Borderland Gooseberries

For one of our reading assignments this week, we were supposed to analyze the story "Gooseberries" by Anton Checkhov for theme. In the story we encounter a man by the name Nicholai Ivanich, who works his entire life to achieve his goal only to find that it was not as satisfying as he had believed it to be. After reading this I could not help but make plot comparisons to one of my favorite game series Borderlands.

The short version of both of these incredibly long games is that you are in a futuristic society that has come across a baron planet named Pandora. On Pandora there it was rumored that their was a secret vault that would give whoever opened it immense fame, power in wealth. You start the game as one of the four vault hunters on the left (I always choose Siren) and work with the help of an AI named Angel to find and open the vault. At the end, you find and open the vault, but a giant monster that you have to immediately kill comes out and tries to eat you instead of the miles of gold you were imagining. The second game picks up some time after this with the same basic premise, but instead you are preventing the antagonist of the story, Handsome Jack, from opening the vault first. The game once again, takes forever to complete and you are finally able to open this second vault, but Handsome Jack opens it first and you have to deal with yet another monster that appears from the vault. This time the vault yields its riches, but you later discover that there are many more vaults in the galaxy you inhabit and are once again left disappointed with all of the hours you have just spent, and I can only guess that the third game will pick up somewhere from there. And yes, that was the short version.

Just from this description it seems that the two plot lines have very similar features, the character has a goal that no one can stop them from achieving, this passion drives them to devote their entire life to the project, and depending on how much you invest much of yours as well. And after gaining a considerable amount of wealth they are finally gifted with what they have spend the better part of their life chasing, only to find that what they wanted was not actually what they would have. With this plot from Gooseberries, along with a heavy handed statement, we can pull that there are very few people that ever actually achieve happiness and that the life long pursuit of an ideal is a gamble at best. While this same theme can be had for the plot of the entire Borderlands series, I think that it can also be shown that the continuous pursuit of such an ideal will most often lead to more work to be done to reach something that proves to be increasingly unobtainable.