Haunted Apiary
Encyclopedia
Alternate reality game
An alternate reality game is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions....
(ARG) that served as both a real-world experience and viral marketing
Viral marketing
Viral marketing, viral advertising, or marketing buzz are buzzwords referring to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of viruses...
campaign for the release of developer Bungie
Bungie
Bungie, Inc is an American video game developer currently located in Bellevue, Washington, USA. The company was established in May 1991 by University of Chicago undergraduate student Alex Seropian, who later brought in programmer Jason Jones after publishing Jones' game Minotaur: The Labyrinths of...
's 2004 video game Halo 2
Halo 2
Halo 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie Studios. Released for the Xbox video game console on November 9, 2004, the game is the second installment in the Halo franchise and the sequel to 2001's critically acclaimed Halo: Combat Evolved...
. The game was created and developed by 42 Entertainment
42 Entertainment
42 Entertainment is an American company based in Pasadena which specializes in creating and producing alternate reality games . The company was founded in 2003 as an independently-owned, creative content and interactive agency under the name 4orty 2wo Entertainment. The company started with a...
. Many of the same personnel had previously created an ARG for the film A.I. titled The Beast
The Beast (game)
The Beast was an alternate reality game created by a team at Microsoft to promote the Steven Spielberg film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. The Beast, which ran for twelve weeks in the spring and early summer of 2001, is one of the most influential early ARG games.-Defining ARG:An ARG is a game...
. I Love Bees was commissioned by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
, Halo 2's publisher.
I Love Bees was first advertised by a subliminal 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
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
stranded on Earth and its attempts to put itself back together.
I Love Bees was a marketing success; 250,000 people viewed the ilovebees website when it was launched in August 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 marketingViral marketing
Viral marketing, viral advertising, or marketing buzz are buzzwords referring to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of viruses...
which CNET
CNET
CNET is a tech media website that publishes news articles, blogs, and podcasts on technology and consumer electronics. Originally founded in 1994 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie, it was the flagship brand of CNET Networks and became a brand of CBS Interactive through CNET Networks' acquisition...
described as encompassing "real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online [communities]". I Love Bees began when jars of honey were received in the mail by people who had previously participated in alternate reality game
Alternate reality game
An alternate reality game is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions....
s. The jars contained letters leading to the I Love Bees website and a countdown. 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, ostensibly a hacked site related to beekeeping
Beekeeping
Beekeeping is the maintenance of honey bee colonies, commonly in hives, by humans. A beekeeper keeps bees in order to collect honey and other products of the hive , to pollinate crops, or to produce bees for sale to other beekeepers...
.
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. 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.
Global Positioning System
The Global Positioning System is a space-based global navigation satellite system that provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth, where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites...
coordinates and time codes, with no indications to what the locations referred to. Players eventually figured out the coordinates referred to pay phones and the times to when the phones would ring; one player in Florida stayed by a phone while Hurricane Frances
Hurricane Frances
Hurricane Frances was the sixth named storm, the fourth hurricane, and the third major hurricane of the 2004 Atlantic hurricane season. The system crossing the open Atlantic during mid to late August, moving to the north of the Lesser Antilles while strengthening. Its outer bands affected Puerto...
was minutes away in order to recite answers to prerecorded questions. Other phone calls were made by live persons known as "operators"; these calls allowed players to interact with the characters of the games in spontaneous and occasionally humorous ways. Other players treated the corrupted data on ilovebees.com as encrypted files to decipher, or used image files found on the web server to solve puzzles. After players completed certain tasks, they were rewarded with new installments to an audio drama which revealed the reasons for the ilovebees.com malfunction.
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. 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
Halo 2
Halo 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie Studios. Released for the Xbox video game console on November 9, 2004, the game is the second installment in the Halo franchise and the sequel to 2001's critically acclaimed Halo: Combat Evolved...
before its release and collect a commemorative DVD.
Plot
The game's plot begins with a military spaceship crashing to Earth in an unknown location, leaving the craft's controlling artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
or 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.
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.
While one AI program, called Spider, 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 Flea continues to overwrite Melissa's programming with its own mysterious goals.
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
Halo (megastructure)
Halos are fictional megastructures and superweapons in the Halo video game series. They are referred to as "Installations" by their AI monitors, and are collectively referred to as "the Array" by the installations' creators, the Forerunners...
installations. However, the price paid for the deactivation is a powerful energy transmission which alerts the Covenant
The Covenant (Halo)
The Covenant are a fictional theocratic military alliance of alien races who serve as the main antagonists in the Halo video game series. They are composed of a variety of diverse species, united under the religious worship of the enigmatic Forerunners and their belief that Forerunner ringworlds...
of the location of Earth. 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
Halo 2
Halo 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie Studios. Released for the Xbox video game console on November 9, 2004, the game is the second installment in the Halo franchise and the sequel to 2001's critically acclaimed Halo: Combat Evolved...
.
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. The events of I Love Bees were, therefore, originally not considered to be Halo canon
Canon (fiction)
In the context of a work of fiction, the term canon denotes the material accepted as "official" in a fictional universe's fan base. It is often contrasted with, or used as the basis for, works of fan fiction, which are not considered canonical...
. 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." References to elements of I Love Bees have since appeared in the 2006 Halo Graphic Novel and the 2009 Halo Encyclopedia, both of which are official canon.
