I've been kicking around this notion of a Functional Collective Conscious for a while now (here, here, here). The idea is that digital communications are leading us to a point at which as soon as one of us knows something, we all know that something. My friend Brian Fountain, who started Prototype 161, sent me this fantastic case study (PDF) of the iconic ARG, I Love Bees, written by the game's lead community designer, Jane McGonigal, PhD. The following anecdote is a perfect illustration of what I've been theorizing about.

In Summer 2004, the game design company 42 Entertainment created an immersive alternative reality game to promote the upcoming release of Microsoft’s videogame Halo 2. Over the course of the game more than 600,000 individuals collaborated through the internet to collectively solve a series of puzzles and challenges that took place both online and in the real world.

One of the central modes of the game focused on a world-wide network of over 1,000 public payphones. The players were given GPS coordinates pinpointing the locations of the phones, and then were challenged to get to specific phones at specific times in order to receive a call and collect a new clue. After several months the players had continually impressed the game designers with their collective intelligence and ability to coordinate action by using a combination of online message boards, player-notated online maps, and mobile phones.

The designers decided to up the ante by creating a challenge called the “relay mission” that would expose the limits of the players’ abilities. As Jane McGonigal, PhD writes in her paper, the designers expected the players to “eventually hit a wall past which they could not coordinate and perform.”

The actress playing the operator would begin by making a live call to a particular pay-phone. When the player picked up the phone the operator would ask them a simple personal question—like, “Tell me something that you’re especially good at.” Once the operator got her answer, she would inform the player that she would be calling another phone within one hour, and whoever answered that phone needed to know what that player had told her as the answer. She didn’t tell the player which phone she was going to call; the player needed to make sure that all of the other players in the field who would potentially receive the call knew that information.

The designers shortened the time between the calls throughout the day, planning to reach a point where the players could no longer relay the necessary information quickly enough. But, to the designers’ surprise, they never reached the limit of the players’ capabilities. By the end of the day, the players were able to broadcast the pertinent message from one individual to a world-wide network of teammates in the real-world in less than fifteen seconds.

The collective wisdom that the players of I Love Bees were able to create illustrates what knowledge in a digital world looks like. And remember that the year of this anecdote is 2004. Only four short years later, many of the tools that the players of I Love Bees had to create for themselves are now readily available to all of us. They were limited to 1-to-1 mobile text messaging, rudimentary online mapping tools, and basic online message boards. Today we have 1-to-many mobile text broadcasting via Twitter. Google Maps has become an open system for collaborative map-making, accessible both online and on mobile devices. And individuals can even broadcast live pictures and video direct from their mobile phones to any number of connected viewers on the web via Qik or Kyte.

The game designers at 42 Entertainment were forced to re-calibrate their notion of what a player knew. Through our use of digital technologies we are constructing a new meaning of knowledge for ourselves. We are creating a world in which the knowledge possessed by any one of us individually is functionally the same as the information collected and shared by the network of individuals.