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Original post by Wavinator Okay, I'd originally thought of this strictly in terms of "brain phone" as ICC says, but just for the sake of argument, what if you had two societies, one more the hive mind, the other more the brainphone type? ...<BIG snip>...

What you present is a semi-IngSoc party member, proletariat sort of relational system in the works. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go read 1984 by George Orwell and get back to me when you're educated.

Of course, in Orwell's negative-utopia from the 1940's, technology had not come nearly to the point it is now, so we have much more... creative ways of instituting "Big Brother" instead of just telemonitors implanted on walls everywhere. However, the idea remains the same. Of course in a "Game" environment we can't have "thought criminals" because we don't actually have that kind of connection to the player, but just as "Good Part Members" are more than willing to rat people out for the smallest of offenses, so too perhaps, would be the citizens of Jubilee in your previous example.

The former Chinese republic that you mention however, resounds with the apartment above the junk shop. An area where Part members are banned from going, primarily because of the lack of telemonitors, not to mention the overwhelming numbers of the proletariat, who are the faceless maasses that are below association. Anyway, that is not to say that you won't find Big Brother's influences there as well.

In fact, this is giving me an idea for a modern-day Logan's Run/1984, negative-utopia type game where any number of interesting game scenarios could develop.

Anyway, that's my further two thoughts on the "Hive Mind" idea. Sorry I strayed from your original ideas with my last post, but from the sounds of it you made it appear that you were looking for a solution to the "hive mind" problem. So I offerred one that I believe is quite feasible. If you were looking for a way to keep the hive mind and yet have players accept it, that might be more difficult.

My two cents, something to chew on.

Vopisk

Investigative techniques tend to keep up with this sort of thing. Some kind of psionic or electromagnetic signature might be trackable after or during a brainphone transmission, and so the "cops" could zero in on the location or even divine the mental "fingerprint" of the perpetrator, and then use that clue in their investigation.

Hive mind would be a total nightmare. Murder would be like your right hand poking you in the eye and you not knowing why it stings. No way. If an outsider did it, it might almost work, but the reaction would be so swift, and so coordinated, that it would be far beyond improbable.

Maybe you could use the idea of limitted controling intelligence, though. A hive mind with a million constituents, for instance, would have the combined mental capacity of a million individuals. It could, perhaps, redistribute it for maximum efficiency. Maybe a ten-man computer design team would be controlled using thirty people worth of brainpower, so they can solve problems faster. On the other hand, the labor squad loading boxes onto trucks would have about a brain for every three men, just enough to keep them working and to prevent them from peeing themselves.

So on one hand, you'd have the big-brain individuals, who have vastly enhanced senses, psionic powers and capacity for thought, and on the other hand you have the fleshbots, who are donating their cognitive resources to other tasks. Their might even be a "body bank", where the physical forms they aren't using are stored, Matrix-style. You could walk right past the blind eyes of a thousand individuals, shout in their ears, and tie explosive devices to their torsos without being spotted, unless a more alert individual, perhaps a guard, spotted you.

I guess it depends on the hive's "personality", but would they even let you into their city? To a society that could hear each other's thoughts, an outsider seems like a high-risk, unpredictable factor that would be feared or at least regarded with extreme suspicion. It would be like letting a stranger with a ski mask into your home - even if they allowed it, you'd be watched too closely to get away with anything.

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Original post by captainmikey I guess it depends on the hive's "personality", but would they even let you into their city? To a society that could hear each other's thoughts, an outsider seems like a high-risk, unpredictable factor that would be feared or at least regarded with extreme suspicion. It would be like letting a stranger with a ski mask into your home - even if they allowed it, you'd be watched too closely to get away with anything.

Logically speaking, you're quite right. But "you'd be shunned from the get go" doesn't make a very good game. So, we have to bend the rules somehow, in some sort of halfway sensical manner that will allow our game to be believable without stepping outside of the boundries to pure ridiculous, unless that's what we're going for? Anyway, the original idea was how to get away FROM the hive mind, yet still institute "immediate knowledge" of crimes like murder and whatnot. But it does get kinda old to seemingly get away with murder and all of a sudden have every man, child, woman and DOG! trying to kill you.

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Original post by captainmikey I guess it depends on the hive's "personality", but would they even let you into their city? To a society that could hear each other's thoughts, an outsider seems like a high-risk, unpredictable factor that would be feared or at least regarded with extreme suspicion. It would be like letting a stranger with a ski mask into your home - even if they allowed it, you'd be watched too closely to get away with anything.

Depends a bit on how the hive mind was implemented. From the model of hive minds in nature, bees, their main flaw is for an outsider to do something that is not in the hive minds' programming. Using bees as an example, they strictly guard the entrances to their hives. But wasps can still steal honey from their hives by breaking their way in through the back of the hive. The bees inside the hive don't attack the wasps as it isn't in their programming to expect wasps to break in.