Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails was stumped as to how to create context for his latest album, since mp3s lacked the artwork and liner notes of the 12″ concept albums of the 60s…the solution ended up being the development of a fully immersive ARG (alternate reality game) which involved and was shaped by the fans who partook in it.

Reznor said he wanted to wanted to give his fans a taste of life in a massively dysfunctional theocratic police state - both through his music, and through the ARG which ended up involving millions of players worldwide.

Hints and clues were seeded in t-shirts sold on the band’s tour, in USB flash drives left in the toilets at tour venues, on websites and in phone messages - fragments of which were assembled to form an interactive narrative which told a story to contextualise and complement the story told in the album.

Although Reznor says it wasn’t intended as a form of marketing, there’s no doubt that it created enormous excitement about the album - and in fact helped to create the narrative of the album itself. It’s also another fantastic example of collective intelligence working together to create something greater than the sum of its parts - in this case the audience pieced together the clues to solve the mysteries posed along the way - and in the process told and shaped and reformed the story online.

ARGs aren’t anything new (my friend Dan Hon’s work on Cloudmakers and Perplex City being two shining examples) but the collective intelligence and participation which drives them is now being used more frequently and in more exciting ways - and it’s particularly gratifying to see big brands such as P&G, Dell and Intel are recognising the value of the hive mind in driving innovation - with the minds of the many undoubtedly eliciting far greater results than the minds of the few.

[via Wired ]