I Love Bees
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I Love Bees (also known as ilovebees or ILB for short) was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as a real-world experience of, and a viral marketing campaign for, the Halo 2 video game. It is a product of 42 Entertainment, commissioned by Microsoft and approved by Bungie Studios – the creators of Halo 2.
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[edit] Overview
Like all ARGs, I Love Bees was a cross-media game that deliberately blurred the line between in-game and out-of-game experiences. To "play" I Love Bees, interested people would generally visit websites thought to be involved with the game, collect and document the shifting information on these sites, and discuss the game with other users. Players also interacted with the game in unexpected ways, for example by receiving unexpected phone calls from Artificial Intelligence characters, or by sending and receiving emails.
The game was initiated when a plastic honey bear was received in the mail by people who had previously participated in Alternate Reality Games. That bear was filled with honey and nine vinyl letters that spelled I LOVE BEES when unscrambled. At around the same time, an advertisement for Halo 2 shown at screenings of I, Robot at Lowes Cineplex theatres flashed a link to ilovebees.com, which is ostensibly a site related to beekeeping.
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. Suspecting that this was a mystery that could be unraveled, Halo and ARG fans spread the link and began to work on figuring out just what was going on.
The game culminated by inviting "crew members" (players) to visit one of 4 cinemas where they could get a chance to play Halo 2 before its release, as well as collect many items of memorabilia, including a DVD summarizing the events of the game.
[edit] Gameplay
The ilovebees.com website first gained public attention when jars of honey were received by members of the Alternate Reality Game community. The jars contained jumbled letters. When cleaned and assembled, the letters spelled out ILOVEBEES. Later, the game would gain its entry into public fervor with the URL's appearance at the end of theatrical trailers for the Halo 2 game on Xbox. From the blurring of media and mystery, it became clear that this was an Alternate Reality Game. Eager to unravel the mystery of the site's hacking, interested internet users began to explore more information, mostly by trial and error.
[edit] Dana, the webmaster
Dana, the sites webmaster, had created a weblog stating that something had gone wrong with her website, and the site itself had been hacked. In later entries she reported that her attempts to fix it were in vain, and asked for help.
Early players tried emailing Dana, exploring the ilovebees.com website for hidden data, treating the corrupted data on ilovebees.com as encrypted files and attempting to decrypt them, and any other ways players could think of to attempt to gain more hidden information from the site.
[edit] Plot
The plot of ILB is elaborate and convoluted (not helped by the fact that the story was revealed out of order), as well as open to interpretation with regard to gaps in the story. Readers seeking a detailed explanation of the story should visit any of the summary sites that appeared across the internet after the game's resolution, including The Netninja Wiki.
The game's story essentially began with a military spaceship crashing to Earth in an unknown location, killing the crew and leaving the craft's controlling AI program damaged. This AI, known as the "Operator" or "Melissa", was not alone. Other AI programs shared its system or affected it from other systems. One program, called "SPDR" (System Peril Distributed Reflex) or "Spider", was a software task meant to repair Melissa, but Melissa, disoriented and self-protecting, did not take kindly to this interference.
In an effort to survive and contact any surviving allies, Melissa transferred herself to a San Francisco-area web server, which happened 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.
At the same time, another AI program appears which has until now remained dormant in Melissa's system. Calling itself "The Sleeping Princess" this AI takes control of the webmaster's email address for ilovebees.com, but because this AI has difficulty using the English language, it instead uses phrases constructed from parts of emails already sent to it.
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 she is washing her hands of the situation and is taking a previously planned trip to China earlier than expected.
While the Spider program attempts to fix Melissa, random dumps from Melissa's memory began to spill into the website, largely detailing Melissa's history and expanding on the story element of the ilovebees game. Of particular note was the revealing of yet another AI, a malicious Trojan-horse virus long infecting Melissa later 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 Flea continues to overwrite Melissa's programming ("Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape") with its own mysterious goals, stated as: "Seek The Truth, Behold The Truth, Reveal The Truth".
Meanwhile, Melissa reveals audio files to people she believes to be loyal members of her crew. These audio files are largely unlocked as real-life players met at the prearranged payphones that the times listed, often having to recite specific phrases mentioned on the site in order to complete their mission. Slowly, a story emerged following a band of unlikely heroes. These characters included Janissary James, the 17 year old daughter of a super soldier; another military AI, named "Durga," residing in the computer system of a teenager named Jersey Morelli; a medical student/immigrant to Earth from a colony world called Coral named Kamal Zaman; and a Junior-level Office of Naval Intelligence analyist named Rani.
