So there has been a bit of buzz recently (mainly about how to get a invite) about a new game from the Google NianticLabs called Ingress. It is a AR game where users do battle for one of two factions in a virtual world overlaid on top of the real world.
The game is still in closed beta at the moment and only open to people with invites, you can apply for an invite here. You can also submit Ingress inspired art work to Google Plus and tagging Brandon Badger, Brian Rose, Anne Beuttenmüller and +Joe Philley and hope they are impressed enough to let you in.
The premiss is that the work at CERN hunting for the Higgs boson has caused the release/discovery of something called Exotic Matter (XM). This XM seams to be capable of influencing human behaviour, especially in the creative and scientific direction. Following this discovery those that know of it’s existence fall in to two factions, the Enlightened who believe that XM is sent to help humanity and the Resistance who believe that XM is part of a slow insidious invasion. As well as XM there are portals which seam to be related. Portals can be captured and things called Resonators added, with these three or more portals can be linked together to create fields in the enclosed space. These field allow the Enlightened or the Resistance to try and influence the public to their way of thinking. The battle is to create the largest fields and influence the most people.
If you happen to live in an area with no portals you can add new ones to the game by sending geo-tagged photos of “interesting” locations to Google via the app, but they take between 2-3 weeks to be added. That seams a long time for somebody to maintain an interest if they are in a area with little or no existing portal, I’m still waiting for any of mine to appear, but I’ve managed to stay engaged by playing around the 4 portals up in Winchester.
There is the start of a strong social aspect to the game as well, you need to arrange for other members of your faction to coordinate attacks on portals (especially the higher level version)in order to capture them back from the opposition and you also need their help to upgrade portals to higher levels to enable longer range links.
There are plenty more detailed discussions about the game online so I won’t go on any more about that here. What is more interesting is the potential this sort of platform has. The combination of crowd sourcing and gamification may well lead to something like the game Spooks, from Charles Stross‘ Halting State. I’m not suggesting any thing as sinister as Spooks, where the EULA turned out to be a click through copy of the Official Secrets Act, and the whole thing was being run by MI5, but it’s important to remember that Google are not running this game for fun, to start with it’s a way to get more people to volunteer more location data and also a nice way to collect a bunch of geo-tagged photos from the portal submission process. I’m already signed up to Latitude so it’s not a problem for me to send my location to google again as part of the game but I do wonder how many other players are aware of the trade they are making to play the game and what else they may need to trade as the game continues.
I’m also sure that Google have a bunch more plans for the project. Thinking about how this could be extended leads to any number of avenues, what could you do with a large enough group of people for the promise of some notional in game reward (at little to no cost to the host)? Things that come to mind:
- Set tasks to submit photos of new buildings/locations to keep things like Streetview up to date.
- Have users walk new roads/paths to update mapping data
- Taking it a step further, with the right mechanisms built in to evaluate trust could you build a cheap/free delivery service having players deliver packages across a city?
These are just a few that came to mind as I was putting this post together, I’m sure there are many more. I’ll be keeping an eye on how it develops and of course capturing portals for the Resistance.
