The term "Puppetmaster" can be misleading as the term is known to be someone who is in control of another. "Puppetmaster" in this context means an individual(s) or group(s) that are orchestrating tasks for digital volunteers and organizing response and data collection.

Albion College

Scholars debate whether collective intelligence is best with orchestration or complete self-organization of the individuals or digital volunteers. Though there is a forming consensus that a mix of orchestration and self-organization might be best. There could be few individuals or groups as "puppetmasters" in which they help design and instruct the digital volunteers on how they should participate. Though after that considering the spread of social media the digital volunteers would have a great deal of freedom in which tasks they participate in. 

Orchestration or Self-organized Collective Intelligence 

Puppet Masters have control over the instructions and the types of missions that the gamers are trying to complete, but they do not have total control over the gamer's actions. 

The gamers have total control over how they react to the instructions they are given. They can react in a way that the designers did not see coming therefore the designers are not able to control for all of the possible outcomes of their instructions. 


Do Puppet Masters Have "Total" Control Over Gamers 

Büscher, M., Liegl, M., & Thomas, V. (2014). Collective Intelligence in Crises. In J.  Stewart (Ed.), Social Collective Intelligence: Combining The Powers of Humans and Machines (pp. 243–265). Springer International Publishing. DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-08681-1__12

Collective Intelligence in Crises

1.  Gathering: crowdsourcing relevant information or data related to the crisis
2. Reasoning: analyzing the data and making it usable for emergency responders and affected populations
3. Curating, stewarding, and orchestrating: figuring out blank spots in the data, guiding training and information production, and putting the data in maps and reports in order to make it easier to visualize
4. Acting: feeding information to officials, responders, physical volunteers, and community members and working to mobilize resources and people

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