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''I Love Bees'' (also known as ''ilovebees'' or ''ILB'' for short) was an
alternate reality game An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. The form is defined by inten ...
(ARG) that served as both a real-world experience and
viral marketing Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way tha ...
campaign for the release of developer
Bungie Bungie, Inc. is an American video game company based in Bellevue, Washington. It is a studio owned by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The company was established in May 1991 by Alex Seropian, who later brought in programmer Jason Jones afte ...
's 2004
video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...
''
Halo 2 ''Halo 2'' is a 2004 first-person shooter game developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox console. ''Halo 2'' is the second installment in the ''Halo'' franchise and the sequel to 2001's critically acclaimed '' ...
''. The game was created and developed by
42 Entertainment 42 Entertainment is an American company based in Burbank which specializes in creating and producing alternate reality games (ARGs). The company was founded in 2003 as an independently owned, creative content and interactive agency under the nam ...
. Many of the same personnel had previously created an ARG for the film '' A.I.'' titled '' The Beast''. ''I Love Bees'' was commissioned by
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
, ''Halo 2''s publisher and Bungie's ultimate parent company at the time. ''I Love Bees'' was first advertised by a hidden message in a ''Halo 2'' trailer; players who investigated the titular website discovered that the pages appeared to be hacked by a mysterious intelligence. As players solved puzzles, audio logs were posted to the ilovebees.com site which gradually revealed more of the fictional back-story, involving a marooned
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
stranded on Earth and its attempts to put itself back together. 250,000 people viewed the ilovebees website when it was launched in July 2004, and more than 500,000 returned to the site every time the pages were updated. More than three million visitors viewed the site over the course of three months, and thousands of people around the world participated in the game. ''I Love Bees'' won numerous awards for its innovation and helped spawn numerous other alternate reality games for video games.


Overview

Alternate reality games or ARGs are designed to involve fans of video games or other media in a form of
viral marketing Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way tha ...
which CNET described as encompassing "real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online ommunities. ''I Love Bees'' began when jars of honey were received in the mail by people who had previously participated in
alternate reality game An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. The form is defined by inten ...
s. The jars contained letters leading to the I Love Bees website and a countdown. At around the same time, theatrical trailers for ''Halo 2'' concluded with the Xbox logo and a URL, Xbox.com, that quickly flashed a link to ilovebees.com, ostensibly a hacked site related to beekeeping. Both events, not connected publicly for several weeks, caused the curious to visit the website ilovebees.co. The site, which appeared to be dedicated to honey sales and beekeeping, was covered in confusing random characters and sentence fragments. Dana, the ostensible webmaster of the ilovebees site, created a
weblog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
stating that something had gone wrong with her website, and the site itself had been hacked. Suspecting that this was a mystery that could be unraveled, ''Halo'' and ARG fans spread the link and began to work on figuring out what was going on. The gameplay of ''I Love Bees'' tasked players around the world to work together to solve problems, with little or no direction or guidance. For example, the game presented players with 210 pairs of
global positioning system The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...
coordinates and time codes, with no indications to what the locations referred to. Players eventually figured out the coordinates referred to pay phones and the times to when the phones would ring; one player in Florida stayed by a phone while Hurricane Frances was minutes away in order to recite answers to prerecorded questions. Other phone calls were made by a live person known as the "operator," voiced by veteran voice actor Kristen Rutherford;http://www.ilovebees.co/MIA.html these calls allowed players to interact with the characters of the games in spontaneous and occasionally humorous ways. Other players treated the corrupted data on ilovebees.com as encrypted files to decipher, or used image files found on the web server to solve puzzles. After players completed certain tasks, they were rewarded with new installments to an
audio drama Radio drama (or audio drama, audio play, radio play, radio theatre, or audio theatre) is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine ...
which revealed the reasons for the ilovebees.com malfunction. Over time, the game's mechanisms for contacting players grew more complex. Players were sent messages via email, called on their cell phones, and travelled to arranged meetings between players and characters. The game culminated by inviting players of the game to visit one of four cinemas where they could get a chance to play ''
Halo 2 ''Halo 2'' is a 2004 first-person shooter game developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox console. ''Halo 2'' is the second installment in the ''Halo'' franchise and the sequel to 2001's critically acclaimed '' ...
'' before its release and collect a commemorative DVD.


Plot

The game's plot begins with a military spaceship crashing to Earth in an unknown location, leaving the craft's controlling
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
or AI damaged. This AI, known as the "Operator" or "Melissa", is not alone; other AI programs share its system. In an effort to survive and contact any surviving allies, Melissa transfers herself to a
San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
-area web server, which happens to host a bee enthusiast website known a
''I Love Bees''
. To the distress of Dana Awbrey, the website's maintainer, Melissa's attempts to send signals began to appear largely as codes, hidden in images or other text, interfering with the operation of the ''I Love Bees'' site and corrupting much of the content. Dana, attempting to regain control over the corrupted website, accidentally erases data which comprises part of Melissa's memory. Furious, Melissa lashes out at the webmaster, obtaining pictures of her using the webcam on her computer and promising to take revenge. Alarmed, Dana announces that she is removing herself from the situation and is taking a previously planned trip to China earlier than expected. All AI units contain a program called SPDR, short for System Peril Distributed Reflex. As SPDR attempts to fix Melissa, random dumps from Melissa's memory began to spill into the website, largely detailing Melissa's history and revealing the presence of a malicious Trojan-horse virus known as the "Pious Flea." The Spider tries to erase the Flea but is outwitted, as Melissa erases the Spider instead of the Flea. The Flea continues to overwrite Melissa's programming with its own mysterious goals, with it eventually being revealed that it is actually an espionage AI more properly called the Seeker, built by the Covenant. With the assistance of other characters revealed by audio chapters, the fictional protagonists break into a secure military installation and manage to deactivate a Forerunner device which is implied to begin the firing sequence of the
Halo Halo, halos or haloes usually refer to: * Halo (optical phenomenon) * Halo (religious iconography), a ring of light around the image of a head HALO, halo, halos or haloes may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Video games * ''Halo'' (franch ...
installations. However, the price paid for the deactivation is a powerful energy transmission alerting the Covenant to the location of Earth. Whole again, Melissa sees how she has been manipulated by the Pious Flea, and returns to her time. ''I Love Bees'' ends with the Covenant invading Earth, corresponding to a major plot point in ''
Halo 2 ''Halo 2'' is a 2004 first-person shooter game developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox console. ''Halo 2'' is the second installment in the ''Halo'' franchise and the sequel to 2001's critically acclaimed '' ...
''. Due to Bungie's commitment to the development of ''Halo 2'' during ''I Love Bees'' run, they were unable to assist
42 Entertainment 42 Entertainment is an American company based in Burbank which specializes in creating and producing alternate reality games (ARGs). The company was founded in 2003 as an independently owned, creative content and interactive agency under the nam ...
with story creation, and so the ARG's story is only tangentially related to the main ''Halo'' storyline. The events of ''I Love Bees'' were, therefore, originally not considered to be ''Halo''
canon Canon or Canons may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Canon (fiction), the conceptual material accepted as official in a fictional universe by its fan base * Literary canon, an accepted body of works considered as high culture ** Western ca ...
. In a 2006 interview, however, Bungie's content manager Frank O'Connor expressly confirmed that ''I Love Bees'' is part of "things that we embrace as canon." References to elements of ''I Love Bees'' have since appeared in the 2006 Halo Graphic Novel and the 2009 Halo Encyclopedia, both of which are official canon.


Development

''I Love Bees'' developer,
42 Entertainment 42 Entertainment is an American company based in Burbank which specializes in creating and producing alternate reality games (ARGs). The company was founded in 2003 as an independently owned, creative content and interactive agency under the nam ...
, was founded by Jordan Weisman, the former creative director for Microsoft's Xbox division.
42 Entertainment 42 Entertainment is an American company based in Burbank which specializes in creating and producing alternate reality games (ARGs). The company was founded in 2003 as an independently owned, creative content and interactive agency under the nam ...
had previously created the first ARG, '' The Beast'', which had been used to promote the movie '' A.I.''. Other members of the ''I Love Bees'' team included Sean Stewart, a
World Fantasy Award The World Fantasy Awards are a set of awards given each year for the best fantasy fiction published during the previous calendar year. Organized and overseen by the World Fantasy Convention, the awards are given each year at the eponymous ann ...
-award-winning author who served as ''I Love Bees'' writer, and Jim Stewartson, ''I Love Bees'' technical lead who produced the first commercial 3D game delivered by the internet. Weisman stated that the goal of ''I Love Bees'' was to utilize every person who interacted with the game, and to use any electronic resource to do so: "If we could make your toaster print something we would. Anything with an electric current running through it. A single story, a single gaming experience, with no boundaries. A game that is life itself." 42 Entertainment conceived ''I Love Bees'' as a
radio drama Radio drama (or audio drama, audio play, radio play, radio theatre, or audio theatre) is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine ...
, and used the pay phones as a way to excite players. Chris Di Cesare, Microsoft's director of marketing, stated that the radio drama's similarities with ''
War of the Worlds ''The War of the Worlds'' is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells, first serialised in 1897 by '' Pearson's Magazine'' in the UK and by ''Cosmopolitan'' magazine in the US. The novel's first appearance in hardcover was i ...
'' was intentional, and that " 'ILB''remains true to the radio drama tradition of
Orson Welles George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter, known for his innovative work in film, radio and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential f ...
that we were shooting for and also allowed us to tell the story in an unorthodox way." In order to prevent non-players from being scared by the sounds of gunfire from the pay phones, 42 Entertainment established passwords that had to be repeated. Stewart described writing for the game as more enjoyable than writing printed fiction, both for the money and the unique experience of ARGs as opposed to other media:
The audiences that we built for those campaigns are having a different experience. They're having a collective experience in which they literally bring different pieces, one to the next, swap them back and forth, gossip about them. They have an element of cocreation and a collaborative nature that doesn't really have an analog that I've been able to think of in the arts.


