Games - Haunted Apiary

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	Games - Haunted Apiary

The Haunted Apiary (also known as I Love Bees or ILB for short) was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as a viral marketing campaign for the Halo 2 video game. It is a product of and Sean Stewart, commissioned by Microsoft and approved by Bungie Studios – the creators of Halo 2.

Like all ARGs, The Haunted Apiary was a cross-media game that deliberately blurred the line between in-game and out-of-game experiences. To "play" The Haunted Apiary, interested people would generally visit websites thought to be involved with the game, collect and document the shifting information on these sites, and discuss the game with other users. Players also interacted with the game in unexpected ways, for example by receiving unexpected phone calls from Artificial Intelligence characters, or by sending and receiving emails. At around the same time, an shown at screenings of I, Robot at Loews Cineplex theatres flashed a link to ilovebees.com, which is ostensibly a site related to beekeeping.

Both events, not connected publicly for several weeks, caused the curious to visit the website ilovebees.com. The site, which appeared to be dedicated to honey sales and beekeeping, was covered in confusing random characters and sentence fragments. Suspecting that this was a mystery that could be unraveled, Halo and ARG fans spread the link and began to work on figuring out just what was going on.

The game culminated by inviting "crew members" (players) to visit one of 4 cinemas where they could get an early peek at Halo 2. Free souvenirs were also furnished, including a DVD containing much of the story content unlocked in the game. The DVD contained a personal "thank you" message, including a long string of recorded messages players were prompted to submit during the pay phone portion of the game, where players created imaginary names and ranks as part of a fictional starship crew.

How gameplay worked

The ilovebees.com website first gained public attention when jars of honey were received by members of the Alternate Reality Game community. The jars contained jumbled letters. When cleaned and assembled, the letters spelled out ILOVEBEES. Later, the game would gain its entry into public fervor with the URL's appearance at the end of ads for the Halo 2 game on Xbox. From the blurring of media and mystery, it became clear that this was an Alternate Reality Game. Eager to unravel the mystery of the site's hacking, interested internet users began to explore more information, mostly by trial and error.

Dana, the site's webmaster had created a stating that something had gone wrong with her website, and the site itself had been hacked. In later entries she reported that her attempts to fix it were in vain, and asked for help.

Early players tried emailing Dana, exploring the ilovebees.com website for hidden data, treating the corrupted data on ilovebees.com as encrypted files and attempting to decrypt them, and anything else that seemed like it might reveal information about the game's plot. A community effort was made to piece together the various text from and a , including speculations, unfolded from this text.

Throughout the ILB game, there were many websites that seemed like they might be part of the game; some featured cryptic text and data like the ilovebees site, while others were humorous and clearly fake. Sharing and exploring these, and determining whether they were really part of the game or merely "falsities", became a defining part of playing the game.

Several things found on the ilovebees.com website became dramatic elements of the game. One was a mysterious countdown which claimed to be measuring time until something called "Wide Awake and Physical"; another was a seemingly meaningless set of numbers, which after long speculation was agreed to be a series of GPS coordinates and (later, when more numbers appeared) times. Players around the United States traveled to these coordinates and discovered that payphones exist at those areas. At the given times, these phones rang, and when answered, snippets of dialogue were heard; some snippets sounded like everyday overheard conversations, while others discussed time travel, secrecy, or war.

Players decided that these phone calls were somehow being sent by the same entity that had hacked the ilovebees.com site, and that it was attempting to communicate, albeit in scattered form. When enough phone calls, called "axons" in the website's jargon, were answered in an area, the website announced that the axon was "hot" and a downloadable audio file, identical to the snippet played on the payphones in the area, appeared on the website.

Taken together, these audio fragments tell a story of time travel, artificial intelligence, and interstellar war, with heavy references to the fictional world of the Halo games.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Haunted Apiary ]

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