When we think of games we often think of words like play, and fun, and pleasure. But to play games is to willingly invite frustration into our lives. The feeling is a common one. You stare blankly at a weekend crossword puzzle convinced that the missing word is just out of reach. You restart a boss fight in the hope that it will be less menacing this time. You leap to your death again, and again, and again, barely missing a ledge in pursuit of a hard-to-reach collectible item. The scenarios differ, but the feeling is the same. So too is the solution to these problems. Indeed, once we’ve become sufficiently exasperated, many of us will turn to the internet for help. There, resources abound. A thesaurus, online videos, walkthroughs, how-to guides, and arcane button sequences promise to aid our analog and digital struggles. We quickly become online sleuths because we want to win; we want to finish what we have started. Of course, a less charitable interpretation is that this is not resourcefulness—this is cheating. In the spirit of play, permit us a quick indulgence—a side story that will frame our goals for this collection.

Abstract: Matthew Thomas Payne and Michael Fleisch argue that the inventory management at the heart of the Borderlands series reflects capitalism’s ritual logic by celebrating the pleasures of maximizing wealth and commodity accumulation. Furthermore, the ways in which players both follow and break the games’ rules of exchange reveal that capitalism is itself an uneven and exploitative gamified system.