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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.)
Looks like I'm the only BeeKeeper to reply so far.
I just have to say that here's been no better thing with which to waste my time at work... sure its a marketing ploy i guess... but big deal. this ARG actually had characters that we cared about, and a very engaging branching/overlapping storyline, the threads of which are just coming together this week. It's also brought alot of people together as friends who probably never would interact in real life. Now if you'll excuse me... I have a payphone to answer.......
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
It wasn't the first site in the genre.
It won't be the last.
It may be advertising but its using a creative medium...the internet and pay phones, whose GPS coords are provided. At a first glance tho, the www.ilovebees.com is a little archaic, couldn't find any GPS coords or anything, didn't really try tho.
Its very hard to make the connection between www.ilovebees.com and Halo 2 at first glance, and I never heard about it until this article. But of course then I saw the word "grenade" on the webpage...I mean c'mon whats more Halo than random grenades.
One thing tho is that I can't really see this being an effective advertising method...basically because your average joe will only labor through this webpage and decipher the secrets if they already are into Halo 2, so its more like they just wanted to provide some fun entertainment and background to the story.
I finally understand why so many people have been visiting my friend's website from ilovebees related sites. (It's a website about locations of payphones).
We were scratching our heads on this one.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
I would say that memetics really is more like the Saphir-Worf hypothesis. In many ways discredited, but resurfacing in modified forms.
The way memetics claims ideas propagate bears at least a superficial similarity to the way ideas propagate on the internet - the bloggers and the webzines and even slashdot all parrot each other intentionally and unintentionally. Now, even in this context you can probably gripe about the use of the workd meme here. But stuff like "Perl is line noise" is very much a meme in that sense. It get's aped and parroted, and said by anonymous cowards trying to look like they know what they are talking about - a meme. "I don't know where this line noise meme started" is a reasonable statement.
Besides, meme is a good word. I'm happy to have it back, even with a slightly altered meaning.
I'm not sure I'd lump this into the same category as pay for play and secret decoder rings.
From what I remember of the Ovaltine thing was that they listened to a story for weeks, waited for their decoder ring, all for the final wrap up so that they could decode the all important message.
All it turned out to be was a lame marketing gimick for Ovaltine...
While the final storyline message might be different the principle remains the same. You listen and listen and listen, hooked on every word, and find out that in the end you have been just been duped into buying your Ovaltine just because you're a fan of something they pay for.
How about you look into your subject a little before you bash people for being suckered by advertising when that's not the case?
The ARG is based on the story of the Halo universe, and yes, come November 9th it will end (According to the Wired article) with ppl being directed to video game stores to buy the game. But although it is technically just one giant commercial, there is not a constant product barrage. People answering the payphones aren't getting spammed with "Buy Bungie games!" or "XBox Rulez!" because that breaks the suspension of disbelief the game (I Love Bees) has created. It is in fact a standalone free alternate reality game. You don't have to like Halo, you don't have to have even ever played Halo. While it may be true that there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is nothing about ILB that forces its product upon you, and I have a feeling that come Nov 9th a lot of people are going to be very sad their fun is over, but go on with their lives w/o giving a rat's ass whether they play Halo2 or not.
As for me, I don't have time to crack cyphers and answer random payphones, but I'll be buying Halo 2 because Halo was the most fun multiplayer FPS I've ever played IMO. Some people may decide to buy Halo 2 because of ILB, and if not then at least they had fun playing the game, incidentally one which gets people outside and interacting rather than just staring monotonously at the television for hours. And unlike the decoder ring revealing an anticlimactic paid advertisement, the "secret" unlocked by ILB will possibly be one of the best video games ever produced - hardly a letdown.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
I've done a bunch of research on this game since I happened to notice it early. A group of us weren't happy with the quality of reference material available and decided to start an editorial-team based Wiki.
If you're interested in the "I Love Bees" ARG (Alternate Reality Game) and want a more in-depth view, you might want to take a look at the FireFlies Guide. For the whole picture, we have a bunch of analysis and reference info available on the rest of our Wiki.
There were lots of hidden puzzles contained in the pictures on the site. Every week there has been at least one set of wav files that are not on the main site and for which there are no coordinates. By solving the puzzles, the beekeepers could determine the names of the hidden files for all to hear. Some of the puzzles were real stumpers. For instance there was a huge list of prepositions and no one could figure out what it meant. It turned out the answer was the one preposition that was missing: upon. The name of the relevant wave file was a_pawn.wav.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
People seem to dismiss ILoveBees as "YetMoreMarketing".
But the reality is closer to Halo 2 being an ad for ILoveBees! Think about, never once on any ILoveBees area is Halo 2 mentioned. Nor will it be - the whole point of an ARG is the alternate reality! ILoveBees is devoted to slowly playing out this alternate reality, feeding you glimpses of it to get you hooked on the story. It's bulding up this alternate reality where teh Covenent are slowly snuffing out worlds, and getting closer to the Earth.
So in a way it's a sort of inverse marketing, that tells you nothing at all about the product it's meant to get you interested in, but instead meant to get you interested enough in what is going through qualities of its own to maek you want to seek out the product yourself. Of course it helps that you have a back-link in that many people found out about it from the Halo 2 trailer, but that's not made explicit anywhere on ILoveBees.
They make a good point in the Wired article that ILoveBees can stand on its own. I don't even plan to get Halo2 (not having an XBox) until it comes out on the mac (several years hence no doubt). But I still really enjoy listening to teh combined story, even if I don't have time to play the game itself.
For those of a similar mind, they happily have all the audio collected in nice easy to digest chronological bits here.
So, even though it's marketing it's the very best kind which is really not meant to sell the product - it's meant to sell the story - through only text and audio! And isn't that pretty cool all by itself?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley