Ingress

No Longer Playing Ingress

Posted by Richard on Saturday, 17 September 2016

Heading north on a Toronto streetcar, my heart sank as I realized something which initially felt awful but almost immediately felt like a relief: 24 hours had passed since I last hacked an Ingress portal. That meant that my streak of 561 days had come to an end on a Friday where I worked from home and didn’t think to hack the portal that was in range of my apartment. That being the only reason for playing Ingress, having been superseded this summer by Pokémon Go (from the same company as Ingress and modeled closely on it), I decided this was a project I could drop.

I’ll miss the software I built for it, though the ideas are valid for other projects I have in mind. One such project was to notify me of nearby farms, crowdsourced by the Vancouver Enlightened community. The software they built was impressive, not to mention the other add-ons, many not sanctioned by Niantic, built by Ingress communities around the world. The fact that I had API access to a player-generated database was staggering enough. There are other data sets, official and unofficial, that the code I wrote would be useful for.

I’ve written extensively about Ingress, though not publicly, only privately in my journal. That‘s because a lot of it involved information that would be useful to the enemy. The game took me on an early-morning car ride to Hope, B.C. to make a BAF (Big Ass Field) so I and a few others could get a high level badge. I played the role of comms operator during the ground game that leads up to a BAF. I’ve participated in “anomalies” (Niantic-sponsored day-long battles between the factions) in Vancouver and Boston, travelled to Oshawa on a GO Train for the purpose of participating in a First Saturday (events organized by local communities that have global implications for the game), and attended events in Toronto, and even showed someone the ropes of Ingress while interest in it waned more generally. I read with interest as bloggers Tim Bray and Alex Gustafson documented their adventures. I completed over a hundred missions, and took photos as I played. I would get the hardest badge to achieve, the Guardian medal for owning a portal longer than 150 days, by holding on to the Penticton airport portal from the summer of 2015 until someone returned home for the holidays. An extra dimension of difficulty was that I would be out of range to re-charge it, but I had the presence of mind to get multiple keys for the portal, so fellow ENL agents re-charged as I toured Europe for a couple of weeks.

Ingress made me look up more often, appreciate how many historical and notable buildings and structures and art were in cities. I met interesting people and went to interesting places and, overall, had fun playing it.

Two Weeks of Ingress

Posted by Richard on Monday, 28 July 2014

While leaving a BBQ celebrating a friend's 50th birthday party, Richard Smith's tweet pointing out the Ingress app had been released for iOS flowed through my stream. For the last two years, owners of Android-based Internet communicators have been playing the GPS-enabled, location-based massively mouthful role-playing game. One hacks portals, deploys resonators, links them up with others, and attacks enemies' fortresses while belonging to one of two factions, either the Resistance or the Enligtenment. After Tim Bray, as longtime a player as one can be, wrote a warm welcome to iOS users, I followed his advice, joining the faction then behind in the worldwide standings. (I missed the part where he said to narrow it down to your geography.)

At this writing, I'm at level 6, which regulars inform me is the level to start serious attacks on rival portals. Tonight, barring unforeseen circumstances like the local transit meltdown that spooked me last week, I will meet fellow players for the first time at their weekly meetup. I've had a couple of near-encounters, with one high-level fellow faction member sending me a message saying he was across the street. Lousy notifications in the current incarnation of the app prevented me from seeing the message until a few hours later. I now assume that anybody walking while looking down at their phone is either a friend or foe on Ingress.

Many questions remain, all of which I'll ask in due course as I get my feet even wetter. The feature requests I have for the app are

  • Background navigation. That is, after exiting the app, I'd like the voice to keep me updated on how close I am to a portal I've chosen to hack.
  • Notifications of in-game events, such as an portal being attacked, resonators decaying, someone mentioning me in the faction chat. I don't know the implications of what notifications would bring: maybe the game is designed for playing on the go or setting out on a planned exploration rather than having your day interrupted with attempts to destroy your protectorate.

Virgin Mary in the courtyard behind the Holy Name of Jesus Church

Playing Ingress has led to some interesting Columbusings. It pulled me into the entrance of B.C. Children's and Women's Hospital, a place I haven't had a need to visit. (Yet.) The second sighting was the walkway to a publicly-accessible sitting area in the courtyard behind of the Catholic Church at Cambie and 34th. It also led to the Virgin Mary statue in the back yard church at Cambie and 33rd. A third sighting, related to the fact I was also playing Fog of World at the time, was a bike rack on private property next to a large home. Lastly, on Yukon and W. 10th, next to the bench facing the bike lane is a plaque commemorating Dad's cookies factory (my photo). It seems that Dad's cookies are a treat invented by an American who named the company after his father-in-law that had Canadian bakeries (Vancouver is not listed on the company's history page).

The game takes me outside of my well-worn routes, sometimes doubling the time it takes me to get somewhere. Now that I have the basics understood, it's time to interact with some of the players and go on group missions.