massively-multi human users in a persistent process of social data-gathering, analysis and
application. Their goal: to produce a kind of collectively-generated knowledge that is different
not just quantitatively, but also qualitatively, in both its formation and its uses.
- from Jane McGonigal, 'Why I Love Bees: A Case Study In Collective Intelligence Gaming''
Jane McGonigal's essay, 'Why I Love Bees,' approaches the topic of collective intelligence
There are several things that attract me to this CI business. First of all, I love that it fosters an environment of collaboration and cooperation in an era that, from my experience, is becoming increasingly divided and individuated (despite the popularity of cell phones, instant messengers, and the like). Though I do fancy myself a "rugged individualist," I admit that we cannot ignore what I see as our basic human need for collaboration and friendship, both socially and intellectually. CI, and specifically CI gaming, gives us a reason, but more importantly an opportunity, to pursue this need in a fun and stimulating way. Yet 'I Love Bees' was structured in such a way that the individual would not be lost to the collective, since, according to Levy, “the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals” is the goal of collective intelligence. And this, more importantly, is what really intrigues me.
What makes the 'I Love Bees' community special, I think, is that unlike most fraternities and social circles that thrive on similarities (or in some cases commonality) among its members, 'I Love Bees' thrived on its members' differences; that is, the philosophy of the game derived from the idea that not everyone can know everything, but everyone can know something, and, with collaboration, that something can be added to the somethings else of others. In this way, through collaboration with other players, one's own experience and intelligence are expanded and enriched. I find this to be a very truthful, and very useful, statement. It very importantly shifts the focus from the collective to the individual, which almost universally keeps individuals more interested and involved than if the focus was direced the opposite way. However, there is one place in which I get critical. The makers of the game actively pursued a manifestation of their philosophy by making sure that not everyone would have access to all of the game's clues. McGonigal writes:
The distributed narrative of I Love Bees played out in highly “deconstructed” form. It was revealed in clue-sized pieces over the course of four months across hundreds of web pages, dozens of blog posts, thousands of emails, and over 40,000 live Mp3 transmissions. Some of these content fragments could be found by anyone who looked closely enough. Others loaded only on the Web browsers of players logging in from IP addresses linked to specific geographic regions. Still others were sent as private, personalized emails or phone calls to a single player out of the hundreds of thousands of total players. Because of this massive distribution of content, responsibility rested on each and every player to come forward with any and all discoveries, so that the entire collective could access and process as complete a data set as possible.
What I don't understand is the need to hand select players special information no one else had access to until those players decided to share it. If the philosophy of CI is that not everyone can know something, that is, no one can cognitively hold all the game knowledge, then why artificially inject inequalities of knowledge into gameplay? Yes, I admit that it would be cool to be that player who got the phone call at home or the special packet of information in the mail, but that aspect of CI seems a little a little heavy-handed to me, and maybe a little superfluous.
It seems to me that 'I Love Bees' and other CI ventures of this kind work because knowledge is not a commodity -- it can be infinitely shared without ever being diminished, and is more often than not enriched when it is shared. But I fell like the game's engineers unintentionally commodify the game's knowledge when they hand it to individuals.
Of course, I may be looking at this all wrong. Maybe the fact that, eventually, the information does get disbursed negates my opinion entirely. But I still feel like there's some aspect of artificiality in effectively saying, 'this firsthand knowledge is only available to one person, but he or she can do with it what he or she pleases.' If we're supposed to be regarding CI as a teaching tool, as McGonigal's article suggests, and as a way of showing that collaboration leads to a more fulfilling (individual) human experience, I think game engineers should take a more lasiez-faire attitude in the future by making players always work for their firsthand knowledge (by solving puzzles, traveling to GPS coordinates, etc.), never handing it to them. This will teach people that even though knowledge becomes common by sharing, there was once a point where said knowledge had to be pursued. And this will keep people interested in the act of discovery, rather than focused merely in the knowledge itself. This, to me, is the more useful end of CI endeavors in gaming.
