Your mission at ilovesbees is... (From Swindon Advertiser)

Your mission at ilovesbees is...

10:27am Tuesday 22nd June 2010 in Gaming

I LOVEBEES.COM. Lonelygirl15 (YouTube member).

Cloudmaker. What do all these things have in common?

The answer is that they are all parts of different games called ARGs, or Alternate Reality Games.

What is an ARG though? To answer that, we need to look at one and see how it works. The best one to look at (and most realistic until its conclusion) is Ilovebees. com.

Most of you will have heard of or played one of the games in Xbox's series Halo. For those of you who haven't, Halo is a science fiction first person shoot-em-up. The player is the Master Chief, a super soldier fighting for humanity, against an alien race called the Covenant for Forerunner technology (another alien race, now deceased). Te chnology has produced AIs, and one has been sent back in time to now, but is under attack by a covenant AI. The ARG was aimed at promoting the second game in the Halo franchise - Halo 2.

In August 2004, former players of ARGs were sent jam jars in the post. Upon opening them, the players found letters telling them a URL address. At the same time, Halo 2 posters and TV advertisements held the same URL address in their credits. Also, when fans of Halo CE (Halo 1) entered the bungee site for Halo, they found that before the page loaded up, a white screen featuring the same URL, www.Ilovebees. com, flashed up just long enough for the user to see and register the URL before defaulting to bungee. net.

When the curious logged on to the site, they found a site that seemed to be dedicated to bee keeping and honey sales.

However, the site was littered with strange symbols and sentence fragments. The site's supposed owner Dana created a weblog saying that something had gone terribly wrong with her site.

Players became dedicated to finding out about what had gone wrong in the site. Trawling through the site, players found out the emails of other players, and created a Facebook community which was dedicated to finding out what had happened.

They eventually found 210 GPS co-ordinates and times.

These were found to be locations of real-life telephone boxes, and the times were realised to be when the phone would be called. The group, being worldwide at this stage, managed to get a member to every phone, and the results were astounding.

Sounds of gunfire had emanated from the speakers, and audio files played over the top of this revealed a storyline.

The sounds were found to be future recordings. In the future, mankind had created AIs and were at war with an alien species. Another alien, seemingly extinct for millennia before the present day, had left relics that could distort time. A human AI called Melissa had been torn in two by one of these, part of her staying in the future, and part of her being sent to the ilovebees server. This part of her was under attack from an alien AI that wanted information out of her.

Further bits of information was sent to players of the ARG by email, people were called on their mobile phone, and others were even told that they were wanted to meet Dana at a certain place and time, who told them all she would have known were this real.

Eventually, all players arrived at a part of the site that had never been seen before. This told them about a cinema, one in each country, and a time that they should be there. When they went to the cinema, they were told of the hoax.

It was all a big marketing drive for Halo 2, which they were then invited to play four weeks before it came out.

So an ARG is a online RPG, but one that gets players out in the open. The designers will contact players any way they can. Are you involved in anything like this? Then get help! An ARG is almost impossible to solve on your own, but if you get it out to your friends, they will be able to help you. If you find one of these, then good luck. The path ahead may be tough, but there will be a reward at the end.

By Matthew Davidson, 15, Sheldon School