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The Borderlands Gun Collector's Club
Author’s note
First thing to know about this post: it is somewhere between 50% and 90% too long. If you *really* want to take a stab at it, scroll down to "Gun Collector's Club" where it gets on track again. I did pick up some lifelong fans from this post and its sequel—someone was mentioning them to me in 2026. But they are LONG.
Anyhoo, this is an essay about manufactured addiction. You don't even need microtransactions. Just rarity, and then the Collector's Instinct kicks in.
In the case of Borderlands 1, there was an obscure bug in the game, one that allowed you to farm legendary items infinitely, with some effort. It triggered people to continue doing DLC boss runs for years beyond the game's shelf life.
Rather than leaning into this addictive feature, Gearbox backed away from it. My blog post here correctly predicts that they have no idea why BL1 was doing so well online, and after BL2, which also had addictive farming glitches, Gearbox has struggled with replayability.
AI Notes
On its surface this is a long, profane review of the 2009 looter-shooter Borderlands, framed with a comic "Editor's Note" claiming it was written by a friend (since Steve himself would obviously never grind a game for months). Underneath is a design essay on what Steve calls the Magic Recipe for addiction. Fun is not enough — fun does not keep people playing a game, or using a product, for years. What does is a token economy: a system that awards meaningless but highly visible tokens for good behaviour, makes them scarce and rankable, gives you display cases to show them off, and adds stack-ranking to make them sting. Rarity creates desirability. Steve dissects how Borderlands' colour-coded loot, banks, and accidental bugs produced exactly that — and keeps pivoting from the game to "your shitty website that everyone is calling a ghost town," to badge systems, to seven-day-active counts.
It is Steve's longest piece on engagement design, written before gamification was a named product discipline, by someone who clearly could not stop playing the game himself.
Related listings
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2012
The Borderlands 2 Gun Discarders Club
Its direct sequel, seven months later. This post even predicts what the sequel will get wrong; the Discarders Club is Steve collecting on those predictions, and watching a token economy collapse in real time.
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2008
Fable II: Arguably Better than Getting Your Head Crapped On
Another game review that is really a design essay. Fable II argues craft cannot rescue bad taste; the Borderlands posts argue that the right engagement loop can rescue almost anything.
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2008
The Bellic School of Management Training
Part of Steve's long habit of making video games carry the weight of an essay — Bellic School as management satire, the Borderlands pieces as a serious account of how engagement is engineered.
Where it was argued
- Hacker News Mar 2012
From the peanut gallery
Read the rest of the thread · 19 more
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There are a few other multicolored folks on Pandora, but they're all Lance or bandits. Villainous-persons-of-color. Lets you be an equal-opportunity killer.
Seeing you rant about Borderlands seems about as likely as seeing an episode of HAWP rant about racket-lang.org. The singularity is upon us.
Bulletstorm was an amazing game despite all its QTE and GFWL damage. I weep for what it could have been. -
I very rarely play video games but I enjoy reading your writing very much indeed.
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"I'm so grossly overpowered now that I now let my horse deal with any pesky dragons" Skyrim
I'm wondering if you played it on Master? -
I don't care if it =is= 100 pages long and I have to read a year's worth of missed blogging all in one post: HORRAY! STEVIE'S BLOGGING AGAIN!
(Ok, I'll go read it now. But it doesn't matter what it says -- I'm sure it's awesome; it always is. Hell, I've already quoted the closing paragraph on Facebook :)
HORRAY!!!! -
Bulgarian -- yes, played it on Master.
To be fair it's hard for a LONG time before it gets easy. I was level 40 before it relented a little, and 50 before it was boring.
I tried hard not to become overpowered. I knew it was going to happen, so I staved it off as long as I could. But the leveling up was inevitable if you wanted to explore.
Sigh. -
Thanks for the vast and insightful post, man! I'm going to plug it on my site (a 'Best Legit Possible' guncard reference archive for Borderlands weapons and items): www.borderlandsbestgear.com
(not trying to spam here, but I'll understand if you clip the link. just thought it might be interesting to someone who just read your post and isn't familiar with the loot system) -
You should get a commission, or Gearbox should let you decide some things that go into Borderlands 2.
Read your post, so I decided to give it a go, only up to level 25, used WillowTree to give myself a few extra inv slots and I'm loving it so far.
Really want to work through to get to the endgame. -
Hey, I had ar 15 handgun and it has some problem in lower receiver and I am here looking for gun manufacturers to fix the problem.
gun manufacturers -
Dude, how much weed do you smoke to write that much?
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there are truly magnificent games
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A spent some time on playing the game. There are still secret passages and codes i haven't learned.
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good to be read post
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Most studies suggest a link between long-term use and the body's production of certain hormones. According to the website of Brown University, overuse can lead to erection problems and
weed lower sperm count. -
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Steve... let me know if you want to come to Redmond and visit the Mushroom Kingdom. I may even let you borrow my copy of Xenoblade :P
It's no wonder everyone wishes for a cross between Borderlands and Fallout. Think of it: all the cerebral fun and horror of Fallout 3 combined with the visceral fun and humor of Borderlands. It can be done! Someone will do it. We might all be Diablogenarians by then, but it'll happen someday.
It did happen, in fact. You've played the "Old World Blues" DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, right? Because that's exactly what you're talking about.
Now if only it also had insane gun loot too. :-)
— Keith Gaughan · 6:00 AM, March 20, 2012
Special thanks to Andrew Wilson for proofreading this post and making me take out stuff I'd regret.
Christ, you mean there was more?
Great review, thanks for being so passionate!
— KevDog · 10:14 AM, March 13, 2012