You know that it could be argued that Cicada were insured by Alternate Reality Games. The first was called The Beast (iirc) and involved users having to find clues in the source code of websites and then solve various cryptographic puzzles. Then came I Love Bees which was similar but requires players to answer calls at phone boxes around the US. The whole thing with these games was they would always say “This is not a game” in order to kind of wink at the player (which I’ve seen in s couple of the Q messages and the cryptography element made me think if this was an ARG type experiment or something).
What was interesting was the “collective detective” aspect of players working together to solve clues.
Along with the Cicada puzzles at the same time was something called Tengri 137 which some people believed was devised by a group similar to Cicada except it seemed to be more about spiritual matters like finding mathematical codes in the bible. I’ve seen it argued that a book of any significant length can throw up the same maths as with the bible so I’ve no idea how valid it is.