I Love Bees

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I Love Bees
The home page in March 2004, the starting point of the titular alternate reality game
Type of site
Alternate reality game
Available inEnglish
Created by42 Entertainment
URLwww.ilovebees.co (mirror)
www.ilovebees.com (original)
Current statusRedirects to 42entertainment.com/work/ilovebees

I Love Bees (also known as ilovebees or ILB for short) was an

A.I. titled The Beast. I Love Bees was commissioned by Microsoft
, Halo 2's publisher and Bungie's ultimate parent company at the time.

I Love Bees was first advertised by a hidden message in a Halo 2 trailer; players who investigated the titular website discovered that the pages appeared to be hacked by a mysterious intelligence. As players solved puzzles, audio logs were posted to the ilovebees.com site which gradually revealed more of the fictional back-story, involving a marooned artificial intelligence stranded on Earth and its attempts to put itself back together.

250,000 people viewed the ilovebees website when it was launched in July 2004, and more than 500,000 returned to the site every time the pages were updated. More than three million visitors viewed the site over the course of three months, and thousands of people around the world participated in the game. I Love Bees won numerous awards for its innovation and helped spawn numerous other alternate reality games for video games.

Overview

Alternate reality games or ARGs are designed to involve fans of video games or other media in a form of viral marketing which CNET described as encompassing "real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online [communities]".[1] I Love Bees began when jars of honey were received in the mail by people who had previously participated in alternate reality games. The jars contained letters leading to the I Love Bees website and a countdown.[2] At around the same time, theatrical trailers for Halo 2 concluded with the Xbox logo and a URL, Xbox.com, that quickly flashed a link to ilovebees.com,[3] ostensibly a hacked site related to beekeeping.[2]

Both events, not connected publicly for several weeks, caused the curious to visit the website ilovebees.com. The site, which appeared to be dedicated to honey sales and beekeeping, was covered in confusing random characters and sentence fragments. Dana, the ostensible webmaster of the ilovebees site, created a

weblog stating that something had gone wrong with her website, and the site itself had been hacked.[4]
Suspecting that this was a mystery that could be unraveled, Halo and ARG fans spread the link and began to work on figuring out what was going on.

The gameplay of I Love Bees tasked players around the world to work together to solve problems, with little or no direction or guidance.

audio drama which revealed the reasons for the ilovebees.com malfunction.[6]

Over time, the game's mechanisms for contacting players grew more complex. Players were sent messages via email, called on their cell phones, and travelled to arranged meetings between players and characters.[9] The game culminated by inviting players of the game to visit one of four cinemas where they could get a chance to play Halo 2 before its release and collect a commemorative DVD.[10]

Plot

The game's plot begins with a military spaceship crashing to Earth in an unknown location, leaving the craft's controlling artificial intelligence (AI) damaged. This AI, known as the "Operator" or "Melissa", is not alone; other AI programs share its system. In an effort to survive and contact any surviving allies, Melissa transfers herself to a San Francisco-area web server, which happens to host a bee enthusiast website known as I Love Bees. To the distress of Dana Awbrey, the website's maintainer, Melissa's attempts to send signals began to appear largely as codes, hidden in images or other text, interfering with the operation of the I Love Bees site and corrupting much of the content.[11]

Dana, attempting to regain control over the corrupted website, accidentally erases data which comprises part of Melissa's memory. Furious, Melissa lashes out at the webmaster, obtaining pictures of her using the webcam on her computer and promising to take revenge. Alarmed, Dana announces that she is removing herself from the situation and is taking a previously planned trip to China earlier than expected.

All AI units contain a program called SPDR, short for System Peril Distributed Reflex. As SPDR attempts to fix Melissa, random dumps from Melissa's memory began to spill into the website, largely detailing Melissa's history and revealing the presence of a malicious Trojan-horse virus known as the "Pious Flea." The Spider tries to erase the Flea but is outwitted, as Melissa erases the Spider instead of the Flea.

the Covenant
.

