Why i love bees: ARG and collective intelligence

Why I love bees

Alternate Reality Gaming

Taken From: Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming, Jane McGonigal, 2007

Alternate Reality Gaming, Kim, Allen & Lee, 2008Jordan Weisman, Edge Interview, 2009

ARG

An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.

(Wikipedia, emphasis mine)

The Hidden Game

“A typical ARG would not even acknowledge or promote the fact that it is a game, yet every Web site or discussion group may contain and reveal a potential clue”, Kim et al.

Features

• Compelling Narrative• Collaborative Gameplay• Multiple communication channels:– Web pages, email, phone calls, print media, ...

• Game players create own channels– Discussion boards, email, meetings, ...

• Developers can respond to players actions– Performance not product

I Love Bees

• First major successful ARG was The Beast – a game tied to the Spielberg film AI, and seeded through clues in movie posters

• Second was I Love Bees – a game tied to the release of Halo 2– Seeded initially with jars of promotional honey

sent to journalists– ilovebees.com URL shown at end of Halo 2 cinema

trailer

Ilovebees.com

• An apparently hacked bee lover’s web-site– Mysterious meaningless messages– Ominous count-down timer– Message from the amateur web-site admin asking

for help• Goes into hiding after exchanging around 100 emails

with players

• No stated goals or rules

Backstory

• From the Halo universe, a ship controlled by a sentient ‘good’ AI has crash landed on Earth– Hiding on the internet– Web admin deletes part of the AI memory

• Other sentient AI programs and one Covenant AI are also on Earth

• Players have to work out what is happening first – before they can help

Collective Intelligence (CI)

• Challenge: “To create puzzles and challenges that no single person could solve on their own” (Elan Lee, director)

• Solved by approx 100,000 active players over 4 months (3 million players in total)– One million message board posts– 33,000 chat messages/day

Responding to Players

• Community discussion boards, fan pages and IRC channels were monitored

• Story adapted to respond to player actions– E.g. When the good AI’s hiding place was given

away by some players– Can also push more clues as needed, or add extra

puzzles if players progress is too rapid

• Key sections planned ahead, but adapted as needed

Participatory Design

“Players assumed that the ILB design team knew exactly how the game would unfold and therefore would always be a step ahead of the players. When the game concluded in November 2004, ILB gamers were genuinely surprised to hear the design team say the gamers themselves had control over how the plot unfolded.” Kim et al.

Building CI

• Collective problem solving of gamers in ARGs is a key feature

• Serious applications?– As a teaching tool– Large scale role play (“real play”) problem solving:

generating novel solutions for real problems

Future of ARG

References• Weisman, J. (2009, December). Traveller: Interview

with Jordan Weisman. Edge, (208), 78-83.• Kim, J. Y., Allen, J. P., & Lee, E. (2008). Alternate reality

gaming. Commun. ACM, 51(2), 36-42. doi:10.1145/1314215.1314222

• McGonigal, J. (2007). Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, (The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning), 199-227. doi:10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.199

• ARGOSI, http://argosi.playthinklearn.net/index.htm