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Inside Ingress, Google’s global online RPG
Ingress is an amazing, world spanning augmented reality MMO - with a disturbing dark side.
Ingress map
You know a game’s special when players drive across cities, fly hundreds of miles, wake up in the night to play and plan multi-man operations across nations - but that’s what happens in Ingress, an augmented-reality MMORPG played globally on Android smartphones.
A Resistance agent from Pomona, California called Djupgrayedd experienced the highs and lows of this Google-made game firsthand. Two of his accounts that represented hundreds of hours of play were banned thanks to Enlightened agents who branded him a cheat - allegedly with little evidence.
Rather than give up or play dirty, Djupgrayedd decided to break a world record with teamwork, ingenuity and real-world gameplay - three tenets that make Ingress stand out in the claustrophobically crowded mobile game space.
The record, for the fastest maxed-out account, was held by a German team that took 24 hours to hit Level 8 - but he thought that could be halved with plenty of preparation, including “leaving at 6.30am to farm Pomona for gear”.
The record run was planned for Huntington Botanical Gardens, 26 miles down the road in Pasadena. Djupgrayedd said “there were 98 portals inside; at 10.30am my three friends fired at the entrance. The entire site was Level 8, fully linked, with rare shields and turrets, so you know it hurt”. The team fought back, and “ripped apart” the Enlightened portals as Djupgrayedd followed behind and built a Resistance stronghold.
They blasted until lunchtime, then moved to high-value portals in Pomona. They weren’t far from Level 8 - and worldwide recognition - when Djupgrayedd’s scanner failed.
The Enlightened reported him again - even though he played with the kind of spirit developer Niantic encourages - and Niantic acted. Banned, for the third time, with no record.
Ingress is a game of extremes, and it’s attracted over a million downloads in just over a year. It’s developed by Niantic Labs, a startup-style team within Google, and it’s coming to iOS in 2014.
It’s an augmented reality MMORPG (massively multiplayer online RPG) where two sides - the progressive, green Enlightened and the traditional blue Resistance - battle over portals that emit Exotic Matter (XM). Portals are claimed by deploying up to eight “resonators” in the real world, and blasters are used to steal portals from the enemy. Players earn Action Points (AP) to level up, and navigate with a futuristic interface layered over Google Maps.
Mobile screenshots
Turrets, shields and other upgrades improve portals’ XM yield, range and defence, and portals link together - even from hundreds of miles apart. Links increase their potency, and triangular fields yield even more XM and AP. The whole game - players, portals, resonators, blasters and more - uses eight experience levels.
Ingress’s rich plot concerns aliens, mankind’s future and plenty of sci-fi mystery. There’s code-breaking, too: Fevenis Silverwind runs news site Decode Ingress, and says that “the rabbit hole goes much further than you could imagine”, with data released regularly on the Niantic Project website - his team of “world-class decoders” has had to use Morse code, Braille, Binary and even Hex in order to crack codes.
It’s standard RPG fare, but the setting is transformative. You see, portals are places of public interest in the great outdoors - parks, artworks, public buildings, prominent businesses - and most actions only take place when you’re within 40 metres of one. The community drives Ingress: teamwork is essential, and users create portals.
One agent who wishes to remain anonymous describes Ingress as “sports for history buffs”, and he’s seen numerous benefits as he’s explored. “I’ve lost weight, my local knowledge is so good I could be a tourist guide, and I’ve made new friends I would never have met without the game.”
He’s even got “five routes to hack portals on my way to lunch”, and leaves work early to play. He describes Ingress as a “brand new world”, one where he even finds himself peeking at people’s phones to spot agents.
Ingress Manhattan map
He’s not the only one - agent Quappelle from Seattle “loves to get outside as much as possible”, and appreciates the futuristic feel; he “spotted a guy on a phone in a car, and watched as he drove and captured a portal. It made me feel like a spy”.
Agent Reginald Surcoat from Connecticut describes how he’s met players from both sides, and all have been “pleasant, and often downright awesome”; most share tips and plenty of laughter - one even invited him to go fishing.
Not all players are so casual however. The Alaskan Enlightened faction was hampered by links from the 109-person town of Iliamna to both Fairbanks, Alaska and Lompoc, California. The latter link, a 2,389 mile connection, was one of the world’s longest, but it couldn’t be broken in Lompoc - and that meant the Alaskans had to act.
One agent, named Artio, volunteered. Iliamna only gets one flight per day in a tiny, rusty plane and, even then, it's often grounded by the weather. Despite this, she flew from Anchorage, on a flight that had been chartered to collect someone else.
Despite the danger - and a potentially catastrophic lack of phone signal - Artio landed and waited nervously for her phone to connect to Iliamna’s weak GPS signal. She eventually made the connection, destroyed the Resistance portal and loaded it with Enlightened hardware.
Artio only had half an hour on the ground and, even then, the pilot wasn’t sure the plane could leave: the runway was freezing. The plane barely took off, and agent Artio wrote her name into Ingress lore. It’s a stupendous feat for any game, and it made global headlines.
Ingress artwork
Other agents go to similarly extreme lengths. The anonymous agent who described Ingress as “sports for history buffs” has upped his game with unlikely allies - pensioners. One of his new friends is “in the local historical society, and their grandchildren have bought [them] smartphones” - tech that they didn’t know how to use.
