In the Summer of 2015?, I found myself driving an hour and a half past fields and through 1 lane stone bridges to an old mill town South of Pittsburgh. I was ordered there by an operator who was who was too sick/drunk to make it there herself. We had connected a few times and I knew that this mission was vital, it wasn’t until the next week that I knew why. But for the next 45 minutes I stood in an abandoned part of town praying that I would get enough keys for it to be worth it before I burnt out the portal for good. A few days later, I was taking some out of town operatives to the subway in downtown Pittsburgh when the whole county was coated in layer upon layer of green ‘fields’. I smiled and knew that my mission had been a success.
I am talking about the AR game Ingress made by Niantic that went on to make Pokemon Go. Though I mostly play Pokemon Go if I’m playing one of these AR games, Ingress’s strategic layer was always more interesting to me in the way that it encouraged collective actions. In the scenario I described above, I was ‘hacking’ a portal over and over again in order to collect ‘keys’ to the portal. You can link the portal you are at to any portal for which you have a key (as long as the link you make doesn’t cross any existing links). Whenever a triangle is closed, it creates a field which is where the game’s points derive. Thus, a main goal of Ingress is to create fields that cover as much area as possible. There was a particular incentive in the scenario above as an ‘Anomaly’ was happening in Pittsburgh where the points that were accrued in Pittsburgh from that morning to that evening would be more meaningful in the grander story of the game. [A story that very few Ingressers that I knew paid much attention to.] My farming for keys allowed two other operators to create a huge field by connecting two portals (in the NE and NW of Pittsburgh) to the one in the South I farmed. In addition though, other operators had to go and destroy links that would interfere with that large field while also distracting other operators from knowing what the grand plan was. Ingress’s main chat was notorious for containing false leads and information.
In Pittsburgh, the largest team when I was playing was the Enlightened (green) and thus each individual operator didn’t have to do too much for us to maintain control of the city. The Resistance (blue) was localized mostly to the Northside and, because there were fewer players, many of their players were much more active. This led to a number of defectors who said the culture in the Resistance was very negative and contained a lot of bullying.
I was never a very active member in the organized activities around Ingress but I enjoyed what I was involved in. Now that I have begun being involved in activities for Pokemon Go, it has become clear again that it is possible to have unique and complicated collective actions organized for these sorts of games. In a recent ‘Raid train’ in which I was a participant, individuals talked in detail about organizing that happened for an event in Chicago. But also there was a discussion about false information posted on our local Discord channel (a community message board) about a special pokemon appearing downtown, a false report that led to a lot of consternation.