Anyone else want to meld with the hive mind or is it just me?
This is an article about roleplaying games, I swear.
“We are the Borg.” This iconic refrain represents the start of a really bad time for players in Star Trek Adventures. “Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” Since they were unveiled in 1989, the Borg have been one of sci-fi’s most terrifying and enduring villains—unthinking drones that together make up one intelligence, a hive mind simply called the Collective. They look like humans, but that resemblance is uncanny. No one is born a Borg but rather entire species and planets are assimilated, then genetically and technologically reconfigured into what the Collective deems an optimal state.
Similarly rapacious are the insectile Tyranids from Warhammer 40k. They, too, are a hive mind that incorporate the genetic material of their victims. But they don’t just do this by force. Tyranid genestealers can infiltrate other species: taking their form, slowly weakening them from the inside, making them easier victims for the inevitable invasion of the swarm. They are the ultimate threat to humanity—unstoppable, emotionless, completely without a sense of self-preservation. The Tyranid will trade the lives of their mindless bug-soldiers without a second thought—after all, there are trillions more chewing a warpath through the vast reaches of space.
The Borg and the Tyranids represent just two out of thousands of different representations of hive minds in science fiction books and games. But already the essential fear they exploit is clear: they are here for you, they want what makes you special and unique and human, and they want to take it away. For them, people are just bodies to be controlled—raw material for their machinations. To be taken by the hive mind is to lose your individuality and become just another cog in the sentient death machine.
Obviously, that’s a bad thing. Every detail is designed to repulse us. And yet, I’m here to sign up. I think it’s because I play roleplaying games—with strangers, with people who like me and support me, games that went well, games that went badly. Let me explain.