Development
42 Entertainment
42 Entertainment is an American company based in Pasadena which specializes in creating and producing alternate reality games . The company was founded in 2003 as an independently-owned, creative content and interactive agency under the name 4orty 2wo Entertainment. The company started with a...
, was founded by Jordan Weisman
Jordan Weisman
Jordan Weisman is an American game designer, author, and serial entrepreneur who has founded four major game design companies, each in a different game genre and segment of the industry.-Biography:...
, the former creative director for Microsoft's Xbox division. 42 Entertainment had previously created the first ARG, The Beast
The Beast (game)
The Beast was an alternate reality game created by a team at Microsoft to promote the Steven Spielberg film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. The Beast, which ran for twelve weeks in the spring and early summer of 2001, is one of the most influential early ARG games.-Defining ARG:An ARG is a game...
, which had been used to promote the movie A.I.. Other members of the I Love Bees team included Sean Stewart
Sean Stewart
Sean Stewart is a U.S.-Canadian science fiction and fantasy author.Born in Lubbock, Texas, Sean Stewart moved to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in 1968...
, a World Fantasy Award
World Fantasy Award
The World Fantasy Awards are annual, international awards given to authors and artists who have demonstrated outstanding achievement in the field of fantasy...
-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. 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."
42 Entertainment conceived I Love Bees as a radio drama
Radio drama
Radio drama is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance, broadcast on radio or published on audio media, such as tape or CD. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story...
, 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
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
that we were shooting for and also allowed us to tell the story in an unorthodox way." 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. Stewart described writing for the game as more enjoyable than writing printed fiction, both for the money as well as 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.
Reception
I Love Bees is credited with helping drive attention to Halo 2; former Electronic Gaming MonthlyElectronic Gaming Monthly
Electronic Gaming Monthly is a bimonthly American video game magazine. It has been published by EGM Media, LLC. since relaunching in April of 2010. Its previous run, which ended in January 2009, was published by Ziff Davis...
editor Dan Hsu
Dan Hsu
Dan "Shoe" Hsu is the former editorial director of the 1UP Network, as well as former editor-in-chief of the video game magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, a position he held from 2001 to 2008. Hsu attended the University of Michigan. His nickname, "Shoe", refers to the pronunciation of his...
stated in an interview that "I Love Bees really got existing gamers and other consumers talking about the universe of [Halo]." 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." I Love Bees not only received coverage from gaming publications, but attracted mainstream press attention as well. At its height, ilovebees received between two to three million unique visitors over the course of three months. 9,000 people also actively participated in the real-world aspects of the game. 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.
I Love Bees received several awards for its innovation. The design team was one of the recipients of the Innovation Award at the 5th annual Game Developers Choice Awards
Game Developers Choice Awards
The Game Developers Choice Awards are annually presented by the Game Developers Conference for outstanding game developers and games.Introduced in 2001, the Game Developers Choice Awards were preceded by the Spotlight Awards, which were presented from 1997 to 1999.The 2009 award presentation was...
. I Love Bees was also announced as the winner of a Webby Award in the Game-Related category, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences
International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences
The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences or IADAS was founded in 1998 in New York to help drive the progress of the Internet and evolving forms of new media. The academy selects the nominees and winners for the Webby Awards, and their European equivalent, the Lovie Awards.Membership...
.
Legacy
Along with 42 Entertainment's previous ARG known as The BeastThe Beast (game)
The Beast was an alternate reality game created by a team at Microsoft to promote the Steven Spielberg film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. The Beast, which ran for twelve weeks in the spring and early summer of 2001, is one of the most influential early ARG games.-Defining ARG:An ARG is a game...
, 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. Before I Love Bees, The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
stated that "ARGs were destined to join Letsbuyit.com and Barcode Battler
Barcode Battler
The is a handheld gaming console released by Epoch in March 1991.The console at retail was supplied with a number of cards, each of which had a barcode. Upon starting the game, the player must swipe a barcode representing a player. The game uses barcodes to create a character for the player to...
s 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. Bungie would later use another ARG called "Iris" to promote Halo 2s sequel, Halo 3
Halo 3
Halo 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360 console. The third installment in the Halo franchise, the game concludes the story arc begun in Halo: Combat Evolved and continued in Halo 2...
.
I Love Bees also attracted attention in the wider discussion of user-based marketing and cooperation. Author Charles Leadbeater
Charles Leadbeater
Charles Leadbeater is a British author and former advisor to Tony Blair.He first came to widespread notice in the 1980s as a regular contributor to the magazine Marxism Today. Later he was Industrial Editor and Tokyo Bureau Chief at the Financial Times...
argued that I Love Bees was an example of "We-Think" collective thinking; Leadbeater noted that after the "puppet masters" began the game, I Love Bees "displayed all the characteristics of a mass movement
Mass movement
Mass movement refers to the political concept of a political party or movement which is supported by large segments of a population. Political movements that typically advocate the creation of a mass movement include the ideologies of communism and fascism...
, propelled into existence in a matter of weeks simply by collective enthusiasm guided by a few cyberspace 'avatars'". The game proved successful with gamers, as well as attracting nontraditional players who had no experience with Halo before joining the game.
See also
- Iris, Bungie's Halo 3Halo 3Halo 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360 console. The third installment in the Halo franchise, the game concludes the story arc begun in Halo: Combat Evolved and continued in Halo 2...
ARG - Radio dramaRadio dramaRadio drama is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance, broadcast on radio or published on audio media, such as tape or CD. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story...
— the genre of the audio files released as part of I Love Bees.