So this is ingress.
Looks pretty dope, right? There's some mysterious thing going on and you have to open portals and shit. Buddy of mine was one of the first alpha players back in the day, and has been playing religiously ever since. He actually tried to talk me into switching to Android so that I could play Ingress with him.
I watched every now and then and tried to understand what the hell he was doing, because he ended up face-in-phone an awful lot. I ended up joining him in making a "L8 Portal" wherein I accompanied him to a restaurant none of us ate at while 7 other dudes milled around staring into their phones to exult over something that made no visible difference in the world then despair as someone going by "toadkiller" drove by and "jarvised" whatever they were doing thereby rendering their work moot. I heard the complaints of his girlfriend, who would have to "hack portals" as he drove.
And I realized that Ingress was Farmville with commuting.
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Of course, the minute an iOS client came out he was texting me. Showed me exactly which of the two factions I should join (Enlightened). Added me to two Google Hangouts. And I started playing. So this is Ingress:
Basically it's Google Maps run through The Matrix. Every time you fire it up it says "headphones recommended" because as you do stuff it makes sounds like William Gibson's Pachinko parlor. You cruise around doing tasks which earns you points. Yay Augmented Reality Gaming (ARG).
And it's fucking addictive.
I am, ostensibly, a big booster of ARGs. I like that they require you to go outside and do things. If you want points in Ingress, you have to get off the couch. You are rewarded for strategic thinking, you are rewarded for cooperation, and you are rewarded for activity. I spent 8 days among the top 100 players in Los Angeles, running around making fields and hacking portals. It's sort of like capture the flag. That funky video aside, here's how you play Ingress:
The "yadda yadda" of Ingress is Space Aliens are trying to move Humanity on to a new level or something. If you're green, you want to help. If you're blue, you want to hinder. You help by turning statues and street art and curious things you find out in the world into "portals" (a process whereby you take a picture and upload it where humans judge its worthiness - they seeded the game with the National Historic Registry), that you then link together to create "fields" whereby you control the brains of everybody under your field. You can't make a field under another field so if you can turn a city blue by grabbing all the right portals the green guys can't do anything until they blow up your portals and turn them green.
To do this you need energy, weapons, and building blocks. Walking around gives you energy. Hacking gives you energy, weapons and building blocks - hack something of your own color you get more shit, hack something of someone else's color it may sting you. Attack something and it will definitely sting you. Attacking and building both require energy.
There's a strategy to hacking and building above and beyond "make big triangles." There are "glyphs" that you have to repeat, simon-says style. And there's that pachinko parlor stuff, and magic green glowyness. Really, Ingress turns a stroll into a points-earning, mind-engaging adventure. So that's pretty dope. And you're interacting with real people, ostensibly - everything you're doing out there in the world was done by someone else, and you can see their handle. You have to go out and tend your portals - they decay over time - and if there's a burly enemy portal out there you might be able to wait them out. It's seriously fun and seriously addictive and should be awesome.
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And then reality kicked in.
I spent seven days using Ingress every time I went walking. Running. Getting groceries. Commuting to friends' houses. Ingress definitely rewards people playing with their phones as they drive - by handing my phone to my wife and giving her some simple instructions, she was able to level me up with a 45 minute drive to a friend's house, just hacking portals and planting resonators as we drove. I guess it's much better on a bus because you can give your phone your undivided attention (like you don't already).
I'd take my daughter running and Ingress. I'd take a break at work and Ingress. I'd go get groceries and Ingress. It was pretty cool for the first few days. And of course, everything I turned green would get knocked down by blue and then you have to build it back up again - the game hinges on conflict. The more conflict there is, the more people level up. And both sides are competing to control more of the world - every 20 hours, Ingress measures how much area each side controls and awards points based on that.
Every 20 hours. Not every 24.
And what you do during the day doesn't matter if, say, the period resets at 2am and somebody comes by at 1:45 while you're asleep.
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Thus do the dynamics reveal themselves.
