Getting out of the house and meeting new people is hard. For a long time, I let inertia limit me to the same neighbourhood and daily routine — until I started playing a mobile, augmented-reality game from Google called Ingress. In just a few months, I’ve explored places I’d never seen before, met heaps of new and interesting people, and walked hundreds of cumulative miles — all because of a simple video game on my phone.
What Is Ingress?
Ingress is a story-driven, real-world augmented reality game — which is short for “you install a game on your phone, and the game takes place in the real world so you have to get out of the house to play.” The video above gives you a quick primer to the story of the game, complete with the whole “you’re a secret agent” vibe it has. Here’s the breakdown:
This world around you is not what it seems. Our future is at stake, and you must choose a side.
A mysterious energy has been unearthed by a team of scientists in Europe. The origin and purpose of this force is unknown, but some researchers believe it is influencing the way we think. We must control it or it will control us.
“The Enlightened” seek to embrace the power that this energy may bestow upon us.
“The Resistance” struggle to defend, and protect what’s left of our humanity.
I’m simplifying (a lot) here, but in the game, most of the action takes place at “portals”, or places of human creativity that draw people together. That’s why you’ll usually find them at museums, sculptures, historic landmarks, parks and public spaces, and other places of interest. The story and in-game lore is a lot of fun, but you don’t have to love it to play. If you are though, it spans several books and comics, and it has heaps of video background.
Ingress is GPS-based, which means that in order for you to play, you have to move around in the real world. As you approach portals, you can “hack” them for equipment, capture or reinforce them for your team, liberate them from the opposing team, and link them together to form “mind control fields”. Doing these things earns points for your faction, and like any good RPG, earns you the points and achievements required to level up and access better, more powerful equipment.
I should mention here that Ingress is by no means new. In this article at Vice, Niantic noted that there are over seven million players around the globe. Our own Eric Ravenscraft wrote a review of the game at Android Police a few years ago. Lifehacker alum Kevin Purdy loves the game, and wrote a great getting started guide here. While it was invite-only for a long time, in the past year Ingress opened its doors to all players, expanded from Android-only to Android and iPhone, and has grown its userbase significantly. Niantic has even teased a follow-up game. There’re a lot to the game and its learning curve can be a little steep, but if you stick with it, there are a lot of real-world benefits.
Play Hard and Discover New Places: Let The Game Be Your Guide
Ingress encourages you to get out and explore your community. In order to play, you have to be physically present at portal locations in the real world. In the beginning, you’ll level quickly and earn badges and achievements, and it’s really satisfying to see the results of your work. Plus, in the game, you have a limited range of action. That “action circle” is relatively small — only a few metres, and any portal you want to interact with needs to be inside it. You can’t just sit at home on your phone (unless you’re like me, and have a few portals in range of your couch — but that’s boring!)
The game also rewards exploration, so you have an incentive to try new restaurants, visit museums, or just go for a walk. You get in-game badges by hacking or capturing portals you’ve never visited before. There are also “missions” (which get you special badges for each mission you complete) that involve interacting with multiple portals in a given place. For example, if you go to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, you’ll find a number of missions you can complete while enjoying the exhibits (and in some cases, it will even direct you to ones you may have overlooked). Some missions are easy to do, while others require some real strategy before you start them. Some of my most entertaining afternoons around town started with “hey, let’s go find some missions to do today”, and ended up at the Washington Monument, for example.
Plus, because many portals are in parks, museums and other public spaces, you have an incentive to enjoy your time there while you’re playing. There’s definitely an “experience the world… while poking at your phone” aspect here, but as long as you remember to look up from the game now and again, you’ll have a blast. The exercise is good too, especially if you’re normally sedentary. We’ve discussed how beneficial walking can be, especially for creativity and mental health, and Ingress is a great way to work some light walking into your day while simultaneously doing something fun, and exploring new and interesting places in your neighbourhood or city.
Make New, Real Friends: Join Your Faction’s Community and Get Involved
When you start playing, you might feel like a single person looking at your phone, but you’re on the verge of a huge community of players. When you sign up, you may even get messages from players offering to help you level. As soon as I started playing, a friendly player reached out with an intro to the local community. I even got messages from a nearby enemy player encouraging me to switch teams and join his side.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been out ingressing and stumbled into someone else playing the game too — either accidentally because I saw it on their smartphone (or they saw mine!), or because someone was in the area and we decided to say hello to one another. I’ve stumbled into enemy players fighting over the same portals I am. We call a temporary ceasefire, say hello and introduce ourselves, maybe share a beer, and then resume hostilities.
If you’re a little put off by any that, I should also mention this mostly happens in text, and everyone I’ve interacted with has been great about giving you as much space as you need. After all, the Ingress community is pretty large, but I like to refer to it as the biggest collection of extroverted introverts I’ve ever seen. Everyone plays at their own pace, and while some people are aggressive, others are laid back and casual — and that combination makes the game great for all types.
