INGRESS REPORT – Translator, Bucketlist, Unight16 – Raw Feed
There are around 220 countries around the world and 150 countries will participate in Ingress Saturday next week. That leaves out about seventy countries.
At this time of year there is a race between the walker and the sun. Either you must go for a walk earlier in the day or you must be ready to walk after the sun has set. Both of these are possible. The days are getting shorter and the temperatures are getting lower. They are getting low enough for gloves to be tempting. I haven’t worn them yesterday, or today, but yesterday I almost felt the need.
One aspect of Autumn walks is that we walk at the golden hour, so the light is good for pictures, if you are equipped to walk, once the sun has set. I was not, so I continued walking, hoping to get home before it was too dark to see. I did, easily.
Pikmin Bloom is simple. It is an app/game that uses your steps to decide how many flowers you have planted in the AR world. As you go for your daily walk you plant flowers, and as you plant flowers, and as you take steps, you also gestate flowers in pots.
The game is made by Niantic Labs, makers of Ingress, a great game, and Pokemon Go, a game for compulsive OCD people. Can you tell which one I prefer. So far the biggest flaw i see with Pikmin bloom is that it does not count all your steps. It only counts those that are taken as the app is open, or a certain mode is engaged, and that is a shame. With Ingress I would easily have the 2500 kilometre badge, if only it counted all walking, rather than just the walking you do with the app open.
We are not all going for walks, just to play AR games. Some us go for a walk to go for a walk, and if we’re in the mood we may spend a few minutes playing Ingress or other Niantic games. I dislike Pokemon Go because of the random rejection when you try to catch Pokemon Go creatures. It feels too time demanding, to be worth investing in.
I will spend more time playing with Pikmin Bloom. The name is hard to remember. We will see how long I last.
Now that we are between the via ferrata season and the snowboarding and scuba diving season a distraction is provided by gamers who like to use the physical world and mobile phones.
Dear Ingress agents of Lausanne and elsewhere,
The first Saturday of December (06/12/14), our city will participate in a special Niantic event named #IngressFS (https://plus.google.com/+Ingress/posts/7oVmNtssWGu). Meetings, fun and competition will be there !
Schedule of the day:
10:00 AM : Cross-Faction Coffee / Croissants at Qwerz bar. Meeting between the players, advices and help to the new players, sharing experiences and explanations for the rest of the day.
12:00 AM : Start of the Level-Up Bootcamp event. AP of players will be registered and the teams will be formed (experienced players with new agents). Note that the Visur Game Mechanic system will reward most handsomely low levels agents.
2:00 PM – ? : End of the Level-Up Bootcamp event. Back at the meeting point (Qwertz bar), the AP gained will be recorded and prizes will be given.
Then : beers, beergress & other activities / surprises for you.
For those who also want to eat together at the evening, we created a separate event which you need to register if you want to come : https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/ccbaf6qv7rjgndtoo0b7upbu5mo
Lausanne was selected by Niantic as the main city for the event #IngressFS December 6, so we should receive kits First Saturday (IFSK-100) you distribute: https://plus.google.com/+Ingress/posts / Ai7yxoCpq2L ! Agents of all levels are encouraged to participate to have a good day between Ingress players.
Please fill the following form for the organization of the levelup (we will contact the low levels some days before the event to know their new level) : http://goo.gl/forms/CNSz5ZZVMT
Additionals informations concerning the organization will be provided here. Thank you to register if you would like to participate, so that we could have the best organization possible.
If you’re a geek and you like mobile phones with a data plan then ingress is for you. Over the last two days I walked 18 kilometres playing ingress and winning back the City of Nyon for the Resistance. It didn’t last long. The same evening the enlightened players destroyed my hard work. I will just have to go back and liberate the city later. I have more important tasks this weekend. Tomorrow Ingress FS Neuchatel will take place. At least twenty of us will be playing, walking around the city, looking for portals and trying to take over the city.
Staring at a phone while walking around a city may sound counterintuitive, or absolutely normal for those who still use text messaging apps or tweet. In this case though you discover details of cities that you would not notice. You notice plaques, the names of places which you always walk by but never knew about and more.