I didn't mind when a Level 13 blue dude and a level 15 blue dude came to my work and nuked all my hard work - it meant I got more points when I finally got around to fixing their shit. Problem was as a Level 4 player there was literally nothing I could do, so I had to wait until another Level 15 green dude and a Level 14 green dude came by and gave my neighborhood back.
I didn't even mind spending every spare moment walking my neighborhood and feeding the meters. After all, it got me out and about and exercise is good. Never mind that my daughter's stroller now had a mophie to deal with the power drain, or the fact that I was literally using my phone every spare minute.
I even started arranging my runs based on what Ingress Intel Total Conversion told me to do - a haxie running on the Ingress data that allowed you to see more than Ingress wanted you to that you could only access from a desktop. I was literally planning my forays into the world based on magic points on google Maps, then moving five steps to the right with a stroller so that my fields would be stronger. I was gaining a level or more per day and would be L8 in a day or so. The future was so bright I had to wear shades.
I even went out and took down a big blue field that my green friends considered their turf. It was a great place to walk my kid. I told my wife I was taking her to the playground and went out there. Except instead of playing on the swings, I spent an hour wandering amongst bird houses, blowing up portals and placing resonators. I ran the mophie down to 50%. And my daughter?
Yeah, my daughter was bored. I wasn't paying any attention to her, I was giving it all over to my phone.
Once I'd done my work, we went to the playground. She had fun. Me? I watched in horror as a L13 blue dude walked behind me methodically erasing my work. I messaged him in the game- first and only time I've done that - and said "can't you at least leave it up for an hour or so?" he sympathized with my plight, but no. So really, nothing to show for it anyway.
I went for a run later that day, also with the stroller. Also with my daughter. I went places I never run, took longer than I should. For the points. My daughter? She was done halfway into the run. I cut the run short (7 miles) because she wouldn't stop crying. And then I went to work, one of my late night shifts. I'd be there until 4am.
And as I was sitting there mixing, i started getting all sorts of messages from Ingress. The stuff I'd built at work? It was all being destroyed. And not by one guy, by eight guys.
See, "resonators" come in levels. You can't place a resonator of a higher level than you. The higher level ones, you can only place so many. It takes 8 resonators to make a portal, and no matter how high a level you are, you can only place one L8 resonator. So if you want a L8 portal, you need eight people, all of them L8 or higher.
And Team Blue had rounded up a posse. They came by my work and took down all my portals and replaced them with L8s. In other words, making it so that nobody was going to touch them until they wore out, or until 8 L8 green dudes came by to do the same thing. And I knew I'd be fine in a couple-few days because they'd wear out, and besides, you get more points for hacking higher-level portals. I was low on weapons and resonators from my afternoon adventure at the playground.
Then an hour later, they did the same at home.
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Picture that - eight dudes in a van at 2am on a Sunday, coming to my work and tapping on their phones for an hour and a half. Then they turn around and drive 26 miles to my house and do it again. to send me a message. I'd been playing the game for 7 days. None of them were under L13, all of them playing for over a year.
That's when it really hit home: Ingress is a game won by people willing to hang out with 7 other nerds at 2 in the morning in someone else's neighborhood. You advance not by being good, but by being willing to do shit in the middle of the night when the people with lives are asleep.
It also struck me that the "drive-by" analogy is pretty accurate - you do maximum damage by cruising around in a car. If you want something protected, you'd best find it away from a major road. The fact that Los Angeles is divided into "crips" and "bloods" was also pretty striking, and the fact that there were people driving around my neighborhood at 2 in the morning to get back at me was deeply disquieting.
My wife had gone to bed 3 hours earlier. She texted me to say that my daughter fell asleep with "Daddy" on her lips. It broke my heart - she'd had a rockin' day with Daddy and Daddy hadn't been there. Hadn't really thought about her. Had been using her as an excuse to wage digital warfare on his fucking phone.
And all the "portals?" Points of interest out in the real world? Ingress weaponizes them. Turns that statue into something to bomb. Turns that fountain into a pinch point. Someone spilled a bucket of yellow road paint on the sidewalk by my house. It looks like a sun. Someone else had painted a smiley face on top of it that says "smile and be happy." The sidewalk surrounds an elementary school. Prior to Ingress I thought it was a cool sign of how laid back my neighborhood was. Ingress turned it into a strategic target.
