https://www.ingress.com/

Anyone here playing? I keep seeing people talking about it, looks… interesting.

Worth a punt, or pointless unless you’re in a city centre?

And, which faction? My area coverage is very one-sided; choose the dominant force or root for the underdog?

don’t do it!

pointless in a city centre.

yes there’ll be a dominant side (blue here iirc), but watch the map over 2 weeks, and it does change.

but it’s a massive timewaste, needs cooperation, and then some others will cooperate to undo everything you’ve just done.

it does make you see the town in a different way, and also play it for a week and you realise how many others fondling phones are also wasting time on it.

I got to L3 (edit: might have been L4) and deleted the app. What it really is, is a way for Google to get people walking round towns with wifi, gps and 3G enabled to populate Goggle’s location database 😉 Very clever though.

Haven’t played it, but met Niantic Labs through work, and some obsessive Ingress fans.
Very impressive concept behind the games and some ambitious plans. They also have a really, really interesting concept in the pipeline.

certainly others at work play (for the other faction).
no clue who they are.
but someone placed portal onsite, so only us and visitors have access to it (technically against the rules), although I’ve had such big GPS inaccuracies before that maybe some can access it from a distance from time to time.

I wish I could persuade myself to delete it. It’s filled in quite a few otherwise boring lunchtimes and I’m now L8 but I could probably find more constructive uses of my time. It helps that I’m in a city centre. I don’t want to co-operate with other players because they’re probably all weirdo geeks 😕

What it really is, is a way for Google to get people walking round towns with wifi, gps and 3G enabled to populate Goggle’s location database

Yeah, that was my first thought too. Whether that’s a bad thing is another matter. (-:

Interesting concept. Could it be taken out into the wild? Around trail centres would be the obvious one 🙂

Could it be taken out into the wild?

erm. it is out in the wild everywhere

there is some procedure to have new portals placed, and there’s no real reason why they couldn’t be at interesting places on a trail centre.

there is definitely a massive bias to cities though.

erm. it is out in the wild everywhere

I should rephrase then – as in, is it limited to city use? Or anywhere you can get a GPS signal and 3G/WiFi network.

I believe “portals” have to be publicly accessible. Eg, I couldn’t use our boardroom at work.

I should rephrase then – as in, is it limited to city use? Or anywhere you can get a GPS signal and 3G/WiFi network.

anywhere there’s GPS and a data connection. realistically that’ll be 3G (or 4G), but wifi is possible.

you have to be physically within so many metres of a “portal”, so as above, it needs to be located in a publicly accessible area. so some trail art/sculpture for example at an area where you may congregate at start/end of a trail would be fine (especially if there;s a right of way), but halfway down a red with no pedestrian access would be “naughty” (but wouldn’t be the first such portal).

The Enlightened are the best faction to join – we have beer and cake ?

There are portals in lots of places – including some at trail centres.