I believe all good games should have some kind of strategy behind them. When you pick up some experience playing a game, you can make more educated decisions about how to make your next move and continue to improve. Chess is a good example, although it might not be considered 'fun' because it leaves nothing to the imagination.  Some games depend mostly on the rolling of dice or spinning of a wheel, which involves no strategy, but what they lack in strategy they make up for by using the imagination. The mystery of what will happen next keeps the player entertained and the storyline is what makes the game enjoyable. Then we have team-based games, anything from football to multi-player first-person shooters, where the fun lies in cooperation, teamwork and thoughtful decision making.
     The 'I Love Bees' game was a perfect combination of strategy, adventure and cooperation, although it wasn't thought of a game at first. Gamers in anticipation of Halo 2 had discovered this weird hacked website that included no explanation of what it was about; there were vague messages and number combinations that were a complete mystery. The participants were forced to make up their own strategies to weed out the clues. They put together theories about what these clues meant and divided themselves into teams in order to test them out. This problem solving became fun not because there was a definite goal to prize to be earned, but because the whole idea behind it was unknown.
    When the GPS coordinates were discovered, help was needed by people who lived close to these points were able to participate by scoping out the locations. Players that might not have had any insight about the meanings of the riddles could at least help out by scouting the area for clues in real life and reporting back to the forums. Areas of expertise required for solving riddles and moving forward in the game were all over the place and ever-changing, and players were always on their toes waiting for the next opportunity to participate or catch up on others' progress. The fact the game took place both in cyberspace and reality is very interesting and reminds me of the geocaching phenomenon. Hidden all over the world are objects, often little canisters with rolls of paper inside. There is a website that gives riddles to find these things, organized by GPS coordinates, and people set out to find them in order to sign their names or switch the contents of the canisters.
     The 'I Love Bees' designers were actually constructing the game according to the actions of the players in real time, prepared with a dozen routes that the game may take depending on the progress of the players at any given moment. Eventually the players realized that the 'I Love Bees' game was telling a sort of back story about the Halo 2 game that had lured them into the mystery, and the anticipation of the next sound byte made the game all the more fun.
     I had to reread the first six pages of this article a few times (and visit the website) to understand what 'I Love Bees' was all about. My interest in video games fizzled out for a while after the end of the 16-bit era, but if I had known about this ARG game I would have been all over it. It was a fantastic idea, but I think the main reason it worked so well was because no one understood at first what was going on, and the fun came out of exploring the unknown in a community of individuals that were all working together for the same reason.