www.ilovebees.com might be a prank, an art project or, most likely, a clever marketing ploy.

What we know for sure is that the promotional trailer for the upcoming game Halo 2 flashes the URL to ilovebees. A quick visit to the site presents what appears to be an emergent AI is in the process of taking over someone’s homespun honey business Website. A little clicking around and you end up on a blog that provides the context—or at least heightens the mystery. Oh, and did I mention that the ilovebees site itself has some sort of ominous countdown timer threatening (promising?) “COUNTDOWN TO WIDE AWAKE AND PHYSICAL”. Whatever that means.

What is interesting to me is whether or not we should consider this collections of sites and clues some sort of a game. Certainly the forums are ablaze with folks trying to unravel ilovebees as if it were a riddle or puzzle of sorts.

I’ll step out and say that ilovebees is nothing more complex than a good old mystery story.

But first, let me explain why I don’t think it is a game or a puzzle.

The reason I suspect people want to think of ilovebees as a game is because it seems to have an objective and a method for interacting with it. It teases us with the idea that if we dedicate our attention, if we interact with it, we will reach some sort of conclusion, we will solve the mystery. This formula is so common in gaming that it resonates and makes us think that we need to play with it. But there is nothing to play with. There is no rule system to enjoy. The collection of sites drizzles clues and hints at cryptic possibilities. But there is nothing to do but follow along. People have created a game out of “trying to figure it out”. But the site, the mystery itself, is not a game in any respect.

So, perhaps it is a puzzle?

If you’ve followed past discussions on this topic then you know that I’ll say, “No, this is not a puzzle.” At least I don’t think so.

What I think separates a puzzle from a game is that in a puzzle, the player has perfect information. The puzzle is a mental process of trying to figure out how to reach some goal. So, Solitaire is a game, if you play it the traditional way—with cards face down, providing less than perfect information. Solitare is a puzzle when played with all the cards face up, where the challenge is to determine the sequence of moves that would win the game (solve the sequencing challenge).

Looking at ilovebees, I don’t see any indication that all the information is available. So, it wouldn’t be a puzzle (or a riddle--a word puzzle).

I could be wrong on this point, however, if it turns out that there are clues that allow you to discover missing information. This is a form of puzzle. Information is available, but it is nested inside the puzzle. You must solve one layer of the puzzle with the information at hand to progress to the next level. The promise of a nested puzzle is that each solution will lead through a progression of solutions toward the final solution.

So, I’m open to the idea that there is a puzzle here. But so far, the whole thing looks like a mystery.

And what is a mystery? This is literary trope, I’d say. A way of telling stories, maybe all stories. You, the reader, feel as if you are encountering a puzzle, but really, you never have all the information you need to reach a correct conclusion until the end of the tale. Even when you have all the information—think Agatha Christie—there is a certain authorial force that finally organizes the facts in a pleasing way that makes the reader go “Of course!” when you really had no way to be sure of that conclusion in the first place.

I remember when I was a kid, I always loved this series of kid mysteries—Encyclopedia Brown. The device in each of these tales was that there was always some obvious, telltale clue that you were supposed to recognize in the story. This was the clue that Encyclopedia would use to solve the mystery. A memorable classic example involved a stuffed polar bear surrounded by stuffed penguins. Aha! Polar bears are from the North Pole! Penguins the South! They don’t belong together, so the missing jewels must be inside the penguins! Obvious? Only in the retrospect of the narrative. The mystery story is the narrative walkthrough of a puzzle. Perfect information at the end.

And that’s what I’d call ilovebees.

Finally, what does this have to do with videogames? In part, it comes from a question posed by a friend was to whether we should think of this marketing trick as a game or not. Also, it does appear to be a part of a promotional campaign for a videogame, so the connection is an obvious one. But my real interest is pretty simple, line up game, puzzle and mystery and you have an interesting set of similar but distinct structures. I think the ilovebees example shows how close they are, but how they can be considered separate things. I wonder if this structural similarity is one of the tangling aspects of the ludology/narratology discussion?. We mix up up games, puzzles and stories because they have similar, but not identical, properties in certain circumstances.