Reception

''I Love Bees'' is credited with helping drive attention to ''Halo 2''; former ''
Electronic Gaming Monthly ''Electronic Gaming Monthly'' (often abbreviated to ''EGM'') is a monthly American video game magazine. It offers video game news, coverage of industry events, interviews with gaming figures, editorial content and product reviews. History The m ...
'' editor Dan Hsu stated in an interview that "''I Love Bees'' really got existing gamers and other consumers talking about the universe of alo" Billy Pidgeon, a game analyst, noted that ''I Love Bees'' achieved what it had been designed to do: "This kind of viral guerrilla marketing worked ... Everyone started instant messaging about it and checking out the site." ''I Love Bees'' not only received coverage from gaming publications, but attracted mainstream press attention as well. At its height, ilovebees received between two and three million unique visitors over the course of three months. 9,000 people also actively participated in the real-world aspects of the game. The players of ''I Love Bees'' themselves were quite varied. The target demographic for the promotion was younger males, but one player noted that even middle-aged men and women were engaged in the game. ''I Love Bees'' received several awards for its innovation. The design team was one of the recipients of the Innovation Award at the 5th annual Game Developers Choice Awards. I Love Bees was also announced as the winner of a
Webby Award The Webby Awards are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over two thousand industry experts and technology innovators. Categories includ ...
in the Game-Related category, presented by the
International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences or IADAS is an international organization founded in 1998 in New York City to help drive the creative, technical, and professional progress of the Internet and evolving forms of interactive and ...
.


Legacy

Along with 42 Entertainment's previous ARG known as '' The Beast'', ''I Love Bees'' is credited with bringing greater attention to the fledgling marketing form; ''I Love Bees'' not only helped assuage fears by marketers about the costs of ARG failure, but attracted interest from other game developers in using alternate reality games to promote their own products. Before ''I Love Bees'', ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' stated that "ARGs were destined to join Letsbuyit.com and
Barcode Battler The is a handheld game console released by Epoch Co. in March 1991. The console at retail was supplied with a number of cards, each of which had a barcode. Upon starting the game, the player must swipe a barcode representing a player. The gam ...
s in the e-dustbin of nice ideas that never really caught on"; the explosion of broadband internet access and a renewed interest in codes allowed ''I Love Bees'' to become wildly successful. Bungie would later use another ARG called "Iris" to promote ''Halo 2''s sequel, ''
Halo 3 ''Halo 3'' is a 2007 first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360 console. The third installment in the ''Halo'' franchise, the game concludes the story arc begun in 2001's '' Halo: Combat Evolved'' and continued in ...
''. ''I Love Bees'' also attracted attention in the wider discussion of user-based marketing and cooperation. Author
Charles Leadbeater Charles Leadbeater, also known as Charlie Leadbeater, is a British author and former advisor to Tony Blair. Biography A graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, he first came to widespread notice in the 1980s as a regular contributor to the magaz ...
argued that ''I Love Bees'' was an example of "We-Think" collective thinking; Leadbeater noted that after the "puppet masters" began the game, ''I Love Bees'' "displayed all the characteristics of a mass movement, propelled into existence in a matter of weeks simply by collective enthusiasm guided by a few cyberspace 'avatars'". The game proved successful with gamers, as well as attracting nontraditional players who had no experience with ''Halo'' before joining the game. . In a 2016
Bandcamp Bandcamp is an American online audio distribution platform founded in 2007 by Oddpost co-founder Ethan Diamond and programmers Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt and Neal Tucker, with headquarters in Oakland, California, US. On March 2, 2022, Bandcamp ...
interview, artist Ramona Andra Xavier, known for pioneering the Vaporwave musical genre under the pseudonym Vektroid (among others), claimed to be acutely influenced by "''I Love Bees''," in its use of "hacked" websites, internet communities and IRL tasks to blur the lines between reality and fiction.


See also

*
Iris Iris most often refers to: *Iris (anatomy), part of the eye *Iris (mythology), a Greek goddess * ''Iris'' (plant), a genus of flowering plants * Iris (color), an ambiguous color term Iris or IRIS may also refer to: Arts and media Fictional ent ...
, Bungie's ''
Halo 3 ''Halo 3'' is a 2007 first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360 console. The third installment in the ''Halo'' franchise, the game concludes the story arc begun in 2001's '' Halo: Combat Evolved'' and continued in ...
'' ARG *
Radio drama Radio drama (or audio drama, audio play, radio play, radio theatre, or audio theatre) is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine ...
— the genre of the audio files released as part of I Love Bees.


References


External links

* (static mirror
ilovebees.co

Halopedia's I Love Bees article

Netninja ILB archive

All text revealed in-game
in chronological order
Audio drama MP3 clips compiled into full chapters

Audio drama MP3 clips organized by scene

Audio drama transcriptions

High-Quality Audio version on YouTube, organized by scene
{{Good article Promotional alternate reality games Halo (franchise) American radio dramas Jordan Weisman games Video game marketing Video games developed in the United States Webby Award winners