I've been playing
Ingress for four years, and I suppose it is time that I said something about
it. If you want a less personal view on
what Ingress is, head over to Wikipedia.
The article there pretty good though completely cold and impersonal.
Ingress is an
Augmented Reality Science Fiction game.
Here's the story, more or less, as the game creators would tell it.
In 2012, along with
finding the Higgs Boson, the scientists at CERN also found something called
Exotic Matter (XM). What Exotic Matter
is, is hard to describe, but it is pouring in through portals, and it can be
used to effect the minds of human beings.
A small company
developed a scanner than runs on a smartphone that can detect XM. The scanner can also be used to capture the
portal, and to hack the portal. Other
information has come out slowly, about a mysterious alien race called the
Shapers.
The Shapers said
that they had come to help human kind take the next step in their
evolution. Some believed the Shapers and
called themselves the Enlightened.
Others think that the Shapers are coming to conquer and called
themselves the Resistance.
And that defines the
choice you make when you enter the game.
You must choose a side, Resistance or Enlightened…Blue or Green?
As far as game play
is concerned, it is that simple. Either
the portals you capture turn blue, or they turn green.
The game is actually
scored by Mind Control Units…sounds ominous doesn't it?
After you capture
portals, you try to link the portal to other portals. Do I need to say that you can only link to
portals of the same color?
So, the process goes
like this. You use your scanner to hack
a portal. You have to be close to the
portal to hack it or capture it. When
you hack the portal you get gear. The
two most important pieces of gear are resonators and portal keys. You capture a portal by putting a resonator
on the portal. You use the portal key to
link another portal to the one you have a key for.
So, restarting the
process from the beginning, and assuming you found an unclaimed portal. You hack the portal for gear. Then you use the resonator you just got to
capture the portal. Actually, you have
to put 8 resonators on the portal to fully activate it. And, we will assume you got a portal key for
it. Then you travel to another portal,
repeat the process and then you can link portal 2 back to portal 1.
Unfortunately, you
still haven't made any points for your team, though you will have gained Agent
Points (AP). Quick aside, I have heard
them called Access Points as well, but I would swear that they were called Agent
Points when I joined. The player is an
Agent of either the Resistance or the Enlightened. AP are basically the experience points of Ingress, and they work pretty much like XP in every other game ever created. AP is how you level up, and there are perks
as you level up to max at level 16.
Next, you would go
to a third portal and claim that. Now,
if you have three portals and a key for each portal, you can now link them in a
triangle. This creates a field. Technically, the name is a Mind Control
Field. That's right, this is where the
Mind Control Units come from. The field
gets a value, Mind Units (MU), which, at least supposedly has to do with the
number of people who might be affected by the field. Larger areas have more MU, but more densely
populated areas have more MU. A field
covering part of the inner city would have very high MU, while a much larger
area out in the country would probably have fewer.
There is more to the
game, but this is the basics. You can
work with other agents in your area to create larger fields, and to cover more
of your city with fields. You can even
work with far away agents to cover whole states. There have even been links across the
Atlantic.
This post has gone
on long enough, and I haven't really said anything about what I think about the
game. So, stay tuned for a future post
with impressions, and maybe a little more about the reality of game play.
