Ingress

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.