Borderlands 3 Science Minigame Leads To Innovation Prize For Gearbox

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Gearbox Entertainment has won Tech Titans' 2021 Corporate Innovation Award for the Borderlands 3 minigame, Borderlands Science. In April 2020 Borderlands 3 — a big budget, FPS, looter-shooter that sold around 14 million copies — introduced a brand-new machine that allows players to complete levels in a minigame that helps real-life scientists with research. The Borderlands 3 puzzle minigame has players shifting many blocks between rows and columns in order to solve it.

Borderlands Science has players solve puzzles that look like a normal minigame, but underneath it does a lot more. Players and blocks represent nucleotides and fragments of microbial 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequences, contributed and sequenced by a platform called the American Gut Project. The goal of Borderlands Science is to help AI when organizing sequences in mass numbers, helping medical researchers map the human gut biome. It is just the latest example of Gearbox's attempts to push boundaries between games and science within gameplay from titles like Borderlands.

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As revealed in a press release from Gearbox Software, the Borderlands 3 minigame and its president Randy Pitchford were awarded Tech Titans' 2021 Corporate Innovation Award and Corporate CEO Award, respectively. Tech Titans recognized the Borderlands Science minigame, crediting it for "helping medical researchers map the human gut biome," and noting it as "just the latest example of Gearbox’s efforts to push the boundaries of entertainment over the last 25 years." Meanwhile, Pitchford was praised for "leading Gearbox through a groundbreaking year both creatively and financially." The awards were presented by The Technology