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!
