Media: Google’s Ingress Takes Mobile Gaming to the Streets

Google’s Ingress Takes Mobile Gaming to the Streets

Andersen, M. (2014). Wired. Originally posted at ARGNet. Excerpts below. Click the link to read the whole article for background on how Ingress started, game specifics and the convoluted storyline. 

Google has encouraged Android users to wage a silent battle for global domination focused on locations of cultural relevance, through its mobile game Ingress. For over a year, “field agents” in the game’s invite-only beta have pieced together a deep narrative hiding just beneath the surface of the geolocative gameplay. The game was recently opened up to all Android devices, with an iOS release rumored for 2014.

It’s been over a year since Google introduced the world of Ingress. At its core, the project is a locative mobile game spawned out of NianticLabs@Google, an internal skunkworks team based out of the search giant’s San Francisco office. In Ingress, players compete to capture and connect virtual portals situated at real world locations to control the globe for their team. 

Finding Community in Competition

In the past year, the Ingress community has blossomed, with blogs and a subredditproviding regular updates on the game’s progress, Wikis documenting the minutae of the game’s story, and a weekly in-game web series produced by NianticLabs drawing attention to some of the game’s highlights, focusing in equal parts on the narrative and gameplay. And there are quite a few highlights, like when one passionate player got a tattoo of the game’s logo.

Each of these serve as practical windows into the world of Ingress for the outsider, but the most vibrant community can be found on Google+. While Google’s efforts to integrate its social network across everything from YouTube to Gmail has been met its own resistance from the company’s existing user base, Ingress may serve as Google’s strongest case study for providing a compelling reason for people to actually use the service for its intended purpose. Ingress‘ gameplay is inherently competitive, pitting faction against faction. However, inter-faction collaboration is also essential for regional planning, so players have turned to Google+ Circles to manage tactical planning while still participating in cross-factional conversations.

The friendly localized rivalries have even led to some unexpected and unprompted instances of geo-locative artwork. Given a palatte of geo-locative points on a map, Enlightened and Resistance field agents teamed up to engage in not-so-random acts of field art, carving out virtual bat signals, woodpeckers, and sailboats to decorate the game’s interface.