated that “There are enough where it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter.” At the very least, they’ve guaranteed that it’s more than the first game has.  So with a practically endless number of guns to find (not to mention however many shields, grenade mods, class mods, and artifacts there are) the player certainly has a lot to sort through. The game streamlines this process, though, by using symbols to speed up the process. 

The weapons are primarily sorted into color groups based on rarity. Some guns are so common that they are found every time the player open a toilet, while others are harder to find than a Sasquatch dressed as Waldo riding a unicorn through Atlantis. The scale goes white, green, blue, purple, magenta, orange. When a player first sees a gun, even before picking it up, a colored marker will appear, indicating the rarity. If the player decides to focus directly on a weapon, a small menu, called an item card, will appear with the gun’s stats, characteristics, and dollar value. At the bottom of the card, three symbols quickly give the player a good deal of information about the weapon. First, there will be one of eight weapon brands. Each brand has a distinctive trait, such as burst-fire, faster reloads, or “reverse recoil,” and a unique look. Second, there may be an elemental symbol in the bottom-center of the card which indicates the elemental damage type of the weapon. A lack of one of these symbols would mean the gun has no elemental effect. Finally, there is a weapon type symbol. These are fairly common symbols that even gamers who haven’t played borderlands would understand. The icon will be a pistol, submachine gun, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, or rocket launcher. Once a player has learned the meanings of each of these three symbol types, they will understand how a gun will behave before they even pull the trigger.  

Many of these factors, though, do not apply early on in the game. The first levels feature only white guns without elemental effects. So Pamela obviously did not learn all that there is to know about the weapons. She did, however, pick up on the weapons’ behaviors and how they related to their shape. Full mastery of these gun-related symbols would take somewhere close to three hours of gameplay. 

Next, the “Psycosocial Moratorium” Principle states that learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered. This was apparent as I watched Pamela play. She had been making her way to the first town in the game, Liar’s Burg, when she came to the edge of a tall cliff. Following real-world logic, Pamela looked around and found the places with the shortest drop. She incorrectly assumed that if she were to jump off the top of the cliff, she would be injured or killed. However, Borderlands 2 has no fall-damage. A player can jump off any height and sustain no damage (unless they jump off the map, in which case they will die). Similarly, when Pamela encountered her first group of bandits, she adopted a cautious in-game approach, hiding behind corners to dodge gunfire. Just like in real life, she assumed that dying would become with some sort of penalty. It does have consequences, but it is not the end of the game. When a player dies, their character is simply revived at the closest New-U station for a small fee.

Some parts of the game actually encourage the players to get themselves killed. For example, the challenge I’ve got a crush on you is to “Have a buddy crush you in the car crusher.” Challenges like these are a defining part of the gameplay. These challenges are split up into two categories: general and location-based. The general challenges include rewards for killing certain numbers of enemies, finding certain numbers of guns, dealing certain types and amounts of damage, and almost everything else the player does in the game. The location-based challenges are quite a bit different. Many of them involve finding certain things in each location, killing bosses in specific ways, and a wide variety of other, seemingly pointless actions.

Gee’s Achievement Principle describes the challenge system exactly. His principle is that there are intrinsic rewards for learners of all levels which show their growing mastery of the game (Gee 222). The general challenges work in this way. There are five levels for each challenge, getting harder as they go. Because of this, Pamela was rewarded for completing the first level of the Open Pandora’s Boxes challenge by opening 50 containers. I, on the other hand, have completed all five levels by opening more than 2500 containers. Challenges for killing different sorts of enemies are scaled similarly, and reward the player based on the difficulty of their achievements. For the five levels of each challenge, the player is rewarded with 1, 5, 10, 50 and 100 “Badass Ranks,” respectively. After earning so many Badass Ranks, the player can redeem tokens which allow them to upgrade a certain stat for their character. So as the player completes these challenges, they are both challenged and rewarded more. 

The enemies in Borderlands 2 work in a similar way. When a player first encounters an enemy type, it will be a weaker version of the regular. For example, there is a vicious dog-like creature called a skag. When Pamela encountered skags, they were skag pups. Had she played on, she would have eventually seen regular adult skags, corrosive spitter skags, and even badass fire skags. The “Regime of Competence” Principle describes what is happening here. “The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge of his, or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as challenging but not ‘undoable” (Gee 223). This is how the enemy system works in Borderlands 2. As one plays, they get more experience, level up, and get stronger. At the same time, the enemies are getting stronger, attacking in greater numbers, and working together more to stop the player. The game even accounts for any advantage they might gain by playing with friends by making enemies tougher based on the number of players in their party.

Playing in a party is also related to the Affinity Group Principle, which is based on the co-op aspect of the game. Gee’s “affinity group” is a group composed of people with similar goals or hobbies rather than race, religion, culture, etc. Players of either Borderlands game belong to the Vault Hunters affinity group. I mostly play the game with my oldest brother, but occasionally I have played in “matchmaking.” For those unfamiliar with the term, matchmaking in a video game is an in-game service that connects players via the internet. Through matchmaking, it is possible to have four players from four different states or even four different countries playing together at once. While they are playing together, these four players will be bonded by their shared goals and experiences. And even those who choose not to connect with other players are all still bonded by an experience that we each have in common. 

To the inexperienced eye, a video game can look like a whirlwind of violence, but there are a great number of variables that go through a player’s mind. Most games involve hundreds of symbol combinations that the player must learn to interpret without explicit directions. Meanwhile, the player is placed in a low-risk environment where they are faced with challenges of scaling difficulty, always pushing them to work harder. In many cases, players are expected to accomplish goals through cooperation with a team of players they have never met or even spoken to. So even though a game like Borderlands 2 involves a great deal of violence and action, it also requires critical thinking and analytical skills.

Works Cited

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. Print.

Gamespot, . E3 Stage Shows : Borderlands 2 - E3 2012 Demo. 2012. Video. YoutubeWeb. 8

            Mar 2013.

Yin-Poole, Wesley. "How many guns are in Borderlands 2?." EuroGamer.net. 16 Jul 2012: n.

            page. Web. 23 Sep. 2013.