Collective Detective facilitates the solution of game puzzles by means of group mind.
Our reading of CD’s own press release, together with this comment posted by TerraQuest, leads us to wonder whether they may not also be smart enough to pose a real problem to solo players and game developers alike. An intriguing conundrum.
Thanks, Holly
Collective Detective, www.collectivedetective.org, is an online community dedicated to Collective Gaming and Immersive Entertainment. Collective Detective members who joined together to play Terraquest, www.terraquest1.com, an online game by MindQuest Entertainment, solved the first phase of the game only Three days after Terraquest’s launch. Phase One, offering a $25,000 prize for it’s solution, was scheduled to last for a month. However, the organized “Detectives” on Collective Detective, managed to pool information and rapidly sort through clues, leading them to the solution, long before the planned phase conclusion. There are five phases remaining in the game.
Collective Detective, located at www.collectivedetective.org, is a subscription based, member driven community, custom developed for the Immersive Entertainment genre. Collective Detective provides the community with a forum for “human information filtering,” a unique problem-solving strategy consisting of group discussion, collective research and real-time information sharing.
Comments
@ 11:34
MindQuest should be smart enough to enlist this Mob to help develop future games. Will we see games developed by collectives for collectives. I think so.
@ 23:51
I agree, Mindquest would benefit from bringing in members from online collaborative groups to help them with their next online endeavor. It’s a shame that only paying members of collectivedetective.org were able to access the information shared by this ‘mob’.
Fortunately, there are other ways to get together and chat with other players when it comes to games like this. It’s nice to have these free options for all members of the general playing audience to get involved with. You’d be amazed what happens when people get together and start talking about something.
@ 08:20
True enough, CD’s a pay service, but so are a lot of things on the web. After all, it takes serious resources to do what CD does: provide a toolset and server space and a custom setting for online puzzle solving. The cost is negligible, US $20 buys you six months of access.
We all can’t live on handouts, I’m afraid. Some times you have to pay to get the good stuff.
@ 10:40
While I agree that sites have every right to charge people for information, I was simply stating that the same information is accessible on free-to-view message boards.
Most times, you don’t have to pay to get the good stuff. And often, when you pay to get the good stuff, you feel slighted when you find better stuff for free.
@ 13:33
It’s not just about information. It’s also about framework. That’s what you really pay for. The framework. The pretty little edgings, and the smooth interface and the server space. If you’re fine not having a studied way of handling information, or a person to fix the server when it goes down (a la Yahoo all the time during CM) then fine, that works for you. Go play for free. This is like buying the brand new pair of hockey skates instead of using the hand me down pair your brother used last season. Sure, they work, but they reek of his feet, and he had athlete’s foot, and there was that time he had to repatch the toe with duct tape.
@ 16:19
Thanks for the info. Glad to see that, beyond the bells and whistles (and a mascot, how apropos), collective detective performs the same task as any other free service.
Any chance you might be working behind the scenes over at cd.org? I’d hate to think that such a successful enterprise would need people shilling in various blogs and message boards, like some sort of gopher sent around the ‘net by some slimy network executive trying to pump people up for the next installment of “Celebrity Mole”.
@ 18:39
I need to point out an error in the article, in that the winner of the BMW he cited was not a member of any online community. Rather, Jonathan and his wife played/solved everything on their own, by themselves, without the help of any ’smart mob.’ So this probably wasn’t a good example in light of the topic of this article
As for TerraQuest, my two cents worth is that MindQuest built the game on the premise that players would hoard information, and not want to share it with anyone else, perhaps even spreading disinformation to thwart others’ chances at winning. This turned out to be a wrong assumption, as it’s been shown over and over in these types of games that folks would rather become a part of a social community all working toward a common goal than play solo against each other.
@ 20:38
I do not now, nor have I ever worked for CD.org. I have served as a moderator in one of their groups, taking an unpaid position as a community leader, not an employee.
CD.org is a different framework for solving puzzles. It comes with a custom front end for viewing the information. It doesn’t change the skills of the detectives, it only makes the information easier to process, easier to respond to and easier to manage as a community. That’s the design behind it. And because what you have also is a person whose full time job and sole responsibility is to make it better, it’s better. It grows, changes, evolves.
So, you’re paying for that lens with which to view the information. Sure, I can see it for free. But I can also pay a pittance and see in a way that makes sense, that’s well organized, that’s dynamic. Most days, how the information is presented and archives makes all the difference, and that’s why CD is worth the money.
As for being a shill? I’m no more a “shill” for CD than you are a whore for another network.