For more, check out the Ingress Google+ page. It has over 3 million followers and the Ingress Google+ community has close to 200,000. But the really close communities are the location-specific ones. For example, my local “Enlightened” and “Resistance” players have their own Google+ communities, where they help one another level, talk strategy, share screenshots and accomplishments, plan events and cheer each other on.
Take It to the Next Level: Participate in (Sometimes Global, Sometimes Local) Live Events
When you’re ready to take things to a new level, you can participate in an Ingress live event. Live events draw in hundreds — if not thousands — of your fellow players from all over the globe to play together. Sometimes they’re massive, coordinated, strategic events that can affect the story of the game, and sometimes they’re fun, local, cross-faction events.
Ingress “First Saturdays”, for example, happen every month (on, as the name implies, the first Saturday) that are part social and part competitive events. Similarly, #NL1331 meetups (#NL1331 is the name of the mobile Ingress van, which you can see at those events and in the photo above) happen at a restaurant or bar, are open to players of all levels, and only last for a few hours. They’re a great way to meet people, get a badge or two, and just have a good time.
XM Anomalies, on the other hand, are major, global events that influence the lore and course of the game. They only happen every quarter or so, but they involve thousands of players. Part of the inspiration for this post was the Persepolis XM Anomaly here in Washington DC, just one of a series of coordinated global events on the same day. It was my first major live event, and I met dozens of people, made new friends, and seriously can’t wait for the next one. These events are massive campaigns, complete with operations centres, dispatchers, and boots on the ground doing the dirty work of capturing portals and defending them from enemy players. You have the option of getting as deeply involved as you want during events like these, so you can be as active or as passive as you prefer, it’s up to you.
Whatever you choose to try, you’ll meet people from all over and all walks of life, visit places you’ve never been (especially if you travel to one of the event locations — I was lucky enough that my first major one was in my own city!) and get involved in the game on a level you hadn’t before. Before this event, I would have never thought to participate in anything this massive, but suddenly there I was, planning, fighting on the ground, and helping keep my teammates hydrated and fed in the field. Best of all, as the day progressed, I met people I shared other interests with too, and we traded contact information so we could hang out.
Remember, Ingress Is Just a Game
Even though Ingress has real-world components to it, you have to remember that it’s still a game. That means it comes with all the things that multiplayer games have. There are super-aggressive players who take the game way too seriously, trolls who make your life difficult or insult you, creepy people and other bad actors. Some players will hunt your specific portals, and others (the worst, in my opinion) maintain databases just to make it easy to hunt other players. There are plenty of jerks, but they’re an extreme minority. You have to keep a certain separation from the game.
The game encourages that separation too. You can only influence your immediate vicinity, and while you can recharge and defend far-away portals from attack, you have to be ready for enemy players to undo your work — sometimes moments after you finish. You can even get into slap-fight duels with enemy players. It can be tough, but it’s all ephemeral. You have to let it go and develop a kind of Zen mindset towards it all.
This was extremely hard for me at first. I used to get really frustrated, and I got close to quitting the game several times. Getting involved with your local community can help (especially to give you a place to air grievances and plan your next attacks!), but I’ve coined a saying that my local friends like to repeat: “Trash talk doesn’t get you AP.” Stick to the positive aspects of the game, ignore the bad actors, and have fun. Remember to use Ingress to get out and get exercise, but look up at the places you see. Use it to get together with people, but talk to those people when you do.
I’ve met people for whom Ingress is their primary source of interaction with others. I’ve met people who are disabled and use the game to find a community they can get involved with, and people who are socially anxious and prefer to talk through text long before meeting people in person. I’ve met people who have lost weight thanks to all of the walking they do while playing Ingress. I’ve met people who used to never get out of the house (much like me) until they started playing. When I say it takes all kinds, I mean it, and I’ve found a welcoming, extremely diverse community that I don’t feel strange or alone being a part of. If you stick with it, I bet you will too.
Comments
13 responses to “How Ingress, Google’s Real-World Smartphone Game, Got Me Out Of My Shell”
No love for Windows phone. 🙁
Installed this morning, and have no idea what im doing.
Could someone provide a link to a good “How to play” website/video?
You mean like the one POSTED IN THE ARTICLE (PS – if you can’t find the link then Ingress is not the game for you).
I played a few years ago and found that as a single person, I could do very little. Most portals were above my level and I could barely make a dent and actually felt frustrated at the lack of progress. It was very cool though to go to a real life location and (at least attempt) to interact with it in another world.
I said ‘good link’…
Anyway thanks @darren for the tips 🙂
I leveled up quickly, and was the only member of my faction in a huge radius, up against level 8+ agents. Don’t give up! Meet some players on your faction, visit a few farms for AP gaining, and you’l be up there in no time.
