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.)

Comments

Re:Uhh yeah

[glenkim]

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.

Useful Links

[(SM) Spacemonkey]

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.

Wiki explanation

[Xeo 024]

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]

Re:Why do people use the word 'meme' so often?

[northstarlarry]

Actually, the word "meme" was coined in 1988 by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. The study of memetics has only been around for about a decade and a half. A lot of smart people doubt the usefullness and the plausibility of the study, but since it is so new, it is vey hard to tell.

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.

I found it disappointing

[dirk]

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.