Ingress: A Computer Game that Makes you Leave Home

This is a new dawn in gaming. A totally different way in playing computer games. You no longer move your character with your mouse inside a virtual game world, but you are actually getting off your computer chair and your screen monitor, and start walking down your local park and shopping centre, playing in a real world map, where you and your mobile phone is the game character

If we look back in the early days, we used to play a game in front of a TV, moving a block around the screen. Then the computers became better and the little blocks changed to a whole new 3d virtual word, where you assume the role of a character and start quests in vast areas, fighting dragons or aliens.

When good internet connection became available, we started playing these games with many other people from all around the world, creating virtual groups and societies, fighting and building whole countries.

The Ingress game took the Online Massive Multiplayer Game to another level. Instead of starting moving your character with the mouse through virtual imaginary lands, created in some game developer’s commuter, you actually move yourself and your mobile phone around your own town. This happens as the Ingress game replaced the virtual game map with the Google Map, where with the help of the GPS of your phone, every player becomes a dot on the world map. If you see in the city people standing in front of a sculpture, using their phone for one minute and then moving on, it might not be that they just sent a sms, but that they were just login in Ingress and virtual attacked at the position they were just standing.

The Ingress game is based loosely to the TV Series Fringe. According to the game, the world as we know is under threat for an unknown entity, possibly Aliens. There are two groups (teams), the Resistance, who want to protect us from a potential invasion, and the Enlightened, who think that the Aliens will actually help humanity.

Both teams fight for area control, by capturing portals, which are in real life places of significance, like monuments, bridges, post offices. In order to capture one of those portals, you actually need to get down to that place and log in your mobile phone an attack. It is a classic “capture the flag” game, which has made many computer game players turn from couch potatoes to healthy street walkers.

It is so addicted, that the biggest complaint from player is that their phone battery runs out after a 3 hour walking trip around the town.

The whole game uses Google Maps and of course it is backed up by Google, who owns the game company, Ingress. The game is still in testing mode, and it is expected to come live soon.  It is expected to become the next computer addiction, that also has the potential to keep you fit and introduce you to new friends from your local area. For more info, just google Ingress.