Eight fuckers from the Valley drove to my neighborhood at 2am and turned my smile and be happy" paint splotch into an enemy L8 portal.
And I realized it affected me because it was letting it.
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I didn't delete the app then. But I never opened it again. That was maybe a month ago, maybe six weeks. I've been sitting on this and cogitating about it to see if I feel differently. I don't.
I think Ingress is a cool idea that's implemented in a terrible, socially-destructive way. Never mind what Google is getting out of it because you're damn right they're collecting all the data. From a human needs standpoint, Google has created a game where nerds with no life drive around in the middle of the night texting at each other and thinking they're gangsta.
I just don't need that in my life.
Badged for your honesty. I wish I couldn't relate to what you write but I've certainly been there myself. I've never played "Ingress" before but I have certainly been guilty of not giving my wife, children, friends or others my complete attention because I'm on my phone, texting a friend, checking Hubski etc. I've gotten much better at it and of late I've been leaving my phone(s) in my car. There was a point when Hubski was new that I would check our analytics every 10 minutes. No joke. Now I tend to check a few times a day. When my daughter asks me to play with her, these days the answer is always a "yes" even when I'm in the middle of a comment, a read or playing my guitar. I drop it and play. When I commit to that "playing" half-way and still sort of check my phone she knows and I feel annoyed because I'm not fully committed to either. If I put the phone away and commit 100% to her, I have a blast! We built a bad-ass space ship out of Legos yesterday. Half way through playing I noticed she had two of the Lego guys holding hands. I asked, "what are those two up to?" She replied, "true loves first kiss."
-My mom lets her watch Disney films. Aside: I'm no longer on myfitnesspal but I need to get back. I started this thing called T25 -that and running should get me back where I need to be.
Woo first smile of the day. At least, I did smile earlier but it was more of a smirk and it was because I was sending a dirty joke to someone so this is much better. What's T25?We built a bad-ass space ship out of Legos yesterday. Half way through playing I noticed she had two of the Lego guys holding hands. I asked, "what are those two up to?" She replied, "true loves first kiss." -My mom lets her watch Disney films.
Okay so, yeah I'm glad you stopped doing that. It's funny to me because nobody plays Ingress in Boulder. Like, no one. So I guess that made our experiences different (I say made because that shit MURDERS my battery so I stopped playing). But for me it was basically just walking around and taking portals alone in the city. I found some places I didn't know about, so that was cool. But from a design perspective it seems like a two-sided faction is a shitty way of doing this. There's this game called Infinity Blade, and one of the cool things they did was have a boss that had like 100000000 HP and everyone around the world had to team up and fight it to beat it. HabitRPG does the same thing. It would be cool if there was an ARG that did something similar, but that was less of a grind. More cooperative, I guess. Or at least put more factions in. And stop collecting my data Google, goddammit. These thoughts are scattered, but I have to shave before class now so I can't write any further. Man, screw shaving. "Congratulations on the deeper voice, bet nobody told you that Arab genes mean hair will try to escape from every pore on your face every day for the rest of your life."
The real problem that ARGs face, I think, is the die-off. Nobody wants to play them for more than a few weeks unless they're hardcore. With a game like Ingress, that means you've got the hardcore constantly picking off the newbs. If it were EVE or the like, the Newbs would be on their own playing field where they would be more than grist for the mill; on a game like Ingress it would only double the overhead to have a L1-8 game and a L8-16 game. But yeah. Crips v. Bloods is a shitty setup. It turns Risk into Checkers. PS. I've been shaving daily since 8th grade and I'm about as Arabic as Bjork.
About 5 years ago at the Society for Neuroscience conference, my pal and I dreamed up a similar game that we called Xyrth. It was more an unfolding story rather than a game, and you didn't fight other people. Instead, you advanced the cause of Xyrthans that you chose to side with. It began by moving some cow-like creatures called Grazers to where they wanted to be. They would have had a song that you would have to sing back to them to win their trust.
