Arabnet Arabnet

Ingress is an augmented reality massively multiplayer turf war game by Niantic Labs. In it, players assume the role of agents in one of two factions: the resistance or the enlightenment. The latter wants to embrace the power of the Exotic Matter, or XM for short, and a mysterious alien race associated with it known as the Shapers. The Enlightenment wants to help the Shapers infiltrate Earth based on their belief that they bring a powerful enlightenment that will lift humankind. The resistance want to quell the odd phenomenon, and by doing so, keep it out of the wrong hands and fend off the Shaper takeover. The playground is the world around you.

The story revolves around an obscure phenomenon. Energy of alien origin has been seeded into earth. Your job as agent is control energy portals where the XM seems to be seeping out. These portals can be found near cultural landmarks such as public art, libraries, post offices, memorials, places of worship, public transit hubs, and buildings of historic or architectural significance. Once a portal has been captured, it will be marked either blue or green, which indicates who is currently in control of it. Grey colored portals are yet to be claimed by either sides. The density of portals correlates with the population density of its surrounding, so central areas of cities contain a higher concentration of portals.

Additionally, you can nominate locations as portals in your vicinity. Instructions can be found here .

The gameplay is unusual and very clever. The game turns your phone into a scanner which guides you to portals. Interacting with portals requires you to actually locate and reach them, as if they were really there. Once within 50 meters of a portal, called the action range, you can start hacking it. In doing so you’ll be able to use a bunch of devices to power up, defend or destroy portals.

You should deploy resonators, devices that gather and store XM from portals, and modifications, or mods. There are six types of mods available: Shields, Force Amplifiers, Link Amplifiers, Multi-hack, Heat Sinks, and Turrets. These can be used to render portals more difficult to attack, increase the intensity of the portal’s response to attackers, and increase the yield of hacking the portal. Each player can deploy up to two mods per portal.

A portal may be equipped with eight resonators. Resonators have levels as well. A deployed resonator’s level is dependent on the player’s Access Level. Access level increases as you get rewarded Access Points for hacking enemy portals. The higher the level, the higher the number of in game items you’ll be able to use, and the more powerful items you’ll be able to deploy. Furthermore, resonators expire over time, so you must recharged them every so often.

Your scanner runs on XM, which are represented by bright orbs scattered on the map. All functions that you do require XM, so you’ll need to find and collect those as you go along.

Finally, by hacking portals you’ll be also collecting Portal Keys. Keys will allow you to create links between portals. Three linked portals will create a triangle shaped control field. A control field will earn you Mind Units. And that is your end game. Securing Mind Units for your faction is what the game is all about and how global dominance is calculated. At the time of writing this article, the Enlightened have 53% global control, the resistance 47%.

The game was initially release in closed beta in November of 2012, chalking up one million downloads in the process. It lost its invitation only requirement when it entered open beta last month, while general release is scheduled for December 14. There are also plans to release an iOS version in 2014.

Niantics Labs is an internal startup within Google Inc. headed by John Hanke, its former Director of Product Management for Google "Geo", which included Maps, Local, and Earth. Prior to Ingress, it had released Field Trip, a location based travel guide which helps you discover places of interest. The app would act like a personal tour guide and surface information on nearby sites as you approached them.

You can read all about the conception of Ingress, as well as the '3 Principles For The Future Of Gaming' according to John on AllThingsD and Co.Design.