Ingress is the Best Mobile Game I Have Ever Seen

I am Enlightened.  Are you?

I am somewhat of a gamer.  Life tends to limit the time I have to play, but when I have some free time, I'd usually rather be playing a video game than watching television.  That being said, I am not a mobile gamer.  Actually, I generally dislike the whole idea.  I never had a Gameboy, PSP, or Playstation Vita (I did a long while back have an Atari Lynx II, which I played on road trips when I was quite a bit younger), and I rarely play games on my smartphone, though I have been known to play the occasional Angry Birds or Stickman Golf when I am out of other options.  I like the epic nature of video games on a full-powered console or PC, playing on our flatscreen television with the surround sound pumped up.  It feels so much more immersive than a handheld game, so much more satisfying.  Mobile gaming is just not something I have ever been able to get into.

What is Ingress?

That was, at least, until last week, when my coworker asked the seemingly innocuous question, "Have you ever heard of Ingress?" to which I responded, "Isn't that the opposite of egress?"  Little did I know what I was about to get into.  He had not played it, but as the owner of a new Droid Mini, the game came pre-loaded onto his phone (or possibly pushed out in an update, I am not sure).  He did know that it was a Google-affiliated game that uses Google Maps and augmented reality to create a game on your phone, but spread across the entire globe.  Other than that, he was really in the dark.

I decided the concept sounded pretty cool, and since the game just came out of closed beta last week, I downloaded Ingress from the Google Play Store.  Currently the game is only available for Android, so iOS users cannot partake just yet, but it supposed to be rolling out to Apple devices sometime next year.  I have to say, while the game has a bit of a learning curve since the interface is not extremely intuitive, it is quite easy once you run through the training missions.  Once you get the hang of it, playing becomes simple, and the game is simply amazing.  This is the best mobile game I have ever played or probably will ever play in the near future.  Let me summarize the back-story and gameplay real quick so you too can join in and help fight for the Enlightened (or the Resistance if you are evil).

Play Ingress and Become Enlightened

To keep it short, the back-story of Ingress is that there is an alien race (or force, it is not clear) known as Shapers, which are seeding the world with Exotic Matter through the use of Portals around the globe.  The portals are located at various types of locations including works of art, libraries, post offices, places of worship, historic buildings, and more.  Starting out, you have to choose a side:  The Enlightened, who believe Exotic Matter (or XM) and the Shapers are for the benefit of mankind and are trying to claim portals to bring more XM and, presumably, the Shapers, to Earth, and the Resistance, who think The Shapers are malicious and are trying to claim portals to stop XM from getting here.

From then on, both sides have the same goal, to claim portals or take portals from the other side.  Claiming enough portals and linking them together creates Control Fields, which gives your side points through Mind Units, or people who exist within that field in the real world.  Claiming portals requires you to Hack them, gaining items such as Portal Keys (help you to link portals), Resonators (help you claim portals), XM Bursters (help you destroy enemy Resonators), Portal Shields (help you defend claimed portals), and Power Cubes (help you regain lost XM).  There is way more to the game, but these are the basics that will help you get started.

While Ingress sounds like a fairly simple online game, and it is, what makes the game infinitely more fun is the fact that it exists in the real world.  To claim portals you have to actually travel to them, and finding them on your scanner (your phone) is not that easy since its range is limited to a couple miles.  There is a website to view the status of any portals in real-time, though even this makes it a challenge to find unclaimed or portals at a low enough level that you can actually take over starting out.  There are a ton of people playing (over a million now), so working in groups is very feasible, and the game makes it easy to only communicate with people in your area.  Try it out, and I think you will find that you will get sucked into it very quickly.

To really see what Ingress is all about, I encourage you to watch this series of videos on the gameplay of Ingress.  It will explain how the game works better than any text could.

Ingress Will be Even Better with Wearable Computers

Ingress falls into the category of Augmented Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Game (ARMMOG, or maybe MMOARG?).  This is the first game that completely integrates the reality with a video game, though there have been a few that do it in a much simpler fashion.  It is really groundbreaking, and paints mobile gaming in a completely new light for me.  I am completely obsessed with Ingress at the moment, as my fairly unpopulated region of the world has a number of unclaimed portals around that need to be claimed in the name of the Enlightened.  There has never been a mobile game that has grabbed my attention like this, and I cannot wait for the future as augmented reality becomes more commonplace.

This game, or games like it, lend themselves in a huge way to the use of wearable computing devices like Google Glass.  While I have not seen anything official about using Google Glass or other wearable technology with Ingress, I can just imagine this game with portals animated onto my actual field of view rather than on the map on my phone.  If there was anything that would convince me to go out and get Google Glass (when it comes out), it would be Ingress with Glass support.  Sure, the news will be abound with stories of idiots who caused car accidents playing Ingress while driving and not watching the actual road, but there is no stopping it now.  Ingress is, in a word, epic.  Go try it out now, and I dare you not to love it.