Playing the game has two parts. Attack and defence is one part and farming the second. Attack and defence are good because they don’t require much walking around. They just require having a lot of “toys” to play with. The drawback to having a lot of toys to play with is that you probably walked around like I did going from portal to portal and hacking it. You get weapons, modules, resonators and more. They are good for game play.
There is a cultural aspect to farming. Missions designed by L9 players of ingress have portals related to a certain theme. If you walk in the old town of Geneva you can follow the Calvin track, the park brunswick mission or the Geneve, around the Cathedral mission. There is a good chance that you will know some of the monuments and you will discover others. With each portal players can write a description. These descriptions can provide you with a new understanding of the places you pass by. In essence it could serve as a guide book for those who like to see things in a different light.
I was going to take the scooter but it was stuck by three SUVs so I had no option but to lazily give up and go on a 10 kilometre Sunday Ingress walk. I couldn’t be bothered running up to the second floor, getting the car keys, moving the car, getting the scooter out and then moving the car back. This is especially true since it’s going to rain tomorrow.
I do have the goal of having at least one day a week without using an internal combustion engine so by the neighbours each having jeeps/SUVs I reduced my own carbon footprint. Days without internal combustion are always good.
My goal was to complete the Nyon by night set of missions. It’s the top line in the screengrab above. It’s a quick set of missions to complete with just a hack but portal for six portals. As the servers were not acting up or slow the time it took to do the walk was enough to complete the six missions. In the process, I captured a few portals and established a few more fields over the city.
While on this walk I listened to the You’re Dead to Me podcast by the BBC. It’s a podcast that explores history in a light-hearted manner. It has a comedian, an expert on the topic of the episode and the presenter. In the episode I listened to they were discussing Harriet Tubman, It’s the little brother of the In Our Time Podcast.
When I was playing Ingress a few years ago I didn’t track the walk with a GPS. I tracked it for this walk. You see that rather than be a large circular hike without overlaps you have the opposite. You see that I walked over certain streets in Nyon two or three times. You also see that there are thorns where I walk to the right or left of my course to get a portal or other.
It’s especially around the Centre of Nyon that you see that I walk through many more streets than usual. On a normal walk, I’d walk from A to B choosing the most direct route. In this case, I go up and down certain streets two or three times.
If you do this without trying to complete a mission it will be even more chaotic as you walk from portal to portal to hack, capture, up, field or other.
During the lull between summer sports and winter sports Ingress is a good way for some people to get out and be physically active without necessarily driving for hours.
People are playing Ingress and Pokemon Go in Parallel. Both games use the same geo-located points and walk the same routes. They have the same places to farm and combat. I started playing Ingress again, but only a few minutes here and there. As I play I see new faces and new people at Ingress portals. They are no longer my age or older. They are much younger, in their teens.
Yesterday as the neighbours were having a party I decided to take advantage of the excuse to go out and play Ingress. I went to the four or five portals in my village. At the village church I saw a youth drive up to it on a scooter, farm via the Pokemon Go layer and then leave. Nothing changed on the Ingress layer. No damaged resonators, no upgrades.
I like that people can play two entirely different games at the same location. I see this as the future of geo-located games. I see this as the next wave. The physical world provides the location and then the layer (or game) provides the user interface, the virtual world we interact with. With imagination more and more layers can be added. This will provide people with choice.
The next step is smartwatches and augmented reality goggles. Those who have played Ingress intensively know where all the portals are so they can put their phone away when walking from point to point. The same is probably true of Pokemon Go players. One person wrote that he uses his smartwatch to farm when walking around. Imagine if Google Glass had come out now. If it had come out now, with the Pokemon Go craze people would buy them.
At the moment to play pokemon Go and Ingress you walk in a position, that given time, will turn us in to hunchbacks. Rather than being from manual work in a field or a coal mine it will be from walking staring at a phone. I write this with a certain sense of humour. The market for Augmented reality goggles is ripe. Device manufacturers should grab this opportunity while it lasts.