So, hey again. :) I remembered this post from yesteryear, and here I am, on vacation with a bunch of family, including my Uncle, who was the final straw that broke my camelbak. He let slip that he was taking his Kia Rio (why, Doug?) rental around OBX to "hack portals". I said "Ingress?", and he stared down at his shoes and sheepishly answered "yuh". 24 hours ago, I downloaded the app, and we've been tag teaming shit around town (I n00b h4x'd the Wright Bros. museum and monuments earlier today). He's "enlightened", so I decided to be green alongside him. Cool coincidence that you're the same, and so's a coworker of mine whom I hadn't previously asked about their Ingress allegiance, though I knew they played. So literally everyone that I know who plays Ingress is in my/our faction. FYI, here's the global spread right now: Apparently, resistance has made some type of incredibly well-orchestrated network dominance incorporating most of Europe. I'm not imploring you to care, I just think it's interesting that the score is skewed towards blue by an order of magnitude. At least for now. Most importantly, I though I'd drop by this thread to point out something terribly interesting. You've got these two factions warring against each other, and in tech-savvy cities like LA (and Seattle, sorry bro) it's pretty unforgiving. My uncle tells me that the message communicated from Google via "glyphs" to the users, by way of exotic matter or aliens or whatever (I don't know yet!?), is anti-war and supportive of global peace. How ironic is it that they've created a militant user base dedicated to waging digital war against our fellow man?
I still play, but really casually - I pretty much only hack my own neighbourhood, on foot (I walk every day for my health). I'm L10 now, soon to be 11.
One thing I'm really not a fan of is that they have recently introduced "special" items (portal modifiers etc), which bear corporate logos - "AXA shields" and "MUFG capsules" and "Softbank Link Amplifiers". I guess they have to pay the bills somehow.
I haven't played Ingress myself, but a couple of my buddies during our studies did. But to me, the two core problems that come with it are very similar to gaming in an competitive environment: a) There are always nerds that are better than you (and in some cases make your work worthless) b) Don't let it overtake your life and prioritize it over other important stuff (like family) It reminds me strongly of the time when I played vanilla WoW PvP where you still had ranks 1-14 you could progress through. The problem with it was, that your performance was measured and compared against on how well others did. That means only one person could be rank 14 on a whole server for a week. That was the one who was "best", no matter how well you did. It trickled down to maybe 2 handful of people for rank 12.
At the end, when it got real competitive, it was more politics and actual gaming. We had partner guilds from the US (I live in the EU), that would log on and idle/play with our characters, so we could get points while we slept. We had agreements with other guilds on our server, which guild would get rank 14 next week and according to that the other guild would play slightly less. The battlegrounds weren't even playing anymore, because at one point our guild was so well-known and dominant, that the enemies didn't even play anymore, they just hid with the flag and tried to stall our progress. During that time I put far too little time into school and my girlfriend at that time. I was happy she did it, too, because I felt we we're playing together, but in the end - and I only realized that afterwards - we weren't really communicating or doing stuff anymore together, it was just idling in the game basically. Thankfully Blizzard removed the PvP ranks shortly after I reached rank 12, and that was the end of it. At least I got quite a bit of money for that account on eBay, but would I do it again? Nope! I had fun doing it at the beginning and then stuck around just for the sake of reaching a higher rank, but in the end it was comparable to work and I knew, that there were always nerds that are going to spend more time in the game than me and it's not worth the dents the relationships in real life took. As long as you have fun doing it without consequences, go for it, but you should also know when to stop and start not seeing a point in the time wasted anymore.
Looking around the Ingress Portland Or. map it seems like Ingress will take you on an extensive tour of Portland's least valuable resource, multicultural pro-vegetable mural projects. I don't hate on these murals but omg there are about a billion of them in this town. At least ten within an easy walk from my house. All the same pretty sure I've got to give it a try and burn out in a week just like every other multi-player game that you need to put exhaustive work into to achieve any kind of excellence.