With the assistance of other characters revealed by audio chapters, the fictional protagonists break into a secure military installation and manage to deactivate a Forerunner device which is implied to begin the firing sequence of the

Halo installations. However, the price paid for the deactivation is a powerful energy transmission alerting the Covenant to the location of Earth.[11] Whole again, Melissa sees how she has been manipulated by the Pious Flea, and returns to her time. I Love Bees ends with the Covenant invading Earth, corresponding to a major plot point in Halo 2.[9]

Due to Bungie's commitment to the development of Halo 2 during I Love Bees' run, they were unable to assist 42 Entertainment with story creation, and so the ARG's story is only tangentially related to the main Halo storyline.[12] The events of I Love Bees were, therefore, originally not considered to be Halo canon. In a 2006 interview, however, Bungie's content manager Frank O'Connor expressly confirmed that I Love Bees is part of "things that we embrace as canon."[13] References to elements of I Love Bees have since appeared in the 2006 Halo Graphic Novel[14] and the 2009 Halo Encyclopedia,[15] both of which are official canon.

Development

Jordan Weisman, CEO of 42 Entertainment

I Love Bees' developer,

A.I.. Other members of the I Love Bees team included Sean Stewart, a World Fantasy Award-award-winning author who served as I Love Bees' writer, and Jim Stewartson, I Love Bees' technical lead who produced the first commercial 3D game delivered by the internet.[16] Weisman stated that the goal of I Love Bees was to utilize every person who interacted with the game, and to use any electronic resource to do so: "If we could make your toaster print something we would. Anything with an electric current running through it. A single story, a single gaming experience, with no boundaries. A game that is life itself."[17]

42 Entertainment conceived I Love Bees as a radio drama, and used the pay phones as a way to excite players. Chris Di Cesare, Microsoft's director of marketing, stated that the radio drama's similarities with War of the Worlds was intentional, and that "[ILB] remains true to the radio drama tradition of Orson Welles that we were shooting for and also allowed us to tell the story in an unorthodox way."[9] In order to prevent non-players from being scared by the sounds of gunfire from the pay phones, 42 Entertainment established passwords that had to be repeated.[18] Stewart described writing for the game as more enjoyable than writing printed fiction, both for the money and the unique experience of ARGs as opposed to other media:

The audiences that we built for those campaigns are having a different experience. They're having a collective experience in which they literally bring different pieces, one to the next, swap them back and forth, gossip about them. They have an element of cocreation and a collaborative nature that doesn't really have an analog that I've been able to think of in the arts.[19]

Reception

I Love Bees is credited with helping drive attention to Halo 2; former Electronic Gaming Monthly editor Dan Hsu stated in an interview that "I Love Bees really got existing gamers and other consumers talking about the universe of [Halo]."[20] Billy Pidgeon, a game analyst, noted that I Love Bees achieved what it had been designed to do: "This kind of viral guerrilla marketing worked ... Everyone started instant messaging about it and checking out the site."[21] I Love Bees not only received coverage from gaming publications, but attracted mainstream press attention as well.[22] At its height, ilovebees received between two and three million unique visitors over the course of three months.[22] 9,000 people also actively participated in the real-world aspects of the game.[23] The players of I Love Bees themselves were quite varied. The target demographic for the promotion was younger males, but one player noted that even middle-aged men and women were engaged in the game.[24]

I Love Bees received several awards for its innovation.

Webby Award in the Game-Related category,[26] presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences
.

Legacy

Along with 42 Entertainment's previous ARG known as The Beast, I Love Bees is credited with bringing greater attention to the fledgling marketing form; I Love Bees not only helped assuage fears by marketers about the costs of ARG failure, but attracted interest from other game developers in using alternate reality games to promote their own products.[27] Before I Love Bees, The Guardian stated that "ARGs were destined to join Letsbuyit.com and Barcode Battlers in the e-dustbin of nice ideas that never really caught on"; the explosion of broadband internet access and a renewed interest in codes allowed I Love Bees to become wildly successful.[28] Bungie would later use another ARG called "Iris" to promote Halo 2's sequel, Halo 3.[29]

I Love Bees also attracted attention in the wider discussion of user-based marketing and cooperation. Author

mass movement, propelled into existence in a matter of weeks simply by collective enthusiasm guided by a few cyberspace 'avatars'".[30] The game proved successful with gamers, as well as attracting nontraditional players who had no experience with Halo before joining the game.[11]

In a 2016

Vektroid (among others), claimed to be acutely influenced by "I Love Bees," in its use of "hacked" websites, internet communities and IRL tasks to blur the lines between reality and fiction.[31]

