Originally Posted by parteisekretarin

90% of the posters on this thread apparently never actually watched Star Trek.

The borg call themselves a collective but when you actually watch the series, as soon as the queen is introduced, it becomes apparent that they are very far from such. A collective, by definition, is the aggregate of the interests of individuals comprising a group. The borg serve no interest but that of the queen; the interests of all assimilated entities are filed and ignored...the borg programming forces those connected to its exonet to be devoid of all interest (by forgetting their identity) and provide nothing to an aggregate/collective other than information that can be used to create technology that enhances the interests of the queen. An actual cybernetic collective can be more appropriately found in the Geth from the Mass Effect series ... their minds are shared and all of their actions are an aggregate of the interests and opinions of the individual units comprising their collective. The borg are nothing more then a cybernetic mind control monarchy lead by a quasi-individual entity that forces its will upon all members linked to its network (the queen).

As for the argument of play-ability, they are perfectly playable provided that customization is greatly restricted. The queen is an entity that dominates the borg network and is capable of manufacturing multiple copies of itself and inhabiting biosynthetic body duplicates constructed of engineered organic material and android parts (as evidenced by TNG: First Contact). Borg troops are often disconnected from the main collective but still function as if connected due to the presence of queen entities in their networks. Each playable "captain" would simply have to be a copy of the queen. Playable borg wouldn't ruin their canon at all, but it'd be boring as hell to play considering all "captains" would be restricted to white female characters, none of the ships would be customizable and there'd only be four types of ships (as mentioned). By the way, to those that mentioned "assimilated ships" -- the borg typically dismantle those ships and use their constituent parts and materials in the manufacture of their own ship classes.

Anyway if you tl;dr'd --- No one here knows the definition of "collective" and the borg are totally playable but wouldn't be anything but a passing novelty that would occupy all of a day of someone's interest.