“I offered to take them to the park, begun to play and, after an hour of patient explanation, they wanted to try”. He enthused that he “serves as the technical advisor for a group of 17 seniors with smartphones and too much time on their hands”.
Some need wheelchairs and others canes, but they’re passionate players who attack Resistance agents that don’t expect a group of grey-haired folk to whip out smartphones. They’re keen, but predictable - not least because “it’s 50 percent off for seniors at our local cafe on Wednesday afternoons”.
Other stories illustrate the importance of teamwork. A group of 18 German Resistance agents ran an “undercover operation” called Friends of Jarvis to hit Level 8 in record time - the same feat Djupgrayedd attempted in California. Group member StringEplison says the team “met every day for two weeks to farm items”, and started at 4am at a local castle.
The record, claimed in six hours, was a complex operation: “we needed multiple trips to plan, agents brought us breakfast and coffees, and another used a chest-mounted camera to record the mission”. The group deleted the account afterwards so no agents gained an advantage, and StringEpsilon’s happy to say that “I’ve never seen that much effort put into a game”.
It’s no surprise players club together, as Ingress needs its community - something Niantic Labs recognises - and thousands of players attend its official events across the globe.
Operation Cassandra took place over two weeks in August and several cities: it begun in Sydney with over 100 agents, and carried on to Boston, Dusseldorf, Manila, Paris, Sao Paulo and Hong Kong, before concluding in New York, Chicago and Cologne. The event made players investigate XM anomalies and Ingress’ complex storyline, and was won by Enlightened agents.
The latest event, #13Magnus, started in October and was even bigger, spanning 35 cities on four continents. It finishes tomorrow, and marks the game’s exit from its long Beta gestation. Again, it tied into the game’s plot, with more XM anomalies and a hefty dose of code-breaking and subterfuge.
Both events saw huge spikes in activity, and were heavily covered on Niantic’s websites and weekly YouTube show, The Ingress Report. Players met with diagrams, laptops, smartphones and cars in order to contribute - they’re MMO quests in the real world.
Ingress is often friendly but like many games, it’s got a dark side. Agents use location spoofing, bots, scripts and multiple accounts to cheat, but unpleasant behaviour in the real world can mar the experience too. Where do you draw the line, for instance, when tailing an enemy agent in real life? When does it stop being a game, and start being something more sinister?
Surcoat, who’s had plenty of good Ingress experiences, stepped in after a player followed his girlfriend and destroyed her portals, and threads on Reddit’s popular Ingress forum host similar stories: one agent saw another “follow [my] every move in their car, even followed me home to make sure I was done”, and another claims Resistance agents at Kansas State University make Enlightened accounts in order to sabotage others.
A pair of new agents in a US college town hooked up with helpful local Enlighted agents, but they’ve been undermined by local Resistance agents described as “total jerks” - they traveled behind the low-level players and “destroyed everything we did”. It’s not against Niantic’s rules, but it’s against the spirit of the game.
Other players have bigger issues. VirtualVoid, a Resistance agent from Slovakia, describes two Enlightened agents who asked if he “could go away without destroying their portals”. He left, but claims “they ran after me and [attacked] me with a baseball and knife”. VirtualVoid says passersby called the emergency services, and he “woke up in hospital with a broken arm, a few scratches and a destroyed phone”.
We’ve heard from a Filipino agent that “people have created factions” in Manila “which has led to fistfights”. It’s gone beyond the game, he says, and is “virtual gang warfare”. Agents in Johannesburg have reportedly been mugged at gunpoint.
Ingress has also raised privacy concerns: it is after all a Google product. Tech site PandoDaily asked if “anyone [is]starting to get creeped out?” by the constant transmission of “GPS and accelerometer data”, and highlighted “a wealth of opportunities for Google to exploit...and a concerning amount of ways for it to misuse data”, such as “hyper-targeted, location-based advertising”.
An article and social marketing site The Wall accused Ingress of “gamifying data mining”, and Tech Hive speculated that Ingress could be “a treasure trove for decoding behavioural trends” - but it concedes that most Google services wouldn’t work without its “so-called Big Data”.
John Hanke runs Niantic Labs. Before that, he ran Google’s location-based services, and he’s quick to defend Ingress. He told TechHive that Ingress is designed to “encourage people to move and explore”, and will also be able to “take advantage” of devices like the augmented reality Google Glass spectacles.
Hanke is “interested in new kinds of monetisation”, which includes integrating brands like Zipcar and Jamba Juice and selling Ingress-friendly data plans, but he’s under no pressure to make money - yet.
Hanke has addressed privacy, saying that “we’re trying to map XM to places where people walk”, and that it would be “great” if Ingress could help Google’s map data, but that “definitely wasn’t the driving force behind the creation of the game”. He also says Ingress doesn’t “receive any special treatment” when it comes to Maps, either, despite coming from Google - Niantic is “just another publisher”.
Ingress isn’t without its issues, but there’s no game like it: blurred lines between fiction and reality, a deep story, addictive augmented reality gameplay and an emphasis on real-world exploration, meeting fellow agents and teamwork.
It’s easy to see why so many have become so engrossed, but the growing pains are obvious, and now it’s left beta and heading to the hundreds of millions of explorers on iOS, this fluid, exciting game could get worse before it gets better. Let's hope they're just that - growing pains.