See also

References

  1. CNET Networks. Archived from the original
    on April 8, 2005. Retrieved May 19, 2008.
  2. ^ a b Devidas, Arun (October 18, 2004). "Halo 2: Remember the Bees". IGN. Archived from the original on October 21, 2004. Retrieved April 12, 2008.
  3. ISBN 978-0-415-96056-4
    .
  4. ^ Zumbrum, Josh (July 21, 2007). "Mystery Movie Teaser Has Gamers Seeking Alternate Reality". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 21, 2008.
  5. ^ a b Terdiman, Daniel (May 7, 2007). "GDC 07: I Love Bees developer gets Serious". GameSpot. Retrieved May 20, 2008.
  6. ^ a b c Shachtman, Noah (November 4, 2004). "Sci-Fi Fans Are Called Into an Alternate Reality". The New York Times. Retrieved May 21, 2008.
  7. ^ "Error 404 - Not Found - The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI". www.ilovebees.co.
  8. ^ Fabijanic, Taya (February 26, 2005). "Down the rabbit hole". The Age. Retrieved April 24, 2008.
  9. ^ a b c Staff (April 2005). "Q & A: "I Love Bees" Elan Lee (Designer of card Game Exploding Kittens), CD, 42 Entertainment's Chris Di Cesare". Creativity: 54.
  10. ^ Goldstein, Hilary (November 4, 2004). "Countdown to Halo 2: Entering the Beehive". IGN. Archived from the original on November 7, 2004. Retrieved May 20, 2008.
  11. ^ a b c d Iezzi, Teressa (April 2005). "Editor's Note". Creativity: 54.
  12. ^ Parish, Jeremy (September 2007). "Halo 3: Campaign Trail". Electronic Gaming Monthly. Vol. 1, no. 219. p. 3.
  13. ^ The 1UP Show: Episode 07/28/2006 Archived 2012-07-13 at archive.today, 27:49 - 27:55
  14. ^ Amazon.com - The Halo Graphic Novel (Hardcover)
  15. ^ Amazon.com - Halo Encyclopedia (Hardcover)
  16. Gamasutra. Archived from the original
    on April 15, 2005. Retrieved August 12, 2008.
  17. ^ Rettberg, Scott (July 1, 2006). "Avant-Gaming: An Interview with Jane McGonigal". University of Iowa. Archived from the original on July 9, 2008. Retrieved August 13, 2008.
  18. ^ Staff (May 2005). "Sean Stewart interview excerpts". Locus.
  19. ^ Hanas, Jim (January 25, 2006). "The Story that Doesn't Care". Hanasiana.com. Archived from the original on September 23, 2008. Retrieved August 13, 2008.
  20. ^ a b Rosmarin, Rachel (September 24, 2007). "Burnishing Halo". Forbes. Retrieved February 4, 2014.
  21. ^ Brandon, John (January 2005). "Online This Month; Hoax sites: everybody plays the fool". Electronic Gaming Monthly. No. 187. p. 46.
  22. ^ a b Wegert, Tessa (August 18, 2005). "Advertisers reap real-world benefits from 'alternate reality'". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved May 13, 2008.
  23. ^ McGonigall, Jane (May 20, 2005). "All GameplayIs Performance" (PDF). AvantGame. Retrieved May 21, 2008.
  24. ^ Clark, Sue (October 23, 2004). "The Buzz: Alternate Reality". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved February 4, 2014.
  25. ^ IGDA (March 10, 2005). "IGDA Names Recipients of the 2005 Game Developers Choice Awards". Archived from the original on December 11, 2005.
  26. ^ "9th Annual Webby Awards Nominees and Winners". International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. 2005. Archived from the original on January 24, 2010. Retrieved May 19, 2008.
  27. Gamasutra
    . Retrieved May 20, 2008.
  28. ^ Carr, Paul (April 4, 2005). "The game with no aim". The Guardian. Retrieved January 26, 2008.
  29. ^ Sanders, Holly (July 12, 2007). "'Halo' on the Hunt". New York Post. Archived from the original on September 18, 2007. Retrieved April 1, 2008.
  30. Sunday Telegraph
    . p. 42.
  31. ^ "Vectors of Vektroid and Vaporwave". bandcamp.com. June 21, 2016. Retrieved April 5, 2018.
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