Ingress, the popular GPS-Enabled Android game from Google's internal tech startup, Niantic Labs, winner of Top Game of 2013 at the Google Play Player's Choice Awards, was released for iOS 7.0 devices this week. [Previously on MeFi]
Ingress is Niantic Labs' proof-of-concept and testbed for a new type of mobile game, that in the words of their CEO John Hanke, formerly Vice President of Product Management of Google's "Geo" division, will "help people get more out of the real world when they're out."
The mechanics of the game have been compared to king of the hill and capture the flag mixed with geocaching. Points of interest around the world, such as public sculptures, murals & commissioned street art, historical markers, unique local landmarks, and even libraries and places of worship, have been designated as "portals" on Ingress's game map, and players must take their mobile device out into the world and visit these portals by approaching within 40 meters of them to begin to play the game. Once they have these items, they can begin to claim portals for their team, link claimed portals together, and when three of these portals all get linked together, a triangle of their team's color gets drawn on the map, adding points to their team's global score, until the other team comes along to knock it down.
Beyond the mechanics of gameplay, Ingress has been marketed as being both types of "ARG" -- an Augmented Reality Game as well as an Alternate Reality game. As an Augmented Reality Game, it falls short of what's shown in Niantic Labs' promotional videos. Both the original game trailer and their trailer announcing the iOS release make it look like you would be able to see the in-game portals overlaid on top of the points of interest associated with them, but currently, the game only shows them on a map interface. (The newer trailer is however, is a wonderful acknowledgement that prior to the iOS release, the Android players, when trying to spot other players, would immediately dismiss any iPhone users as harmless.)
As for Ingress as an Alternate Reality Game, in that category, it may very well be too successful for its own good. The game has an elaborate backstory, described by the creators as a J.J. Abrams-like sci-fi spy thriller. As far as Alternate Reality Games go, this game's reality is so alternate, many players don't even try to follow it, instead focusing strictly on just playing the game itself.
Development of the game's backstory has been under the direction of Niantic Labs' Creative Lead Flint Dille. Dille, whose previous works include screenwriting for the original Transformers and G.I Joe cartoons (He's responsible for killing Optimus Prime in the 1986 movie, and the G.I. Joe character Flint is his namesake) was also was the head of TSR's west cost division, producing TSR's Buck Rogers XXVc pen & paper RPG (continuing the legacy of his grandfather, who had adapted Buck Rogers from a sci-fi novella into a daily newspaper comic strip).
Flint Dille arranged and appeared at the event that would be Ingress's ARG Trailhead, a seeming crazy outburst during a panel at the 2012 San Diego Comic Con, by a man named Tycho, reportedly a comic book "ghost artist" who gets called in to finish unfinished pieces by other artists to meet publishing deadlines. Soon after, bits of the storyline, involving the discovery of an extra-dimensional intelligence called the Shapers, and the efforts of a secret US government agency to determine how much of a threat they are, and whether that threat could be turned into a weaponized asset instead, began being parceled out in bite-sized chunks on a daily basis at the website NianticProject.com (And then later on, through posts on G+ on the +NianticProject account's feed). To encourage players to investigate the Alternate Reality Game, passcodes redeemable for in-game gear are hidden in each release of storyline media using steganography and scrambled with simple cyphers.
To bring new players up to speed, two videos were produced to summarize year one of the backstory: Part 1 and Part 2. These two videos were part of a weekly series of YouTube videos called the Ingress Report, which Niantic Labs uses to disseminate both heavy doses of backstory, as well as highlighting major operations by the players themselves. Other avenues that they have used to get Ingress's storyline out to the players include comic books, soundcloud channels, and several e-books: The Alignment Ingress, The Niantic Project: Ingress, and Ingress: Level 8 (a fourth e-book release The Shaper Key, is currently being written). A more recent media offering under the Ingress banner, is a second weekly YouTube video series, titled Ingress Obsessed. It is presented as a vlog produced by a pair of sisters who are low level agents in the game (in actuality, the sisters are both established Hollywood actors), and eschews the deep dives into the backstory to instead focus more on what the players manage to accomplish in-game, as well as tips geared to beginning players. Recent episodes have also been heavy on the video effects to push concept of Ingress as Augmented Reality, similar to the two trailers mentioned above.
When crafting the backstory, Niantic was quite careful in how they depict the two teams of players in the game, making it so that there's no clear distinction of who are "the good guys" and who are "the bad guys." The blue team, the Resistance, will tell you that they're fighting against alien mind control and want to keep humanity "human". However they may very well be helping a US spy agency learn the secrets of mind control for themselves, and in the worst case, enabling a rogue Artificial Intelligence wipe everyone's brain clean to have room to run AI code on our wetware. On the flip side, the green team, the Enlightened, say that they want to harness this extradimensional energy from the Shapers to bring artistic and scientific inspiration to everyone on the planet, sparking the next stage of human evolution. But they may just be under alien mind control, wanting to bring everyone else under mind control too, except for the few who go insane from the process, and then once these minds are controlled the Shapers will consume people's life experiences like pieces of fruit.
Aside from the Alternate Realty Game aspects of the backstory, Ingress is also notable for being a free mobile game that does not rely on the micropayment model. Instead Niantic Labs funds the game through sponsorship deals, such as a deal with HINT Water to include a passcode under the caps of their bottles redeemable for in-game items. Other partnerships saw the locations for Jamba Juice and ZipCar added to the game map as portals despite these locations not meeting the usual "interesting local feature" standard for being portals.
There is also speculation that Niantic is taking the location data that the game is constantly collecting when it is being played and funneling that data back to the Google mothership, presumably to help Google map out places the Street View car can't access, such as the walking paths of the parks that many of Ingress's portals are located in. While spokespeople from Niantic have denied any data mining on their part, their status as a semi-independent company segregated from the bulk of Google proper means that the denial could mean that while Niantic Labs themselves aren't tapping that data, the parent company could very well be exploiting it. What isn't speculation is the fact that point of interest information submitted by players as part of Ingress's new portal process has also shown up in Niantic's other app, Field Trip.
Another privacy concern that players must evaluate and weight against the enjoyment they get out of the game is the fact that when a portal is captured, linked, or neutralized, the name of the portal and the player's in-game name are announced on the game's COMM channel for every player to potentially see. Over time, it becomes easy for other players to pick up on the "when" and "where" of a particular player's activities. And while automated scraping of game data is against the game's Terms of Service, there is a popular browser script that aids in compiling those COMM announcements into a map marker with a trail showing locations that players have been over the last few hours.
Furthermore, while the game itself encourages the use of an in-game name that can't be tied to your real identity, to the point of allowing name changes for players who used all or part of their real name and listing the revealing another player's real name as a bannable offense in their community guidelines, this is largely a moot point, as an overwhelming amount of player-to-player networking for the Ingress community occurs on G+ which until very recently, had a "Real Name" policy in place.
Despite the privacy issues, and other controversies, such as concern that portals located on military bases may lead to incidents between civilians and base security, Niantic Labs is pushing on to adapt the technologies they developed in Ingress to new games, such as their partnership with Harper Collins and 20th Century Fox to develop a game tie-in to a series of young-adult novels and movie adaptations from author James Frey, Endgame. Bringing things full circle to Ingress's own origin, James Frey and John Hanke will be presenting a panel about Endgame on Saturday July 26th in room 7AB at San Diego Comic Con this year.