The Game That Wasn't There

An epic battle has been waged on the corner of Battery and Embarcadero! No, it wasn't between the police and the left-over “Occupy” types who just migrated back from Burning  Man. It was between the Enlightened and the Resistance, which are the warring factions in INGRESS.  Niantic Labs’ (aka Google) augmented reality game.

Ingress promises to be the cure for the iconic shut-in gamer, by forcing them out into RL (that’s Real Life in case you are over fifty) The objectives in INGRESS - known as portals - are tied to real geographic locations, such as the Donahue Monument. In order to interact with them, the player has to be in physical proximity to the portal.

INGRESS is a capture the flag game: you amass weapons, attack an adversary’s portal , claim the portal for yourself, and establish your defenses. Only, this one has a slightly bigger map than Halo, as in: life sized.

Ingress is also a LBS (Location Based Service), which means specific data objects are opened and closed to the device/user depending on their location. This is one of the largest and fastest growing Application-layer decision framework tools currently being utilized, and these are imbedded in all sorts of applications from Googling Thai noodles to advanced weapons systems.

It would be uncool to talk about INGRESS without mentioning Grey Area’s SHADOW CITIES game, which had the same concept, released for the iphone in 2010. Shadow Cities was much more metaphysical in nature, but having the same core mechanism; go places, do stuff. For whatever reason, Shadow Cities lasted about three years, and closed down in 2013. And for those of you who really want to geek out, there was the other predecessor: Uncle Roy All Around You.

Both Shadow Cities and Ingress augment reality in a rather cerebral way, and by that I mean they don’t; at least, not in a way that you can look at. Unlike the ads, players do not utilize the camera to see the Portal hovering above Donahue’s “Labor” statue, you just know it’s there, and do your thing entirely on your touch screen.

Strange Bedfellows

Reality and gaming have long been at loggerheads when it comes to a gamer’s time and attention. Games that pull the imagination out into the real world are not utterly unique. The LARPING phenomenon has been around for a minute or two. And, in case you don’t know what Larping is, and tend to Google stuff you don’t know about, have a nice night. And, Yes. It’s all real. In the case of Ingress and Shadow Cities, the “what have I become” feeling while getting out of the car is greatly diminished compared to dressing up like Boba Fett while LARPING. In fact, if your boss saw you obliterating someone’s portal or casting a Shadow Cities rune by the deli on Broadway, he would assume that you were just sending a text, or playing Candy Crush.

While we are on the topic, why are titles like Bejeweled or Candy Crush currently crushing games that offer us the chance to make realitymore exciting? King’s Candy Crush title has been number one on both Android and Apple, and has been played 151 billion times in its first year of release. Candy Crush is estimated to take in roughly 140 times the cash that Angry Birds takes in daily (not including licensing income).There is a morbid possibility that augmenting reality just does not do enough for it.

All cell phones have a rough idea of where they are, because they continually survey the cell towers in their area, and select, or are directed to, the tower that is best for them. This doesn’t mean they know how to get to Cleveland from where they are, they just have a feel for the tower infrastructure in the area. This information is communicated back to the towers, so the tower can relate salient information like, directing the handset to boost transmission power, or to hand off to another tower.

By using trilateration an APP can figure out more or less where it is. All cell phone towers in most civilized parts of the world are registered and mapped, so by applying that tower data to a database of possible towers, APPs could figure out how to get to Cleveland from the phone’s current approximate location. But, they don't. They use an LBS. The LBS doesn't need a huge databse, it sends the trilateration data as part of a metaphoric 'key' and the key just unlocks a specific 'box' of information which is sent back to the phone. In that way, massive amounts of data is not stored or transmitted. Currently, most smart phones use GPS trilateration the same way they can utilize the tower data only with much better accuracy. Phone apps then utilize this data to attack imaginary portals with imaginary weapons in order to take over an imaginary world. Shall we play a game?