Collective Detective

Immersive, cross-media, entertainment adventures and other buzz words.

The original Collective Detective was launched in 2002 was the first service of its kind targeting what we thought was an emerging immersive media community. It was a member driven platform, custom developed for participants of online and location-based games, mysteries, "advertainment," and cross-platform narratives. CD helped facilitate the easy sharing of information and solving complex puzzles together as part of a "hive mind," "group think," or as we called it: "Distributed human information filtering."

This came out of being a part of various campaigns and seeing communities struggle with the lack of tools and resources. So I built something to help serve the need.

Notable games that players followed were for movies, TV shows, "The Driver" web series for BMW, TerraQuest, The Sims, and Game Neverending.

While a great project and learning experience, our thousands of members would blow through the stories, games, and mysteries much faster than the authors intended. It had a healthy subscription model, but not enough new content to keep it active.

The future looks a bit more interactive and immersive. Augmented Reality, Web3, Experiential Reality, and the rise of the hyperverse/metaverse will bring amazing opportunities for new kinds of storytelling. That's interesting.

  • the Web