Ingress: The GPS Game That Gets You Off The Couch And Into An Alternate World

It was 1 A.M. and I was sitting on the couch watching some bad T.V. My Android phone clutched in front of my face, and my Reddit feed was scrolling across my eyes. The myriad of cat posts, angry atheists and white guilt racism was beginning to blur together. I was pondering whether to attempt sleep yet or not when I heard a deafening sound. *BABUNG*. My phone sounded a notification, ” You received a new Email! ” scrolled across my notification bar. I lazily tapped it not interested in what message awaited me. NIANTIC OPS soon displayed in the FROM field. ” Shit, what is happening now “, I literally said aloud. I opened up the message and read it. JakeAK had destroyed my portal mods and retook a portal for the resistance. I looked at the activity log and the clock, he wasn’t going to be there for much longer, so I stood up and wondered what my next move would be. My rabbit looked over at me, with that same disproving look I’ve seen countless times before.

I did. I got up, threw on clothes and ran outside. The 12 degree weather hit me hard in the face, I pulled my hat down and ran into my truck. I fired up my Ingress App and got my bearings. I saw the globe circling as it zoomed in on my location. I got to the dashboard and saw that I was almost out of XM. Dammit. I needed to fill up… maybe I am getting a little too far ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning.

Ingress is an Android app that uses your GPS to connect you to an alternate reality. The story that goes along with it is that a mysterious energy source has been appearing all over the globe, XM. Along with this mysterious energy a race of aliens known as the Shapers have come to Earth. They have come with the intention of peace, to help us use this new energy but not everyone believes their motives. Soon a resistance has gathered up to stop the shapers from coming into our dimension, while a group of sympathizers known as the Enlightened have come to help the aliens. A war has broken out between the Resistance and the Enlightened.

The two sides are fighting over control points know as portals. Portals are real life locations that you have to physically go to and interact with. You can submit portals by taking a GPS tagged picture and sending it to the game creators. Some great portals are signs, statues and businesses. Players can put resonators and shields on the portals. Resonators range in levels from 1 to 8. 1 being the weakest and most common. The average level of resonators determines the portal level, which in turn determines the overall strength and range it can reach. Players can then hack active portals for items. If you hack one that is on your own side you getter better and more items but no experience.
If you get lucky hacking you can get a portal key. This let’s you recharge the portals energy remotely or connect other portals to it. The whole object of the game is to control more portals and link them. If you link enough portals that all connect into a closed off shape it creates a control area. The control area is valued in MUs or mind units. Its believes that this number is derived from population. The minds in the control field are the ” uninvolved ” citizens that will be more inclined to take your side. So the more minds the better!

Now to be able to do ANYTHING in Ingress you need XM. The mysterious energy. You can collect XM by walking or driving and picking up the crystals that appear on the map. How XM is created is still unclear but it is believed to be connected to mobile data usage. So apartments or cities usually have more around.

Now that you got the basic understanding let’s get back to our story.

I needed XM. I was extremely low, I had been remotely recharging a Portal in Anchorage hours before and had run out. I knew of a great cache of XM, The local AT&T store. So I put turned on my Zune, fired up the most recent episode of  Geekscape and drove off. Looking at the recent activity in the region chat I saw that a lot had been going on, Anchorage had been going through a lot of changes, portals being taken back and forth. With only two portals in a 20 mile radius of each other out in Wasilla, each 45 minute drive into “town” to go to a store, DJ a gig or just get some Mongolian food turns into an adventure. Seeing the different world on the phone is always thrilling.

I soon got to the AT&T store. It was covered in XM, I circled the building and filled my tanks and drove down the road to the portal. The Schwabenhof German pub was my target, well the heavily weathered sign at the bottom of the HILL to the pub. I pulled off on the side of the road and got a peak at the portal. JakeAK must have just hit Level 4 as this was the first time I had ever seen him post up Level 4 resonators. I opened up my Ingress Calculator and ran the numbers. Being only Level 3, I can only fire Level 3 and below weapons, the XMP bursters. I looked at the info and figured I could do it, if I got smart. The resonators circle around the portal, at the 8 different points of the compass, at about 40 meters from the center. I needed to be standing right on top them to do maximum damage. So I hopped out, back into the cold and started running around over frozen snow banks firing my bursters. Geekscape playing over my headphones, Jon talking to an EX-NFL star about Skyrim.

Soon the resonators started falling. JakeAK would be getting emails of my attack, but I doubt he’d come back out. I ran over another snow bank, but this one wasn’t solid on the back. I fell into snow up to my knee, but was right on top of a resonator, so I continued to fire. My shots flying outwards in a circle, doing direct damage at my feet and less at the edges. I was hitting three at once from this spot, and soon three fell. I dug myself out and took inventory. Three damaged resonators left, two Level 3 and one at 4. I was running out of gear so all my shots had to count. I looked at their location, two were on the other side of the road. I got to the edge of Palmer-Wasilla Highway and ran across. It’s called a highway but they’re kidding themselves. Two lanes a highway does not make. Not a lot of traffic at 1 AM.

I got to the other side and started to make my shots. Hitting two resonators at once. Jon was talking about seeing a geek movie at SXSW, he was worried that it would just end up being a parody movie, made by people that were not geeks. I wondered what he would think of me right now, fighting a fake intergalactic war on my phone. In a ditch. At 1 AM. The two resonators I was attacking fell. Only one Level 4 remained. It was severly damaged but I had used a lot of gear. So, I ran back to my warm truck and parked right on top of it. I fired and fired. Chipping away at the weak resonator. If I can destroy this I can recapture the Portal and claim control for the Enlightened. I fired and fired. More and more damage coming off. I fired and fired. Victory was soon mine. I fired and fired and…nothing. I had shot off my last Level 1 burster. The resonator still stood. So damaged it was practically on fire, but it still stood. Its blue glow signaled it was still under Resistance control.

It was a valiant effort for a lone Level 3, but I did not succeed. I sent a text to my friend Dylan, letting him know of my attack. He was surely asleep but I hoped he would wake up and come finish it off. I put my truck into gear and drove home.

Ingress is a game, but it is a different kind of game. It gets lazy nerds outside, running down streets, through ditches and over snow banks. It has introduced me and my friends to cool new people. We have run into people from the other team while on a raid. Dylan and I were in a town halfway to Anchorage, Eagle River, and were attacking portals and creating control fields. We had taken a few and gotten to our last portals of the run and a car pulled in behind us. I got out and said hello to a player from the other team, Tarpon. A really great guy who we got to chat with. He told us that he got emails of our attacks and planned to wait for us at the library, hoping we would keep attacking and he’d try to stop us by repairing our damage. He then told us he was thwarted when he saw us drive through the library parking lot to just collect XM.

This is just one of our encounters with Ingress. The people we’ve met have all been awesome. I can always expect to meet a nice geeky person at a Portal. I mean you have to be PRETTY nerdy to go on a city wide raid with eight other players, that was fun in itself! Finding the hiding resistance player in the parking lot to the Hockey arena was hilarious.

I highly suggest anyone with an Android phone go the official site and request an invite. You can play this anywhere! I was watching the Intel maps for the Vatican when the new Pope was being announced, watching Portals change sides faster than a strobe light was entertaining. A lot of those guests at the Vatican that day must have players.

Be sure to check out the official Ingress site. Apply for a code and hopefully you can start playing and meeting new people and finding new places that you never knew existed!