Hive Minds and Tabletop
Discussing subjects & mechanics in tabletop games that share the mind and initiating the Help the Hive Game Jam.
Hive minds and shared mechanics among players present a unique challenge in balancing compromise and autonomy. Just as Janov struggled to determine whether Gaian truly allowed individual tendencies within its shared consciousness in Foundation and Earth, game designers face a similar dilemma. How do you ensure fairness when mechanics, resources, and actions are shared among players?
Hive minds are often portrayed as villains in media—think of the Cybermen or Borg, who seek to assimilate everything into their collective. However, there are stories like Semiosis by Sue Burke, where a bamboo-like lifeform demonstrates sentience and makes moral choices, or The Last Human by Zack Jordan, where neural networks connect almost all of the species, that explore hive minds as more than just a sinister force. These examples show that hive minds can be a character trait, not just a state of being—a concept that can be more deeply explored at the game table.
Competing Minds
There in lies the wub.1 If players share autonomy, how do we encourage these neural stories without detracting from the experience? The following categories capture the current approaches I’ve identified within our genre of gameplay:
Default Tabletop: Classes and mechanics that fit easily into most systems, with shared consciousness primarily expressed through flavor, dialogue, and intelligence rolls. While straightforward, this approach often lacks depth. Easy doesn’t mean bad however, and a standout example is Heart - a system where character stories takes precedence, bringing hive mind concepts to the forefront.
Conflict and Bluff: Games like Everyone is John, feature shared characters with players competing for control.2 While easy to set up and offering clear expectations, this approach can fall short in crafting cohesive stories and making informed decisions, making it better suited for party games.
War Games: A quick dip into cybernetics and a city quite quickly becomes a brain. War games allow for turn-based groupings of units with various kinds of victory conditions among the many arms of a nation.3 Players can work together to command many parties while taking individualistic actions. While these games offer a top-down view and can delve into deep political battles, they typically lack emotional emphasis on the individuals involved. Paranoia though not a war game, uses pack tactics to manage multiple characters at once.
Pass the Journal: I’ll write a sentence and you finish it. I’ll choose an action and you choose the next. This form collaborative storytelling can be engaging but also challenging in terms of setting boundaries and pushing beyond improv practice. Sisters of the Hive uses this as an introductory mechanic leading to more complex gameplay.
Pooled Resources: Players maintain individuality while sharing a common pool of resources, such as communication spells or knowledge circuits. This approach supports focus and allowances towards character development and storytelling but can be tricky to implement without slowing gameplay. Headspace excels here, focusing on the emotional baggage of characters and shared states within a Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) system, even incorporating meta-gaming through the hive.
I've excluded map-making games, as they often focus more on internal development rather than interaction with the outside world, and the "character" of the city is typically passed between players rather than fully shared.
Thinking Inward
“I isolate a grove from my root network for a moment and enjoy the night as a human might, small in size but intense in outlook, entirely and pleasurably alert to nothing beyond my immediate surroundings, a luxury I can take only for a moment, but it is amazing how being small is a qualitative rather than a quantitative difference.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis
If you're exploring the complex nature of hive minds, PbtA games are a great fit. They allow for stress mechanics, precise moves, and unique health variations, all while emphasizing theme over mechanics. However, PbtA games don’t usually involve sharing physical space but rather pooled resources—a common toolkit rather than a common mind. Constructing a game with a shared mind controlled by individual players leaves little room for compromise and I'm curious about how new systems might push this genre further.
The Goblin Thought
But unlike all the orcs, elves, witches, living pitch, and oracles of the land, goblins thought differently.
When a goblin stands short, looks to the heavens, and screeches with all its might atop its hoard, it's expressing a mix of pure anger and joy in a world not quite made for it.
The goblin hoard - a pile of goods and trinkets - is a place of greed, yes. But it's the same greed that thrives throughout this land of men and beetles. It's the allowed selfishness that helps us learn and grow, walk and run, screech and scramble. The hoard is the goblin's memory.
The Goblin Thought is my prized creation—a game where I explore neurodivergence through the lens of a hive mind. Inspired by The Monk and Robot series and The Last Human, this game invites players to really push the hive mind open-ended narrative.
The goal of this game is to experience just a fraction of what it's like to be one of these marvelous misfits; to understand a mind separated and compiled by its own and others' experiences, which may not be as alien as you think Build your hoard with every crook or crevice acting as a neuron firing with life. Make allies and defeat monsters, or simply exist and witness.
I've considered integrating some PbtA mechanics as an expansion. While The Goblin Thought currently blends Pooled Resources and Pass the Journal, where you interpret cards and encounter conceptual challenges (common in more new-age TTRPGs), it could benefit from more structured mechanics that utilize point-based systems.
PbtA moves could add to the open-ended thematic feel, while health bars like those in Seventh Sea could represent the hoard’s resilience. Seventh Sea’s character creation system also offers a specific flavor and skill growth that could complement systems such as this.
The Game Jam
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.”
― Mark Twain
Help the Hive is a game jam designed to expand the genre of shared sentience! I encourage you to create innovative mechanics that facilitate hive mind communication, set in unique scenarios. Perhaps you’ll design a shared rondel or a grid of shifting cards. Maybe this is the first hive-mind game set in gas stations or the Arctic. If we get enough participation, the games can be included in a Charity Bundle for the Western Environmental Law Center, supporting ecosystems and pollinators. I’ll be reviewing highlights from the jam in a future newsletter, focusing on ingenuity within the genre.
Join us between the dates of August 20, 2024 - October 1, 2024 (EST): https://itch.io/jam/hive
In Summary
Hive minds don’t have to be evil—they offer rich opportunities for nuanced storytelling.
This genre challenges us to balance the interests of multiple players working under one roof.
Join the game jam, create new engaging fiction, and protect real-world hives in the process!
Next week we’ll be discussing how educator skills can overlap with running a good first TTRPG session. Regarding today’s content, did I miss any existing gameplay aspects? Do you have ideas for your own game? Comment below—I’d love to hear from you.
External Links:
Many swarm-strategies for human decision making are similar, where the average of a group ends up with a complete loss of individualism within a hive. As shown by this article it can raise chances of success but the popular vote is not always a correct one: https://unanimous.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Swarm-Intelligence-and-the-Morality-of-the-Hive-Mind-CI-2016.pdf
