Ok, so that was the horrible political rant. Before I got back to my work, I started into a great Slashdot interview with Neal Stephenson, in which he mentioned something wonderous: I Love Bees.

Wow.

This will seem curious to some of my readers, but bear with me: it's an "alternate reality" game, if you use Stephenson's nomenclature, but it's really just a sort of participatory storytelling. I've missed this round so it's like picking over the remains of the meal instead of enjoying dessert, but the main idea was this: "players" read chapters of the story, and tried to be at hundreds of pay phones called randomly, where they either got bits of the story early or, in very rare cases, had a chance to change events. It's a bit tough to explain, but Wired covers it nicely.

I'm sorry I missed I Like Bees, apparently publicity for Halo 2: it's a strange wonderful confusing form of storytelling, and I love watching it unfold. I played the first of these, made for Stephen Spielberg's movie AI and now named Beast. For the most part the game was a series of websites in which clues were more or less hidden, but it spanned multiple media. If you saw a poster for the movie, you were probably looking at some hidden clue. Soon a group called Cloudmakers formed, a collective of players researching, discussing, auditing and coming up with the next steps. You can still see some of the strangeness: I remember my friend Martin showing this to me and thinking, "OK, this is something you couldn't do before the internet."

As I said, I'm sorry I missed I Love Bees. Somewhere, in the name of an odd narrative, a team of people are working long hours with curious pseudonyms ("Puppetmaster 2"); other people are scanning what these folks have created, trying to meet some challenge in order learn a bit more of that story, with the tantalizing chance of actually changing it; all of them are laughing or wondering struggling through the strange, mixed-up medium.

Man, I hope they're having fun.