Collective Detective Projects

CollectiveDetective.org

Launched in 2002, CollectiveDetective.org was the largest and first custom-developed solution for online collaboration of online mysteries, scavenger hunts and other forms of immersive entertainment. It was co-founded by Josh Babetski (Collective Detective, TaxiCafe Media) and Holly Samee (Culture Captioning). At its peak, CD had a membership of thousands using group-think to solve puzzles and mysteries in hours which were designed to take months.

Before the wiki and blog hit the mainstream, CD had forums, a pre-wiki collaboration tool to organize group information called "The Trail," a dedicated IRC chatrooms and a wonderful and passionate community.

Collective Detective’s community became well-known for quickly and efficiently dismantling these puzzles, mysteries and scavenger hunts, all before viral and online word-of-mouth marketing were part of a standard marketing toolkit.

We loved the social connections being made. It was great to see things like collaboration by a housewife, a lawyer, and a programmer working on things like physics problems; using ovaltine decoder rings together; and people developing friendships extending beyond the games they were playing.

Increasing use of wikis and blogs began migrating information in a more distributed form, where we thought it belonged. It was also an interesting education in what happens when you and the community want to go in different directions. We played with some different formats for CD, but eventually retired it. We took the lessons from the failure of CD.org and applied them to future projects.