Merging Minds gameplay excerpt
Merging Minds, 2023
multiplayer video game
duration variable
What would it be like to belong to a collective mind? The brain-computer technologies making this possible are increasingly available, enabling humans to use novel ways of collective thinking and decision-making as a multi-mind.
With these new ways of being come ethical and philosophical questions - for example, around responsibility, ownership, and identity. For a person who participates in a collective mind, where do the boundaries between individual and collective begin and end? If the collective mind makes a decision that brings rewards, who takes ownership of these rewards and how should they be distributed? If their decision brings disastrous consequences, who takes responsibility?
Merging Minds is the result of an artist residency alongside creative technologist Albert Barbu in collaboration with the Rethinking Collective Minds research team at the Wellcome Centre for Ethics & Humanities, University of Oxford to form a creative response to these questions. The resulting video game invites people to enter a three dimensional labyrinth as multi-mind avatars - multiple players embodying the same bodies - collaborating and coordinating with each other to navigate obstacles. It simulates some of the challenges collective minds could face in the future around decision-making, the economy of merging, and attachment to identity. Rather than offering any definitive answer to these questions, our approach was more like a virtual laboratory, creating the conditions to observe how people would intuitively react in these situations.
The virtual world draws upon the aesthetics of new hardware - quantum computers, wetware, bio sensors. The creative process also involved collaborating with generative AI on the character designs and koan-like (Zen riddle) text that helps guide players throughout the game, following the spirit of the use of intermediary computers or AI in BCIs, BCBIs, and BBIs to organise collective minds.
In the game, merging with other players and NPCs simulates the experience of joining a collective mind. This blurring of boundaries between self and other is translated into a spiritual experience of transcendence that sparks considerations of how much participants are willing to surrender individual identities, interests, and motives on behalf of a wider collective.
LINKS
Merging Minds public engagement at the Wellcome Centre for Ethics & Humanities
CREDITS
Art and animation by Yambe Tam.
Software development, UI & UX by Albert Barbu.
Sound design by Barney Kass.
Research lead Dr. David Lyreskog.
Commissioned by the Wellcome Centre for Ethics & Humanities (WEH), University of Oxford. Supported by the Wellcome Trust.
Special thanks to the WEH Public Engagement team, NEUROSEC Young People’s Advisory Group, The Cherwell School, and Wheatley Park School.