Confessions of A Former Ingress Addict (AKA What I did while too depressed to play music for two years)
After my maternal grandma passed away, I stopped playing music for a couple of years...and in my most-depressed state, started playing Ingress to epically-obsessive levels.
Just couldn't find it within me to play music for a while. It was really tough. I needed something to occupy my free time, and I stumbled upon this interesting augmented reality game called Ingress in early 2014, and my life was forever changed.
I became Enlightened.
At its very basic, Wikipedia describes Ingress as:
Years before the release of Pokemon: Go, the ideas at Niantic Labs were owned and controlled by Google and they came up with this amazing augmented reality game that also requires you (even in the Terms of Service), to provide Google with data. You always have to have your Location Services on...now this is for the obvious "location-based" aspect of this game...but it also is tracking and logging your driving patterns. Awesome.
The main point of the game is to create triangles making links from portal to portal without any intersecting links getting in your way. You must be located at the portal to interact with it.
The larger of a metropolitan area you can cover, the more points you can amass for your team, and cycles determine regional scores for each team and are tracked over time from the history.
It's like capture the flag meets geocaching, and I loved it.
I drove all over the region playing this game on what we referred to as Field Ops on my days off, before work, after work, and any time I could find to occupy. I also made some great friends who have remained as such even after I left the game.
Since I was on the regions Field Team, I spent a ton of time driving around the region in a regular 100-mile radius of Springfield, MO during a time when gas prices were at an all-time high.
The most expensive "Free Game" you'll ever play.
While I didn't get involved in the international community beyond swag trading and stuff like that, there are HUGE Ingress First Saturday and Anomaly events that take place all over the world, and I suspect there are many current and former Ingress players on Steemit.
Why did I quit? Well, this little problem:
I was completely obsessed with this game...to the point that for 587 straight days I made sure that I hacked a portal within a 24-hour period. In fact, for the first 280 days, I actually hacked the exact same portal for this achievement, of which I was very proud.
I am a sucker for the potential of badges and marked achievement. I think I miss being in school. Even though I had maxed out my potential for this badge, my "streak" was over and I was heartbroken. I overslept and missed it by literally 45 minutes. I never expected to react to it the way I did, but when I say it broke my heart, it truly did. I felt shattered and honestly depressed for more than a couple of weeks, and then I just decided that the emotional investment I was making into this game was way too much and I needed to step back, regardless of the fulfillment my badges were giving me. I wanted to hit 730 days...two straight years of hacking.
The most basic of achievements to make, and I fucking failed.
Like I said, I love badges:
Politics of the Game
Our region was quite active during the couple of years I was playing Ingress. The Enlightened (green team) and The Resistence (blue team) were both active staging Ops within the city as well as a large region with Field Teams very active on both sides.
When you have active agents with lots of ideas, there's bound to be drama of sorts. Our region suffered as a result of this in a big way. Old leadership battling with new leadership, and a lot of folks wanting to do things "their way or the highway," which made fielding increasingly difficult.
I came in during a shift in the game, during the winter of 2013-2014 there had been a small influx of new players when the game released to iOS users, and I came in at the tail end of that particular wave of the game.
Back in my day, when there were only 25 portals in this damn town and we had to work together...blah blah blah...
While Ingress is a game which encourages people to work together...some Field Operations just aren't possible without the help of many people, sometimes reaching over many states...however, sometimes at a regional level, not all field ops needed to involve all agents...
...and then we had a communications leak.
For a while, no one trusted anyone. Our chat rooms were filled with cryptic conversation and words of distrust and arguments. The fun was being sucked out of the game.
Maybe I'm naive, but I prefer a pure thing remain pure.
Some of my Ingress Swag from the International Community:
The International Ingress Swag Community is really cool. Lots of challenge coins made for various regions, and I was very proud to be a part of a cross-faction challenge coin made for the Springfield Region. For a period of time, we were working together to protect our L8 Farm located on Historic Commercial Street in Springfield, MO, and the coin was really meant to commemorate that teamwork.
Here are some shots from some of my favorite field ops that I had the opportunity of being involved in. I'll never forget the experiences I had playing Ingress, what I learned about teamwork as adults, and the things we accomplished together.
I tried to get these to post side-by-side, but none of the script I tried worked this time. My apologies.
