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I Love Bees Coming to an End
With the gold status of Halo 2, the ILoveBees performance will soon come to an end. Wired has an article discussing the meme in depth, and going into details about what exactly it is. If you haven't had a chance to experience the phenomenon yet, the article does a good job of laying it out. (Though the performance finale doesn't come until Halo 2's launch day.)
it's a free alternative reality game that further fleshes out the halo universe. some people, such as myself, are really into the scifi story of halo. i recommend the first halo book, the fall of reach, as a starting point after playing halo.
It would appear, to my much surprise, that none of you have read the wired article. Basically I Love Bee is a game. But a game played out in real life. They provide clues, and you run around working the clues out for more clues. This happens in the real world, using phones and websites. This game was used by Bungie to promote their own game, which happens on your XBOX. Very simple concept, terribly obscured.
Anyway these links provide more information, and a community you play the game.
http://bees.netninja.com/
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/
They probably aren't ready for a slashdoting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_2 [click here]
The "Haunted Apiary" ARG
The website ilovebees.com (http://www.ilovebees.com) is currently being used as a publicity site for Halo 2, with the site being pointed to by adverts for the game during movie trailers. Ostensibly a site about bees, the server appears to have been taken over by some mysterious force, which is "counting down to something".
The frontpage has a counter counting down to July 27 (when it says "network throttling will erode"), August 10 (when "this medium will metastasize"), and August 24 (at 8:06 am, when it will be "wide awake and physical") - many think something big will happen related to Halo 2 on these dates. Other messages relating to the Halo story are hidden throughout the site. Now that the countdown has ended, a new era in the ILB saga has begun and November 9th is gonna be big.
This style of publicity is similar to that which surrounded the movie A.I. which featured a grand Alternate Reality Game. The Halo ARG has been dubbed The Haunted Apiary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_2 [click here]
It's used in sociology often. It has Greek origin, and came much before the word "memetics". I think you have a narrow view of what the word means. Ironically, as you assert your own doctrine over its usage, you become the pretentious weenie.
It's certainly true that the proponents of memetics have a hard time really sitting down and coming up with hard evidence of what they are talking about, but it's also true that doing that is extremely difficult, given the material (which is insubstantial and only really detectable second-hand) and the nature of the idea, which is probably close to sociology, but also straddles psychology and biology.
You have to admit, however, that, on its own, the idea of a "meme" -- an idea as a self-contained unit that makes its way around the culture -- is both fascinating and useful for description of some cultural phenomena.
As a Cloudmaker (the group that participated in the AI game now known as The Beast) I was disappointed by the I Love Bees "game". While the story was certainly interesting, and that is what kept me in it for as long as I was, the game aspect seemed to be sorely lacking. Almost everything was taking bits of text or audio that was given to people then figuring out how to assemble them so that they make sense. It was less of a game, and more of a story that the reader had to assemble from parts. Sure, those parts were scattered around through different readers, but there really wasn't much of a challenge. A large part of the draw of The Beast for me was the actual puzzle aspect. Figuring out what answers Eliza wanted. Having to take chess moves, enter them into a chess program to find the best counter-move, and then have that be the password. Puzzles that forced huge amounts of people to brainstorm together to come up with the answers.
I Love Bees may be a good marketing tool. And it may be a good story. But it failed as a game for me.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Memetics was never a theory that the same ideas that drive genetic traits also drive ideas. The guy who coined the term, Richard Dawkins, has always maintained that a Meme is [i]analogous[/i] to a gene. Memetics is more of theory that evolutionary principles also drive culture like it does genetics. Memetics is merely a way to talk about cutural evolution in an analogy to biological evolution. It's neither bogus nor outdated.
More information here:
http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/overview.html
"the devil finds work for idle circuits"
the sleeping princess has done that for us:
http://ilovebees.com/humptydumpty.html
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
That's not the worst of it. Over at Livejournal, the word "meme" has taken on the definition of "annoyingly colorful randomly-generated crap that you copy and paste into your journal". Every time I see someone calling some memegen crap a "meme", I die a little inside.
(For the lucky uninitiated, these things work by taking some random input, hashing it and picking random elements from sets of answers.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'd recommand this. It contains files the Sleeping Princess didn't leave on the humptydumpty. Like Herzog.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
Meriam Webster's definition
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
For those of you with no patience or time to play the game, they do have a page that comes very close to what you want. Just download all the clips and listen at your liesure. It's also fun to poke around the site and read things there but the audio portion stands up by itself.
The Wired story had it right that it's basically a modern-day radio drama - and I think a really good one. The game around it sounds cool, sad I don't have time for that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Read the Guide to the game for the backstory on what's been going on over the last three months.
Yes.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
um, follow the google trail and you will find both the audio and the transcripts.
/. to the fullest. Ask a question that they are too lazy to search for themselves while bitching and moaning how society sucks. Grow up, and gimme my 2 bucks.
I suppose that AC really knows how to use
Yeah! I have the same problem with books!
It's like, you're supposed to believe that the words written on a sheaf of dead tree sheets is actually happening when obviously they're just words put there by some printing press! How insulting to a person's intelligence is that?! And you even have to turn the sheets of paper over yourself! The whole thing is a total crock! Totally unbelievable!
And then there's D&D. . , where people say they're somebody else, when really they're just spinning falsehoods. Don't even get me started on D&D!
Though, joking aside, I can see totally your point. The fact that you're having the "failure to suspend disbelief reaction", (which to be fair, I entirely shared when looking at the Bees page), means that it could have been done a lot better.
The way I would have done it, off the top of my head, is to have made a web page or series of web pages which look like they'd actually been altered in a conventional way, but by a source with a fantastic origin. In a fictional story where it is possible to send matter and energy back through time, how hard is it to accept that electrons and magnetic charges stored on a web server can be manipulated from the future? Remember the phone message system to the future used in, "12 Monkeys"? --That kind of logic was clean and plausible, some variation of which could easily be used to introduce fictional elements into the real world in this case. Anything is possible with fiction. That's the point. There is no good excuse for clumsy "style over substance" mistakes. --A desperate commando from the future seeking help in the past I doubt is going to waste his time making clever looking javascript graphics. (Unless of course, you're trying to show that he's a fucking idiot. He was on the losing side, was he? Hmm.)
But then, the nature of this game was dreamed up by a team which included, most likely, a lot of marketing people and not enough solid creative types who had command veto. Marketing people have the curious problem of being very smart and very stupid at the same time. It's really hard, apparently, to wash the 'slick' off a marketing drone. Most things dreamed up by marketing drones tend to have that subtle odor of, "Coke vs Pepsi". It makes me very badly not want to buy stuff. Ever.
But, clearly, we're in the minority.
-FL