Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Inside the Honeypot, Inside the Game

Posted by Zonk on from the metagaming dept.

VonGuard writes "The Game is the title of an article I have up on the EastBayExpress site, and it's an inside look at 4orty2wo, the company behind ilovebees.com and the original ARG 'Who Killed Evan Chan?'. I also have an interview with the 4orty2wo folks in this month's Game Developer Magazine entitled 'Inside the Honeypot'. Read both carefully and you may find clues to a new ARG!" From the article: "One day last fall, Lenore Henry stood by a pay phone on San Francisco's Market Street. She cupped the thick black shell of the receiver to one ear and plugged the other with an errant finger to block out street noise. Behind her, a man clicked on a recording device and poked a microphone at the telephone mouthpiece. A familiar female voice was on the line. It wasn't a recorded voice as before. This one was live. It was 'the Melissa,' and Lenore needed to make it cry."

22 comments

  1. To go with the Sarcasm thread... by yotto · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    This is /so/ /interesting/!

    --
    Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
    1. Re:To go with the Sarcasm thread... by dmaduram · · Score: 1

      This is /so/ /interesting/!

      It *is* interesting -- the I Love Bees campaign was able to generate an unprecedented amount of support and comraderie among fans, and it's interesting to see how this effort was orchestrated. Just to pull a quote from an related Wired article:

      In any case, the phones keep ringing all across the United States, and they are even beginning to ring in Holland and England. Some people have driven hours to take part, and one player even braved Florida's Hurricane Ivan to answer a call at a pay phone that was destroyed shortly afterward.

      "Dude," said Puppetmaster 2, "it's a hurricane. Put the phone down."

      Speaking from limited experience, I haven't heard of a game marketing campaign that was so imaginative or effective. If this is how games are released in the future, I'm all for it.

  2. What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    What?

  3. Was I the only one.... by Zeussy · · Score: 3, Funny

    Was I the only one that thought winnie the pooh when i read Inside the Honey pot.

    I better go back to my corner.

    --
    Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
    1. Re:Was I the only one.... by ReverendLoki · · Score: 4, Funny
      Was I the only one that thought winnie the pooh when i read Inside the Honey pot.

      Now there's the subtitle to an "E! True Hollywood Story" I never want to see.

      --
      09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
    2. Re:Was I the only one.... by Sarin · · Score: 1

      Was I the only one that really didn't get a clue what it is about by reading the article description?

      Except for the parent post poster of course

    3. Re:Was I the only one.... by teksno · · Score: 2, Funny

      i thought it was either about pooh bear going to rehab, or something about network security...

  4. So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    After reading the article, does anyone think that Microsoft has been scammed out of big money to pay a company to play a LARP with a bunch of strangers that hadn't sold a single ticket to AI or a single copy of Halo 2?

  5. Fourortytwowo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Weird name for a company.

  6. We don't care.... by EnronHaliburton2004 · · Score: -1, Troll

    How much did they pay for this advertisement?

    The entire lack of any useful description really makes me belive this is some sort of viral advertising campaign. There's supposed to be a big sense of mystery here or something.

    Hey, get a clue: We didn't care about I Love Bees then and we still don't care now.

    --
    94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
    1. Re:We don't care.... by Chyeld · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I did. I even still have the DVD I burnt of the complete 'story'.

      Perhaps the world doesn't revolve around you after all?

    2. Re:We don't care.... by assassinator42 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's an amazing, 2+ hour audio drama. I like it more than I liked the plot for Halo 2. Did the people who critisize it actually listen to the completed story? Congrats to 4orty2wo and all of the excellent people who worked on this story.

    3. Re:We don't care.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Since I can't mod you down any further, I'm going to respond to your childish trolling.

      You know how the RIAA always harps about how file sharing will cause musicians to stop writing music? I'm sure you're a very cavalier gentleman, so you will probably recognize that this claim is unsupportable. The only thing that can make an artist stop producing art is the abuse of their spirit.

