i love bees

Historical ARG Presentationemac4326

October 9, 2008Sherri Segovia

'Twas the night before Axons

by Shad0 (found on thebruce.net)'Twas the night before Axons, when all through the house Not an ARGer was posting, or clicking a mouse; The axons were graphed on the forum with care, In hopes that a pay phone or two would be there...

i love bees...

Commissioned by: Microsoft Game StudioCampaign: to promote xbox Halo2Designed by: 42 EntertainmentWhen it started: July 13th 2004When it ended: November 4th, 2004

7 hours of script was written in 5 months

When it went live in week 1, week 8 was still unwritten.

the rabbit hole

how it started...

Honey bear sent to Steve Peters (founder of ARGN) and a handful of other people (cloudmakers)

Inside were cut out letters that could be assembled to spell:

i love bees

within a week...• ilovebees.com flashed at end of theater ad for Halo 2• video game trailer online (bungie.net forum)• Trail Head: beekeepers website appears to be hacked

Unhacked vs. Hacked

ARG Elements

http://www.42entertainment.com/bees.html

• Emergent Properties (a la War of the Worlds radio show)

• Real World Elements: 40,000 pay phone calls were made (ARGN), + websites, blogs,

emails, jpegs, Mp3 recordings, other digital artifacts

• Collaborative / Interactive Storytelling (ex: Weephun) --immersive backstory

• Self Organizing Structure (online network): 54,000 forum posts on unfiction (Mssv) ...dubbed themselves "the beekeepers" ...created wikis, guides, websites (documenting red herrings, puzzles, "story so far")

Dana's blog (in game character)

http://ilovebees.blogspot.com/

Participants

2.5 million

tens of thousands

75,000

* source: 42 entertainment

campaign results

significant press coverage: CNN, New York TimesHalo2 sold $125 million in copies first day of releasewon 2005 Game Developers Convention special award for innovationwebby award* source: 42 entertainment

gameplay

Audio story that originates in year 2537 (Halo precursor), deconstructed and distributed via Axon Plot

Axon Plot: Corrupted ILB website lists 220 numbers called "Axons"...players discover these to be GPS coordinates of pay phones

Countdown on website when "Axons Go Hot" (termed "enhottenating"), meant times when phones would ring

At first... players would simply need to say the word of the day. ("Apocalypso")

Required increasingly sophisticated collaboration:

"Initially, one person would show up at the phone, receive a call, and listen to a riddle (which was read by live actors). The players would have forty-five minutes to solve that riddle and have the answer ready, sometimes at another pay phone thousands of miles away, to unlock the successive elements of the story that moved the game forward."

bnet

...cont.

As the game wore on, that time dropped to a seemingly near-impossible forty-five seconds. To do that, players had to set up an intricate communication network with strangers.

The chain typically would be one person manning the pay phone and using a cell phone to contact another player sitting in front of a computer ready to transcribe the riddle. The riddle would then be sent to a chat room filled with other players. Once the message was sent down the line, it would need to be solved and sent back up the line to the computer operator, who would then give the original player the correct answer, which needed to be repeated to the actor on the other end of the phone. bnet

Reward: When players answered correctly to Melissa's questions, they were admitted to her crew. She would also play an audio clip that contained pieces of the Halo story.

Melissa's failure text: "You don't know who I am, and I don't know who you are. You're not meant to hear any of this. You must purge the contents of your chatter immediately." Afterwards plays an endless, spooky repetition of "I love bees!" until she hangs up, or the player hangs up first.

(i love bees wiki)

Advancing the plot:

Axons were activated in groups with special code names and a green color. When Melissa made successful connections, she updated the list of axons, marking them "CONNECTED" and "AXON HOT." Then she would increment the status bar for that group until they were full. The group color would then change to orange, and the name of the group became a link to the same audio clip, available to everyone.

the "rules"

Not try to break into characters' e-mail

Not try to break into characters' voicemail

Anything else that's unethical or illegal

(posted in player Quick Start FAQs by bees.netninja.com)

the puzzles

http://bees.netninja.com/staticwiki/beewiki/ThePuzzles

the "Hive"

Creative Team

"The Internet basically is about searching for things and gossiping, and we invented a way to tell stories that are about searching for things and gossiping," said Sean Stewart, the novelist who, along with director Elan Lee, created I Love Bees and its predecessor game, The Beast.

bnet

Jane McGonigalAs a designer and community lead for the ILB project, I "played Dana" -- wrote her blog, answered emails, checked her voice mail, sent Aunt Margaret's honey, and in general was responsible for keeping tabs on everything you guys were up to. When Dana disappeared, I got to do other fun stuff, like make puzzles (my favorites: the cootie catcher and the prisoner's dilemma puzzles), help design the live event missions, masquerade as the Operator on gmail, and track and schedule all of the axons.

http://www.avantgame.com/ilovebees.htm

Final Reward:

Players invited to a "training mission" which was actually a chance to play Halo2 multiplayer before its release. Various sites around America were used to host the event, including movie theaters and malls.

halopedia

legacy

"Bees was not just a typical marketing ploy; it was a game in and of itself, a very high-quality, fulfilling experience with excellent writing," Peters said. "I never got the feeling that I was just being manipulated into buying a product because they never mentioned the product. If they had mentioned it, it would have driven people away in droves."

bnet

"I Love Bees seemed to attract people who weren't even gamers" -- Beekeeper Matthew Freestone

bnet

Used highly unconventional means to deliver storyline. Engaged massive multiplayer community in a complex network of problem solving and collaboration.

Brought credibility and confidence to marketers to view ARGs as a viable means of promoting products.

example of collective intelligence of players..."we think, therefore we are" (Pierre Levy)

trivia

The game was re-written in midstream in order to accommodate players who wanted to see more puzzles. Since the radio play was pre-recorded, the rewrite was what brought the live calls.

The lack of ability to beta-test meant that 5 hours before the phone calls went live, the PuppetMasters were still trying to see if the payphones would ring.

The PuppetMasters had not expected Weephun to rat out the Sleeping Princess so easily and had to do quite a bit of rewriting in order to deal with it.

A player tried to answer a live call in the middle of Hurricane Ivan. The PM broke character to tell him to run to safety: "Dude, it's a hurricane. Put the phone down."

halopedia