Chasing Bees, Without the Hive Mind

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A well designed ARG also changes the ways participants think about themselves, giving them a taste of what it is like to work together in massive teams. They develop an ethic based on sharing rather than hording knowledge; they learn how to decide what knowledge to trust and what to discard.

Let's be clear. According to Levy, the collective intelligence is not governed by mob psychology. It is not a "hive mind" where everyone knows the same things and thinks in the same ways. It thrives on diversity, starting from the assumption that each individual member has something unique to share. The group seeks out different voices and perspectives to inform their discussions. There is no fixed hierarchy -- people come to the foreground or fade away depending on what they can contribute at a particular moment of time.

Playing an ARG can become all-consuming for weeks at a time. Many of the most hardcore participants find themselves seeking out other ARGS or even forming teams to create their own games.

When hardcore gamers can't find an ARG to play, they start applying their minds to other problems. As McGonigal has documented in one of her scholarly essays, team members have rallied to tackle such real world problems as locating the D.C. sniper, mapping governmental corruption, or even, briefly, trying to find September 11 conspiracies.

In each case, they proceeded from the assumption that the solution lie in tracking flows of information across cyberspace, looking for clues which might be overlooked by traditional law enforcement agencies and putting together the pieces in fresh ways.

One can see these efforts as distasteful in so far as they turn tragedies into games or as arrogant in so far as they assume a level of expertise they may not have earned. But they are a local consequence of the sense of empowerment players discover through participating in such robust knowledge communities. Even the most complex problems seem manageable if everyone puts their minds to them.

Levy has predicted that such knowledge cultures represent an alternative source of power that exists alongside the political authority of the nation state or the global reach of commodity capitalism. We will someday learn to use this power to change the world.

For the moment, we simply play.