      How do you abuse someone's spirit? By telling them that what they do is worthless. Who is this "we" you speak of? Chances are it's just you and your short-sighted sense of l337ness that makes you want to slam anything you don't understand. Well, guess what buddy? I played I Love Bees, and I'm willing to defend it. It shouldn't need to be defended; it was an amazing game, just like Katamari Damacy is an amazing game. But because it was also an ad campaign, so many people here abuse it without thinking.

      I don't own an X-Box. I personally believe that if you could see I Love Bees and not be moved by it, you have no heart; and if you actually bought Halo 2 because of it, you have no brain.

      But I do believe in 4orty2wo. If they had a product I could buy - they don't because their games are always given as a gift to their players - I would much rather do that than support the people they've been hired to represent. They are a struggling, young, creative company with an art-based business model; everything that Slashdot has traditionally supported and defended. So please, take off your troll mask and give these people some credit. They deserve it.

    4. Re:We don't care.... by EnronHaliburton2004 · · Score: 1

      Regardless, this is another goddamn fucking advertisement posing as an article. All of the I Love Bees articles are the same...

      --
      94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
    5. Re:We don't care.... by PacerGuy · · Score: 1

      I can't speak for everyone, but to be completely honest, I found ilovebees to be incredibly dull. The puzzles were unimaginative, the stories somewhat weak, and the whole payphone concept (while unique) was very limited. (What's that? You live somewhere other than LA? Well screw you then!)

      The worst part of the whole thing, however, was not unique to ilovebees - it occurs in any ARG that hits a certain size. It's what I like to call the 'exponential bullshit factor'. Essentially, it's the way that crackpot theories and moronic opinions feed off of each other in such a way that once the so-called 'community' hits a certain size, it's damn near impossible to glean any of the rare useful info from the mess.

      The way it works is like this: some simpleton ("A") comes up with a theory that he feels is so obvious and true that there is no way it could be wrong. Usually, this theory is completely farfetched, with no basis in the game material whatsoever. "A" then starts several threads espousing his fantastic theory. Posters "B" through "F" then reply to this theory, either with their own convoluted crackpot theories or extensions to the original useless theory. "H" through "Z" then start posting their own crap, expanding "A"'s thread past 25 pages. "G", however, who actually had something intelligent to say, posted her comment on page 24 of the thread. So essentially, the only way to glean any useful information out of the crap is to read 25 pages of useless mindnumbing garbage.

      Yet, for some reason, people seem to think this 25 pages of crap is an 'amazing exchange of ideas' and truly a community to be proud of...

    6. Re:We don't care.... by sho222 · · Score: 1

      Yet, for some reason, people seem to think this 25 pages of crap is an 'amazing exchange of ideas' and truly a community to be proud of...

      Welcome to /.

    7. Re:We don't care.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow, you brunt a DVD about a "story" that came from a viral marketing campaign?

      So do you also have a DVD collection of advertisements you frequently watch, as well as a T-shirt that says "I wasted my pathetic life on a viral marketing hype campaign, and all I got was to be a marketing firm's bitch"?

  7. a few things by CoffeeJedi · · Score: 2, Informative

    yeah, some of us beekeepers checked out the mini-arg linked from the article, i think the whole thing was solved in a matter of hours actually

    but, this is coming from a writer who couldn't get the lead character's name right (its just Melissa, no "the") and couldn't even get the name of the original A.I. game correct (everyone just calls it "the beast" now, even 4orty2wo)

    --
    May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
    1. Re:a few things by CoffeeJedi · · Score: 1

      hmm, ok, apparently the mini-arg is still going, i guess East Bay Express is having some fun

      --
      May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
  8. Ooh Im so impressed by Jukashi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Viral marketing fucking sucks. The only amazing feat here is the ability of these people to be even bigger liars than other marketing firms. How long until our memories are full of these corporate 'happenings'? Thanks for making the world a worse place, dickwads.

  9. What's this all about? by Kosi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I RTFA, but was not able to fathom what it is talking about. And what is an ARG?

    1. Re:What's this all about? by Low2000 · · Score: 1

      Alternet Reality Game