Extraction from a Cell Phone Game

Two years ago, Thanksgiving 2015, my brother introduced my husband and me to a cell phone game called Ingress. He billed it as a great way to learn about landmarks and art around your location. Since he lived in Williamsburg, VA, we quickly discovered that we could easily locate plenty of portals to destroy the enemy and capture with our own resonators, and gained a couple of levels before the week was out.

Once we were home in Northern Virginia, we discovered local portals and where the general lines of the Enlightened and the Resistance were. It became a competition between us to see who could level up first. My time as an artist in Occoquan helped me to gain more points and medals than my husband. After all, historic towns had the best places to “hack”.

The pros of this game:

·       Something my husband and I could do together.

·       Exercise – getting us out and walking.

·       Exploring new places.

The cons of a phone game:

·       We’d get rather competitive on who captured and destroyed portals

·       We were walking with our faces in our phones and not always paying attention to our surroundings

·       We were not taking in the area around us – we were looking for portals and not landmarks, art or history

It was easy to get addicted, and as with any addiction, one looked for more fixes and took chances. I got adept at hacking portals as I drove by on low speed limit streets. If I was close to gaining another medal or leveling up, I would fixate until I got those achievements.

In the summer of 2016, the Ingress people released a phone version of Pokémon. Portals that were used in Ingress were repurposed for this game and historic towns were flooded with kids of all ages capturing strange creatures. Every time I went playing Ingress, people asked if I was playing Pokémon. It started some interesting conversations, but I also discovered some of the people playing a children’s character game were rather creepy.

The Ingress people were nice for the most part, no matter which side they were playing for. One group met at a local restaurant, and we learned a bit more about playing the game better, but I did leave the place thinking that some of these people do not have a life outside the game. In fact, if one noted on the game’s activity board the time and places a person went, you’d find some people out late at night, driving around from portal to portal.

There was a “local” event in Williamsburg where an Ingress gathering was to be held one weekend so new people could level up and players could meet with each other. We actually considered driving 2.5 hours to each way to play, but came to our senses.

Then there were the people who looked like they had special insight into the game, and hunted down player’s portals that were nearing some sort of goal. My husband and I were always blown away any time we got close to holding a portal for more than 100 days. We needed 150 days to earn the highest medal for that goal, and hubby got to 149 days when someone destroyed his portal. That was his last straw. He quit the game in early 2017. I hung on awhile longer. I was at level 13, and decided that I would quit once I got the 150 day ownership of a portal and to level 14. I had the medals, but needed the points to level up.

Being in NM proved more difficult to run up the points as quickly as in VA. With my husband no longer playing, it was getting boring to do this solo. I had claimed several obscure portals at a historic site in NM when I first moved to the state, and it looked good that I might be able to keep it.

When my portal was destroyed at 133 days, that became the nail in this game’s coffin. I just no longer had the desire to try for another 5 months to hold one portal or to score another 500,000 points to level up. I shut down my game almost two years after starting it and gave my arsenal to my brother.

Now when my husband drives, I’m looking out the window at the beautiful scenery instead of my phone looking for the next portal. My phone’s battery lasts a lot longer. I also no longer drive around looking for portals, wasting gas and time.

After two years of playing – what have I gained? Nothing. There is no satisfaction of accomplishment. I am no better or worse off because of this game than I was before I started playing. I don’t miss it either. This is written just to close it out and give an experience in case anyone is thinking about starting something like this. Just ask yourself – what do you think you’ll gain by getting involved?