unforum

[Bellebet]

[META] An Aside

[Swissben]

[Nightmare Tony]

Me wonders if the puzzles may get gearewd down, since the tagret players for Halo 2 ARE 13 year old players. that may be where they are coming in from for the ARG. Back for the Beast, it was a brave new world and no one knew what or who was going on. Now you have literally a club of players who are much sharper and keeping up with things.

Wish we had this much budget back when we release Ninja Warriors. Sigh.

[Swissben]

Targeted players...17-35 like the first one.

[Wishi-san]

Halo: Rated M for Mature.

So I don't think it would have any effect on the level of difficulty of the puzzles? I think the reason for the honey is that MS/PMs wants us to guide and help the new people to the genre.

[Varin]

[alaranth]

In addition, if it wasn't for the Halo2 folks popping up, I don't think that we in the ARG crowd would be understanding the story as well. They've been giving us lots of insight into the backstory of Halo, and it's more and more tying right into what's going on with ilovebees.com.

We've already had the one type of collective gaming, which has brought together ARGers, and now we're adding console gamers. Maybe the next big ARG will be played in part over the multiplayer options on a console...

[Bellebet]

[Swissben]

BTW, is eveyrthing hapening here?

I miss the centralized communication in our old Cloudmakers Yahoo group.

[Wishi-san]

This seems pretty centralised...

And Bellebet, well they seem to be arriving on irc by the minute.

[Bellebet]

[Nightmare Tony]

Swissben: sorry there, I didnt know Halo was a more mature game. Havent kept up with the home units since the Neo Geo. I went back to arcade programming 2 years back, was doing Nintendo way back in the 8 bit days, and some other arcade units, so 13 was more the target audience (back in one adventure, we had to remove crosses from a church and a pool of blood that the trainmaster was in in one scene). At least am now doing a pinball machine, so the age range is all over the place

[Bellebet]

On second thought, Maybe Halo 2 players WOULD really get into this game. Bungie HAS done stuff like this before. Apparently, there were a series of e-mails dubbed the Cortana letters. It's pretty easy to find if you Google.

The tone sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it?

However, this still doesn't say how we should deal with the people purposely trying to rip back the curtain to reveal MS/Bungie.


Bellebet

[astashenko]

As I was reading the comments to latest blog entry I got a little upset. I think it's alright if someone was just pointing out that there was a link in the trailer, but the comments devolved entirely into an OT discussion about Microsoft's business practices. It really hurts the suspension of disbelief, which is important to me in these sort of games.

[josh g.]

I think a key difference here is that The Beast's storyline was clearly in a different setting than our present existence. Characters in The Beast existed in the future, and therefore would not be expected to connect to whatever was happening elsewhere on the web.

Anyway, people coming to ilovebees who are fans of the game can't be expected to "play along". In general, they won't have background knowledge of ARGs, acceptable gameplay / roleplay, or any such rules.

Come to think of it, what rules?

That said, anyone who thinks they're being clever by pointing out, "You're pretending this is real and it's not, how lame," should probably just be ignored. If they think it's lame, they won't be re-reading whatever response you give them anyway, unless they're trolls, in which case you should Never Feed The Troll.

Live and let live, maybe they'll join the fun.