Dearest Veeky Forums

Dearest Veeky Forums,

How would you go about doing a GOOD Hive Mind, Swarm Intelligence, or otherwise Collective Conscious?

Hard mode: It's still one of those, "assimilate flesh" sort of Mind Swarm deals.

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Just don't make them assimilate unwilling victims. There is nothing inherently evil with plugging a brain into another brain, and the two brains are unlikely to consider themselves separate entities after a while. There's significant evidence that this is how human brains work already, in fact. When you cut the connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, they'll get into arguments with one another, but when the hemispheres are unified, the idea that we are all a bunch of two-brain hive minds sounds funny to us.

There's upsides to having yourself subsumed as an individual to a hive mind. You get to be a part of something big and important, your individuality might be rapidly destroyed as you become a tiny part of something much bigger, but you don't *die*, and in fact you become basically immortal. Even if your original body dies, all your memories, thoughts, and experiences, everything that made you who you are, will live on in the hive mind. Only as a small part of it, but it won't be totally annihilated. It's a way of escaping a hopeless situation that's less grim than suicide. I wouldn't want to join a hive mind personally, but there are quite enough people in the world who would that a hive mind would have no difficulty perpetuating itself by assimilating volunteers exclusively.

The individual drones still have separate personalities and quirks, but their ambition and goals are entirely focused on the swarm as a whole. They don't have any personal motivations or goals, and their reason for living is "help the swarm prosper". They are not particularly empathetic outside of the swarm, but become much friendlier once they consider you a part of the swarm, which you must do by helping the swarm as a whole, and not the individual drone. Giving them a Christmas present will barely register on an emotional level for them, but donating to the swarm winter supplies or defending the swarm fortress from a hostile enemy will earn you an eternal friend.

This is a good one that basically solves the whole dilemma: make it optional to join the comforting embrace of the Mother-Mind. There's lots of benefits and upsides in being a part of a unified whole, just don't go full "RESISTANCE IS FUTILE" on other species.

Good as in not evil, or good as in not shit?

Slowly reveal, to the tune of horror, that the players cant tell the difference between who is a hive drone and who isnt.

Not because the hive drones are tricking you, but because the drones have their own individual goals and ambitions are are "real people", they just want what the hive mind wants. Or rather, the hive mind wants what they want.

From the perspective of the hive mind, humans are a collection of smaller hive minds, none of which has acheived species wide dominance yet, largely because our hives are stupid and inefficient. All attempts to argue against this fail or are disproven.

Leave the players seriously questioning whether their characters are part of a hive and dont know it.

Well done, that's quite good.

You could try playing up the nobility of giving completely of oneself for the good of the whole as the real perfection of altruism, like how bees die when they sting but it still works because the hive survives. Better yet, show how the hive mind has survived countless disasters where other civilizations have been wiped out. Not that they did better than any other, but they literally had to be a hive mind to survive. It doesn't have to be good so much as an absolute necessity. As for the "assimilate flesh" aspect, you could go a different route and show that it's actual existence is due entirely to good intentions - you could say that it is a new movement, an entirely new civilization, founded on the idea that science has the capacity to perfect anything, from sentient bodies to social interaction, and they use science to do just that. Replace with alchemical magic if a fantasy setting, maybe.

First is easy. Just not them not be dicks. No reason a hive mind could not interact with other civilizations on peaceful terms (or at least as peaceful as non-hivemind civilizations genreally interact with each other). There'd no double be large amount of "culture shock" with such interactions, with the hivemind having trouble treating individual members of the other society as individuals rather than just representatives/mouthpieces of that society, but it could work.

Second one is harder. I quess you could just do as said and make them only assimilate individuals who want to join them.

At that point it isn't really a hivemind, though. Hivemind generally requires there to be no individuals. I have a species that works pretty much exactly like that in my idea for a SF setting, but while based on eusocial insects they're explicitly not a hivemind. Every member of the species is an individual with their own wants and desires, but because of both culture and biology they place the benefit of the hive far higher than personal gain or self-preservation. This only extends to their own hive though, so their society is actually made up of thousands of city-states that are allied for the common good but in practice spend considerable amount of time trying to ensure that the common good benefits their hive the most.

Human consciousness is a hive mind of cells.

A hive mind is nothing but a normal mind.