THE ENLIGHTENED>
http://decodeingress.me/ all the info you need
First of all, you need to find a portal. Hopefully there is one nearby. You have an action circle around you. Get close enough to the portal so that is in your action circle.
Click on it and hack it. It will give you some items. From memory you can hack a portal every 5 minutes. After 4 hacks, it will not be hackable for 4 hours.
Hack everything you can to get more gear.
Resonators – These are used to capture a portal.
Bursters – These are used to destroy enemy resonators. Destroy them all and you can claim the portal for yourself.
Powercubes – These will give you XM or energy when used. Every action in the game uses up a little (bar up the top) but there is heaps clumped around portals so you’ll usually have enough.
Shields and mods – These are modifiers that can be added to portals to make it harder to destoy, or let you hack it more often.
Keys – for linking and fielding.
Tips – When using bursters, stand on top of the resonators you are trying to destroy. It will do more damage. Also, hold down the fire button and release at the correct time for up to 20% bonus damage.
When deploying resonators on a portal, stand so the portal is just inside the edge of your action circle. Deploy all of them. The distance you stand from the portal depends how far away the resonators deploy. The further they are spread out, the harder it is to take out (You don’t have to walk around the portal for all the resonators, just stand as far away as you can and deploy them. They will fill all the points at max distance).
Keys – Most portals will give you a key when you hack them. If you have a key for portal A, and hack it again, you will never get another key. Either use the key, or drop it from your inventory (it will show up on the scanner at your location), hack the portal while you don’t have the key, then pick up your original key again. You can also store keys in capsules, but they are rare, takes awhile till you hack one usually.
Once you have a key, you can make a link. If you have a key to Portal A, go to another portal and choose link, and choose the key to Portal A. It will link the two portals. Do this for 3 portals to make a field.
Basically, make links, fields and deploy on grey portals for points and to level up. You start of pretty weak. When you are level 1, you can only use level 1 resonators and bursters. Aim for level 8!
But the best possible thing to do is to reach out in Comm and meet up with someone for a lunch hour and get them to show you the basics. You can be a lone wolf player, but it’s heaps of fun to play with others. Higher level agents can give you gear, help you level up quicker and give you tips and answer any questions.
Do I only want to hack enemy portals or should I hack my own team too?
Hack all portals. All will give you gear. Enemy portals will sometimes zap some of your XM (energy). Hacking enemy portals also gives you 100 points.
Been waiting for an Ingress article on here for a long time. Well written.
I used to be quite fanatical when playing this, often driving large distances just to link a portal to a different town (I live in a regional area so always travelling). These days I’m fairly casual when playing, but I love it when one can take down an entire field, build your own field then spend the next few days defending.
The really crazy players do exist, which is why I tend to solo and rarely partner up. I remember one guy nearly got assaulted because a port was set up outside a bikers gang house. They were getting paranoid as people would stop out the front at all hours for no reason then drive off.
Partner up with sane people or recruit your friends. Most communities will tend to shun the insane people a bit unless they are really dysfunctional communities.
You can do a lot more damage with a friend and also make higher level portals.
I’ve had heaps of fun with this game. A friend and I went on a unique hunt one day from about 8am to a bit after 10pm. Road trip from Hobart up the state, hit 6 towns/cities and back again. Get out and play at each location, don’t just cargress.
Going to an anomaly in Asheville, USA was probably a highlight.
Also spent a night camping on Bruny Island and was part of the first field to NZ. All for Ingress. Don’t play as much anymore but still fun to go out for an evening and do some missions with a mate.
Always wondered why Giz, LH and Kotaku never mentioned this game at all. Huge anomalies going on all over the globe and millions of people playing.
They cover other smartphone games too. Maybe it’s all a bit daunting to understand if you don’t play?
I used to love playing this game and got a bunch of mates into it too until some guy got sick of me taking ‘his portals’ however I caught him out GPS spoofing his location and hacking me back without being there. It really dampened my experience and gave up 🙁 If they can fix this sort of thing, i’d consider coming back to it. Also – IT TAKES OVER YOUR EVERY WAKING MOMENT 🙂 hehe
I played solid for 6 months but quit after players from the competing faction followed me around one night for ages so I couldn’t go to my own house, then a few days later they showed up at one of my kid’s weekend activities to taunt and follow us. A mother & daughter in our faction group were harassed by one of the same people after reporting it and lodging complaints and concerns, the ‘community’ and Niantic (the google owned Ingress game company) did nothing about any of it.
Beware: There are no boundaries in this ‘game’ – it doesn’t end, there is massive cheating, there is no recourse for players who intimidate, and amongst the good – the worst kind of people ‘play’ (obsessively territorial low-lifes with no jobs and lots of time on their hands). They’ll find you online and reveal your real name, contact you at work, make you watch your back whenever you leave your home. It’s like someone builds a bridge over your world, darkness falls and all the trolls move in.
I wouldn’t get back into it if you paid me, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone else get into it either. So yeah – good luck.