The game's basic setup won't surprise genre fans. The action takes place on Pandora, a mineral-rich planet that contains something more than ore. It also houses an ancient alien vault, and rumor says it contains boundless wealth or heretofore-unknown technological marvels. Those whisperings have drawn scads of intergalactic treasure seekers (a.k.a. Vault Hunters) to the dusty little planet like binge eaters to a Sizzler's salad bar. The first game ended with the protagonist opening the vault to discover not riches, but an eldritch horror with lots of tentacles and a taste for consuming worlds, which led to an understandably large battle.
Now fast-forward five years. The alien baddie is dead, a mysterious substance called Eridium has sprung up all over Pandora, and a new wave of Vault Hunters has once again begun to arrive, drawn by news of a second vault. But the intro reminds us that they aren't the only ones interested in finding out what's inside:
[Eridium's] appearance attracted many, including the Hyperion Corporation. They came to Pandora to mine Eridium and bring order to the savage planet. Through their excavations, Hyperion uncovered evidence of an even greater vault. Their leader vowed to find it, to use its power to civilize the borderlands once and for all.Hyperion's head is the suave, sociopathic Handsome Jack, and he plans to purge every Vault Hunter from Pandora by any means necessary.
Okay, okay, you can probably tell that Borderlands 2 doesn't go in big for story. The real emphasis is on shooting and looting. Major plot points get about as much screen time as Claptrap the beatboxing, dub-step composing robot. (The game's writers seem to have attended the annoying-is-funny school of humor, which means that most players will think that Claptrap needs to promptly perish in a fire.) But what story there is deserves discussion because of that trope I mentioned earlier, namely that the future corporations will be bigger, badder, and more powerful than actual governments. My first encounter with the convention came from William Gibson's early cyberpunk novels and short stories. In them, we encounter Ono-Sendai and Maas Biolabs, Hosaka and Tessier-Ashpool S.A., multi-national entities that dominate entire economies, possess their own armies, and engage in both clandestine and open warfare. Knowing Gibson's ideological commitments, it makes sense that he swelled private enterprise into something monstrous. But it makes no sense to grant the trope prima facie status in futuristic fiction. In fact, the science of profit seeking makes it virtually impossible.
In Basic Economics, Stanford University scholar Thomas Sowell catalogues a dizzying array of once-dominant companies that quickly faded into obscurity. The A&P grocery chain (once the largest in the U.S.) succumbed to Safeway's cost-cutting innovations, and Safeway has since largely fallen to the even thriftier Wal-Mart. Where The New York Daily Mirror once claimed a daily circulation of a million readers in 1949, it disappeared by 1963 due to the rise of television. In fact, it seems as though most print media may soon be supplanted by online content. Early 20th-century mail order retailer Montgomery Ward succumbed to Sears, which has since given ground to Amazon.com. Why do massive corporations tend to follow this pattern of expansion and extinction instead of rising into permanent power? Sowell explains:
In short, although corporations may be thought of as big, impersonal and inscrutable institutions, they are ultimately run by human beings who all differ from one another and who all have shortcomings and make mistakes, as happens with economic enterprises in every kind of economic system and in countries around the world. Companies superbly adapted to a given set of conditions can be left behind when those conditions change suddenly and their competitors are quicker to respond. Sometimes the changes are technological, as in the computer industry, and sometimes these changes are social or economic.Size alone may prove a hindrance rather than a help, as Sowell points out in a latter discussion of economies of scale:
Economies of scale are only half the story. If economies of scale were the whole story, the question would then have to be asked: Why not produce cars in even more gigantic enterprises? If General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler all merged together, would they not be able to produce cars even more cheaply and thereby make more sales and profit than when they produce separately?See where I'm going with this? When corporations make money, the draw competitors to their field. Corporations are conglomerates of people, not independent intelligences. People make mistakes, and as you get more of them together, they tend to come to decisions slower. Knowledge is money in business, and a sluggish pace often equals decline. In getting bigger, companies often grow themselves right out of existence.
Probably not. There comes a point, in every business, beyond which the cost of producing a unit of output no longer declines as the amount of production increases. In fact, costs per unit actually rise after an enterprise becomes so huge that it is difficult to monitor and coordinate, when the right hand may not always know what the left hand is doing.
Then there's the question of motivation. All a corporation wants is to turn a profit. Even if it does so unethically, it has no interest in curtailing basic rights or murdering meddlers to "bring order to the savage planet" and to "use its power to civilize the borderlands." Time has shown that Choeung Ek and Perm-36 were not the work of corporations. They owe their grisly history to governments.
(Picture: CC 2012 by jit)