These ops include fielding over considerable portions of Missouri, as well as a couple of multi-state ops, including when I team-fielded Perdido Key in Florida, covering the entire key, and also with the 3-field finale there at the end of the gallery, which I was able to knock down the final blocking link to make this op possible. Not gonna lie, my communities made me feel like a hero, and that was super cool.
If you play Pokemon: Go, you have Ingress Agents to thank for all of your PokeStops and Gyms, because we actually worked to identify those locations and provide infomation about them, submitted them to approval to Niantic, and that eventually became the complete groundwork for PG. You're welcome. ;)
We received zero compensation for our discoveries and work to increase the quality of portals which eventually turned into PokeStops and Gyms.
Again, although a bit of a departure from the music, Field Trips, photography, and Weird Plastic Baby stuff, I hope you enjoyed this look into Ingress through a former addict's eyes. It was quite therapeutic to write. Thanks for reading it.
Follow me @jessamynorchard for more assorted randomness!
Awesome post! The wife and I had an addiction to Ingress as well. Not as bad or as long as yourself. We really enjoyed it while we were playing. We were the only active Enlightened members in our area. It kind of sucked, but we always had stuff do do, lol. You're right, we sure wasted a shit ton of gas driving around everywhere. But, it was fun and great for killing time.
I'm a sucker for strategy games, and we had fun working with some of the more rural agents to make really big field ops as well as helping protect guardians and to create high-level farms. Playing up against a stacked team can be tough. Our ENL bunch was always smaller, but we considered ourselves smarter, and therefore always seemed to have great ways to thwart the area Smurfs' plans. :)
Hell to the yes! It is a pretty cool game. I think it would be a lot of fun in an urban area.
We had a ton of Founders in our area, so it is definitely rich with great portals. Not only in a quantity level, but the quality of the portals is also nice with accurate historical descriptions and names. I've heard in other places of the country/world it isn't always as nicely done. I learned so much about the town I moved to all by playing Ingress, and I'm so thankful for that info.
"Oh woah, you mean the Bio Studies place used to be the first schoolhouse in the County? That's pretty cool." Kind of stuff.
"Oh woah, where we crossed these railroad tracks right there is actually where soldiers crossed during Zagonyi's Charge during the US Civil War."
So true. We learned quite a bit about or town as well. We actually only noticed a couple landmarks that weren't properly identified. It happens though.
Instantly followed ! This is a great story. I loved ingress too back in the days.
I used to ride a bike to do 14 kilometers to reach the nearest city and participates to operations there.
It was a great time :) I miss it. Thanks for the feel trip.
By the way if you like technology/games I'm writing about it, you might like it :)
It was such a good time for such a long time. I reinstalled my app to get some info of my badges and stuff for this post, and threw a message out in COMM to my old cronies...they all want me back. I told them about Steemit. LMAO
... @howo also following you now!
I couldnt get into the game, but it is definitely an awesome idea
Nice
FOLLOW and upvoted me@roney-ron
Thanks, man! Much appreciated! Glad you enjoyed it.
Thank you for the detailed article! What a nice way to entertain yourself while connecting to others. I will check this out since Skyrim crashed my last HD :)
You are quite welcome. The game really is fantastically intelligent. I highly recommend it. It just became too much emotional investment for me. My advice is to keep it as a game and to keep it at arm's length. You may not have issues with that, but I most certainly do, so I always pass that along. Those hours you spend driving and the time you spend planning can start to really mean a lot to a person quite quickly.
Awesome post. I'm 12 days away from blacking my sojourner badge. i hope I can write a post about it once I have it.
I cant blame you for feeling so depressed after failing at double onyx. I almost smashed my scanner after my gp was killed on 147th day.
Followed.:)
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good post! I was resistance but no hate! I too was a former ingress addict for a time!
Interesting read! Ingress is an awesome game and I liked playing it 2 years ago. I discovered several interesting places in my area and partecipated in a germany-wide ops once.
But I stopped playing after I got stopped in my car by the local police at 2 am in my little town when attacking a portal ( I always parked correctly in public parking lanes/spots) and after people looked at me when walking crazy with my phone in hand. I just don't want the people in my little town where I live and work to know that I play a game like ingress as an adult. :)
And also it got boring after a while driving to nearby towns playing ingress and just the next day all captured portals got re-capped and links destroyed. And it also became time consuming collecting XM and recharging portals on a regular basis.
But it was an interesting experience!
Are You a true ingress player? A true ingress player has been stopped by the police at least once... ;-)
very interesting post