Borderlands
by
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.
This essay may be found on page 165 of the printed volume.