Have you ever wanted to be a Honeybee?

After reading over 200 pages on bees, I began to wonder what it was like to be a honeybee. Well, okay, maybe not a lot, but at least a little. Little did I know I would soon have my chance.

No, I have not turned into an actual honeybee. Rather, I have become LIKE a honeybee. All thanks to a video game called “Realm of the Mad God.” This game is available for free, so I would highly recommend it if you want to experience what it’s like to be a bee.

This is the game, in a nutshell. You are a character. You run around killing things (such as that red enemy the game is pointing to at the top of the screen) to gain levels. Once you gain levels, you can kill more things. But Realm does the traditional “Role-Playing Game” things a little differently.

Firstly, there is a huge focus on impromptu cooperation between strangers. As you can see, I have not explored any of the map at the top right of the screen. However, all the yellow dots indicate other players. These other players HAVE been exploring the map. Therefore, to get to them, all I have to do is click their icon on the screen, and I instantly teleport to their location.

This is interesting because who you teleport to largely determines your experience playing the game. If you’re a level 1 character, and you teleport to a level 20 character, it’s likely they are fighting some tough monsters, so you might die instantly.

However, if you teleport to people who are closer to your level, all experience gained by the people in the vicinity is shared equally, so you will all gain experience together. In this way, you will “level up” a lot faster than if you were to adventure separately. Which brings me to my point. While in this game, we are bees.

This screenshot looks a LOT different than the other one, because look at the mini-map on the top right.

The players have begun to realize where the enemies who drop valuable items are, so they have started to swarm around that particular area. In this way, the game goes from individual players exploring the map to players swarming around locations once people find various key locations (this is usually done by one player announcing in the chat log at the bottom “MYSTERIOUS CRYSTAL HERE EVERYONE TELEPORT TO ME WE NEED PPL” {a mysterious crystal is an enemy that drops very valuable items, but take a lot of people to defeat.})

So we are bees. When I look at the mini-map for a place to “teleport”, I try to find places where there’s a lot of people. If they are fighting a cool monster, I’ll stick around. If there’s nothing there, I teleport somewhere else. In this way, someone has created a game which forces players to use the concepts of a hive mind to succeed. Lastly:

Yeah, this a swarm. There’s really no other way to describe it. When a game gives players the opportunities to utilize swarm behavior, it is VERY easily to mobilize 80+ people to fight for a single objective.