In order to get a certain trophy, you must submit a certain number of new portals. In order to level beyond 8, you must have certain trophies. Result: shitty public art projects becoming portals. Portals everywhere. At least, where you can drive. On my entire 12-mile standard bike ride, which is entirely on the ocean, there are three. Why? Can't drive there. The playground mentioned above is filled with whimsical bird houses. Each one of them is a portal. You walk it as a loop and level up. Or, go through and blow it up. Funny thing is, the dude who nuked mine was probably in plain view but I never saw him and he never saw me 'cuz our faces were buried in our phones.
I can relate. I've been playing it semi-casually and can see the insidiousness increasing. I'll probably continue playing (my grandson likes to drive-by hack for me), but I can see that I'll need to remind myself not to take it seriously. I'm only L3, so not nearly as deep into it as you've gone. Frog also btw :-)
from the game i like the social part, in the last years i have met many people from different places, professions, skills and ages. we (enlightened dominican republic) monthly get together with the family (those with and those without) to share beers, etc.
Dunno; frogs and smurfs is what they call 'em down here.
I have been playing for nearly 3 months, got myself L9 acc and it was only because in my town there's only 12 portals, after I conquer them, there's literally nothing else to do except link them together for some experience to next level and some badges. And Blues only come to take it down one a day or once in 3 days. I got one portal in a range from my house too, got my inventory full and have to recycle materials like L7 and L6 resonators and L5 xmp bursters. MUFG and soft banks are obtainable from hacking. Nothing to do in this town really, and the closest town with some more action is 45 ish km from here and I'm using public transport, and that town is mostly green, when its blue there's things to destroy and it eases me sometimes. Well, I believe in big towns like LA and NY is very difficult to maintain a portal for 5 min, but I currently live in Finland and I've got one portal standing for 60 days. And in place like this all you have to worry is to spend 1h on these 12 portals, conquer and link them, and the rest of the day is yours to do whatever you please. It really depends in a place you live. I come from Portugal and in my town there its like 50 portals maximum, once you conquer it, even with L1 resonators, no one will come for up to one week. Some places may be very frustrating and annoying. Countryside is good, small town is better.
Hey! I was texting a friend about this article and I thought you'd enjoy it. Ever play this game again?
I did enjoy it, thanks. I'd heard some of the stories but I'd forgotten about the Warcraft neglect thing. Spooky. And no. Haven't touched Ingress since. I may try it once I move; eightbitsamurai had such a completely different experience than me I wouldn't be surprised if Los Angeles were simply the exact wrong location for Ingress.
Yeah, not as bad here. I stopped playing a long while ago, though, I liked having my phone battery stay above 50% before 4 PM. Remember how I mentioned that I would NEVER touch an MMO, or League of Legends, or Starcraft, or something like that? This shit is why. I legit shivered reading all of that.
Backintheday I bought an Ensoniq Soundscape sound card to run... Cakewalk? I think? and it came with the first chapter of Warcraft 2. And I played it for 16 hours, ran out of content, and immediately started scheming as to how to get the rest of it. And then realized I'd just pissed away 16 hours. First and last time I ever played Warcraft.
well, i was down there... but now i play weekly (starcraft) and every day when im alone, ingress.
Kleinbl00 you internet too hard and I don't know how you do it. But I really loved the line "as you do stuff it makes sounds like William Gibson's Pachinko parlor". I'm sure that Ingress will be replaced with something less destructive in due course. Maybe if there was a little bit less conflict... but then is that what makes it addictive?
There are a few things that would fix the game pretty succinctly. 1) Why 2 factions? Considering the number of options for building your avatar, alignment at many levels should be possible. I understand that the narrative sort of requires it but the narrative is pretty stupid anyway. Hell, if there were three factions it'd change things up a whole bunch. 2) As it is now, strength of a portal is only a matter of being in proximity for long enough to drop stuff - things auto-array. Having to place resonators by hand would certainly change things up. 3) Fuck your gate times, do a rolling average, and give energy and points incentives based on those rolling averages such that points come and go instead of having everything matter only at 2am. That's to start. Nobody asked me. If nothing else, having the "8th street Enlightened" team up with the "South Sepulveda Resistance" to protect the neighborhood when the Covina Collapsers (or whatever) feel like rolling through would give you an actual dynamic rather than what it is now.