With the assistance of other characters, the real-life protagonists break into a secure military installation and manage to deactivate the "sterilization" sequence of the Halo installation, which would have wiped out all life in the known Galaxy. However, the price paid for the deactivation is a powerful energy transmission which alerts the Covenant to the location of Earth.
[edit] Resolution
A turning point in the story was when some players caused the Sleeping Princess, another AI living on the ilovebees.com server, to be destroyed by Melissa. While many were outraged by this (the child-like Sleeping Princess screams as she is 'murdered'), it is later revealed that the Sleeping Princess was not destroyed, but contained. With the aid of the Pious Flea the players managed to free the Princess once more and allowed her to merge with Melissa. The merge allowed Melissa to restore the parts of herself that were damaged in the initial crash.
Whole again, Melissa saw how she had been manipulated by the Pious Flea, and returned to her own time, merging with Durga. As a parting gift, she also left another series of audio clips. These audio clips show how the main characters of ILB fared. The tone is somber, as ILB ended with the Covenant invading Earth, corresponding to a major plot point in Halo 2.
ILB 'ends' the same way in which it began. The System Peril Distributed Reflex, thought to be destroyed, is again in control of ilovebees.com, and again there is a countdown on the site, but it is a 500 year countdown coinciding with the fictional timeline of Halo, and likely corresponds to the day the Covenant invades Earth in Halo 2. This improved SPDR destroyed the Pious Flea, the Covenant virus that brought about the discovery of Earth and led the Covenant to it, once and for all.
[edit] Reasons for the Game
Even while the game was running, it became clear that ilovebees was a publicity stunt engineered at least in part by Bungie Studios to build hype for the upcoming release of their title in development, Halo 2. Microsoft had played a large part in a similar publicity stunt previously, with their involvement in The Beast [1], an ARG used to promote the movie A.I.. The speculation was finally proven after the conclusion of ilovebees, when it was revealed that the developers of The Beast, 4orty 2wo Studios, were in fact the creators of ilovebees.
Bungie also has had a history of doing promotional puzzles for upcoming games, specifically relating to the Halo franchise. Prior to the announcement of Halo: Combat Evolved, former Bungie employee Nathan Bitner released a series of cryptic emails later called the "Cortana Letters". Although not strictly an ARG, the Cortana Letters did encourage fan participation, and melded reality with fiction as Bungie employees pretended to have no idea who Cortana was or how she was sending her emails.
[edit] "Training exercise"
As the ARG came to a close, players were given the chance to go to one of 4 locations for a "training exercise" to take place. While originally open only to ILB players, invitations were quickly extended to the general public. Indeed, most of the people who went to these exercises were not ILB players, merely fans of Halo 2. This caused quite a deal of irritation to devout ILB players, who felt that the exercise was specifically for ILB fans. Amusingly, a few exercise organizers didn't know about ILB; they were told it was a Halo 2 preview event.
At each of the "training exercises", fans were given a complimentary DVD compilation of materials released throughout the ilovebees game. The DVD also included, among other things, a personal "thank you" message from Melissa and a long string of recorded messages players had been prompted to submit during the pay phone portion of the game, creating imaginary names and ranks as part of Melissa's fictional starship crew. Many other promotional items were available depending on location and availability, including posters for Halo 2. In addition, attendees got the chance to play Halo 2 multiplayer, before the game's release, on the screens of the theatres they were gathered in.
[edit] Awards
- In March 2005, the design team for I Love Bees was one of the recipients of the Innovation award in the 5th annual Game Developers Choice Awards. [2]
- In May 2005, I Love Bees was announced as the winner of a Webby Award in the Game-Related category. [3] Since 1996 the Webby Awards have been the leading international awards for websites that show excellence in web design, creativity, usability and functionality, and are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
[edit] External links
[edit] The game
[edit] Press coverage
- First and second Slashdot articles.
- Wired article
- "I Love Bees" design team receives a Game Developers Choice Award
- "I Love Bees" Nominated for a Webby Award
[edit] Falsities
During the game, many sites not part of the game pretended to be part of the game. These include:
- I Love Beer - The humor site that Dana even mentioned in her blog.
- CAPitALLism's The Reality of Alternate Reality - A digital art and politics site that created an elaborate and simultaneous narrative, documented in complete.
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