Playing the Game: Can I be a Collective Mind?

Jerry G. on our Facebook page asked, "Any thoughts on how you would do a Borganism PC?" I really ought to be working on the opening fiction for Hotfix right now; thank science for this enticing distraction! So, to complement the GMing posts I've been doing, my first post on being a player...

First off, definitions: a "borganism," according to Wiktionary, is, "An organization of autonomous organisms that exhibit collectivism: individual "units" that have merged to yield a unified construct. Such an amalgam may possess a collective consciousness, arguably an emergent phenomenon of social networking." (I had to look it up, although I had a feeling from the morpheme "borg" what it meant).

Sure, why not? Eclipse Phase is made to allow this type of experimental character. Much of what you need is already in the Core rules, and you can make up the difference with a little help from a cooperative GM. Now if you want to play a Borgy borganism that goes around assimilating people, you're going to need some house rules. But that'd be pretty antisocial for a PC, so let's assume you want to make a colony mind that's friendly toward those outside of it.

The possibility of emergent consciousness fascinates me. Hell, if you believe Marvin Minsky, we're all in effect colony minds made of many agents, and consciousness is just our analog to a CPU scheduler. If you look at it this way, the challenge has more to do with role-play than with the rules. You should lay out for yourself how your colony mind arose in the first place, what its constituent pieces want, and how strong various "factions" within it are relative to others.

Do the mental agents who take an aggressive tack toward the world outside their society of mind hold sway, or is there a faction of mental agents who just want to get along? Do agents that control making long-term plans tend to win out, or is your organism more one that reacts quickly to its environment? Really what you're doing is making a whole bunch of characters, making them share the same body, and then deciding who wins out in certain situations.

As far as mental traits/augmentations, several jump out as useful for representing this type of character: Multiple Personalities, Multitasking, and Oracles. Multiple Personalities lets you give different factions of agents within the character's mind their own skill sets. Multitasking reflects well the multi-threaded nature of the character's consciousness. Oracles is written in the rules as a subservient nano-colony that filters your experiences and reports back, but in a character like this, it could have a will of its own. There are a number of other mental traits and augmentations in the book that could apply if you simply keep their game mechanics effects but change the explanation of how they work under the hood to reflect a colony mind.

But I have a feeling what you're really after are some ideas for physically representing the character's mental state, and here you've already got three good options in Core rules (and again more, if your GM is on board):

  • Swarmanoid. The most obvious morph choice. In a character based on an emergent social consciousness, you can presume that rather than a single ego having been downloaded into the swarm, this particular swarm had been  programmed to operate autonomously (perhaps under the control of a number of pre-sentient AIs) and then, through complex interactions of the various agents, emerged to consciousness on its own.
  • Flexbot. Similarly, a flexbot doesn't have to have been created in one piece. It could have started out as part of a swarm of autonomous bots that emerged and joined together to make a colony.
  • Multiple pod morphs. This is a high-CP option, probably most appropriate as a long-term goal for a singularity seeker or similar character. Basically, take a bunch of pods (and/or synths) and equip them with ghostrider modules and puppet socks (which I think all pods come with stock anyway). Install a non-sentient AI in their cyberbrains to control autonomic functions. Then have a body-hopping infomorph that lives in one of the ghostrider modules and uses jamming/teleoperation on the rest of the bodies to control the group. That would be the game mechanics explanation; you're of course free to say that the consciousness is spread over the bodies and contributed to in varying degrees by the controlling AIs.

Hope that helps! Happy hiveminding!

Brian’s Biopolitics Talk Online

The talk EP co-creator Brian Cross gave at last year's Biopolitics of Popular Culture seminar is now online in MP3 format. The topic of his presentation was "Talking Transhumanism at the Table: Designing Games for Non-transhumanist Audiences." Here's a summary:

In creating, publishing, and promoting Eclipse Phase we wanted to makea product that made an deliberate effort to engage with explicitlytranshumanist and political themes but would deal with these issues in a way that complete novices to them would be able to grok. I’ll discuss some of the issues that we encountered in making a game with an agenda, how we tried to make complicated transhuman and ethical issues interesting to play with, and some of the complications that have arisen since the game was published.

The slides from the talk can also be found in PDF format here.

Looking for GMs

Are you attending Origins or GenCon? Are you interested in gamemastering some Eclipse Phase sessions? If so, get in touch! We're looking for GMs to help us run some games. We'll provide the scenarios and Catalyst Game Labs offers a compensation package based on how many hours of games you run.

Category: 
Events

Running the Game: What’s a Red Market?

Brian G. asked this question on our Facebook page:

"The *Glory* adventure refers to one of the NPCs as part of the 'red market' dealing in 'red tech.' I can't find an explanation of what that
means. Is it just 'black market' dealing in 'illegal tech,' or something more specific?"

Sort of. It's a concept that doesn't have a lot of useful real-world referents.

Red markets are basically what black markets turn into when they don't have to hide from governments anymore. The economy that characters in anarchist space are taking part in when they use Guanxi networks to get goods & services tends to be a red market.

In a red market, exchange of goods is mediated & regulated by violence and/or the threat of violence. It's sort of the ultimate buyer beware situation; your only guarantee of a fair exchange is your ability to smite the seller if they screw you over. Black and gray markets basically work this way now, but the presence of government authorities keeps a lid on the worst excesses.

Also important to note that not all of anarchist space is like this. This is one of the things that sets the criminal world apart from autonomists & mutualists. Economies like Extropia don't have government authority, but they do have contract law to stabilize them. Predominantly autonomist economies like Locus have anarchocommunist social structures that prevent them from acting like red markets.

At the end of the day, though, it has a lot to do with mindset. The distinction between criminal red markets, autonomists & mutualists may seem sleight from a capitalist vantage point. They're all basically lawless, right? But for the people participating, this isn't the case. They self-identify as belonging to one camp or the other, and this should play out in terms of how their reputation networks react to certain kinds of behavior.

Example: Let's say you sell some shady tech that doesn't really work (or works with unintended consequences) in autonomist space. If you're dealing with the average anarchist on Locus, your @-rep is going to take a hit and most people will just think you're an asshole and not want to deal with you. In an Extropian framework, your @-rep would take a hit and you'd be seen as a terrible business person. In a Guanxi framework, however, nobody cares, and the buyer's only recourse is to come after you; the proof is in whether you end up dead.

Note that even autonomist spaces like Extropia & Locus have their anti-social criminal elements, of whom the character referred to in Glory is one.

A lot of people have asked how there can be criminals in the outer system. One way to be a criminal is to do stuff so heinous that even a place with no large government authority wants you around. Hopefully this post helps illustrate another, more subtle way to fall into the criminal camp: by using a red market style of doing business in a libertarian or anarchocommunist environment.