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An Ingress Story
10 years ago
Have you heard of Ingress? It's an MMO-ARG (Massive Multiplayer Online Alternate Reality Game) played on your smartphone. The objective is to hack, capture & link portals together for 1 of 2 factions and you find these portal by physically traveling to real life locations, mostly statues, houses of worship *eg: churches, mosques, temples, etc...) or historical buildings. I've been playing this for just under a month now, and I've found it rather addictive. It may be different for anyone outside the UK, but since a large majority of portals near me at under 1km away it's quite the motivator to get out of the house for 2 hours rather than sitting on my chair watching YouTube videos or starring at my sketchpad going "I wanna draw, but I don't feel like it..." I've even got my closest best mate playing it too. We keep planning late night raids on other player's portals, it makes me chuckle.
Since playing, I have changed the colour of my hometown from green to blue, being very OCD about how I set up my portal links & fields. In my town, there are 2 large areas that contain many portals, one is the main town area, where the town hall is; the other is the local park, about a kilometer down the road from my old college. The setting for my story I'm about to tell you is in the park. The time & date for it? Saturday 6th June (Yesterday at the time of writing this). I had originally gone into the park just gone lunch time to recapture some portals that had degraded over time (a good mechanic to have in a game like this) when my phone ran out of charge which was a way of telling me "You've been out for 2 hours now, take a break." and so I did, I went back home, recharged my phone and had my dinner, but once it came to 5:45pm, I was out again to finish what I had started in the park.
My starting plan was to link the portal at the South entrance of the park to the bandstand in the center of the park to create a field, I already had the portal key for the south entrance, I just needed the key for the bandstand. As I walked over the small slope of the hill towards the bandstand area, I noticed a gang of chavettes sitting and smoking in the bandstand. The girls where clearly late year high schoolers, if not early year college students, dressed in there typical chav wear most likely bought by their parents. Luckily for me, I don't have to stand directly on the portal to hack & link the portal so I didn't have to engage in awkward conversation with them. Unluckily for me however, 3-4 of the chavettes had spotted me, noticed I was the only white male walking past them that wasn't looking after kids and quickly made their way other to me to quickly annoy me by asking me for my phone number and stating "You're the guy of my dreams, you have long hair, etc..." which I ignored. Then, a few more of the chavettes started following, then the rest. We're talking double figures of annoyingly high pitched tweenage girls trying to get your attention. Luckily for me, once I had walked past the bandstand area and into one of the gardens, they had stopped following me and left the park, allowing me to finish what I went into the park to do.
On my way back home, I thought about the encounter I had in that park. It occurred to me that if it was the other way around, a gang of men annoying a lady walking through the park, it would be a 1 page article in the local weekly paper about "Sexual Harassment In Our Parks." and the classic domino effect would happen of angry letters to the police, increase of security on the park and so on. Also, the thought came to me of "What if I did report what I had experienced?" would my case be treated the same as any other human being, despite gender or race? or would my case be ignored because I'm a white male and I should "just get use to it"? The more I think about it, the more worried I get someone will related me to GamerGate.
I'm not looking for an answer by the way, I just wanted to write my thoughts down, tell you about a sweet smartphone game that doesn't have micro-transactions in it and a recent experience of mine.
Since playing, I have changed the colour of my hometown from green to blue, being very OCD about how I set up my portal links & fields. In my town, there are 2 large areas that contain many portals, one is the main town area, where the town hall is; the other is the local park, about a kilometer down the road from my old college. The setting for my story I'm about to tell you is in the park. The time & date for it? Saturday 6th June (Yesterday at the time of writing this). I had originally gone into the park just gone lunch time to recapture some portals that had degraded over time (a good mechanic to have in a game like this) when my phone ran out of charge which was a way of telling me "You've been out for 2 hours now, take a break." and so I did, I went back home, recharged my phone and had my dinner, but once it came to 5:45pm, I was out again to finish what I had started in the park.
My starting plan was to link the portal at the South entrance of the park to the bandstand in the center of the park to create a field, I already had the portal key for the south entrance, I just needed the key for the bandstand. As I walked over the small slope of the hill towards the bandstand area, I noticed a gang of chavettes sitting and smoking in the bandstand. The girls where clearly late year high schoolers, if not early year college students, dressed in there typical chav wear most likely bought by their parents. Luckily for me, I don't have to stand directly on the portal to hack & link the portal so I didn't have to engage in awkward conversation with them. Unluckily for me however, 3-4 of the chavettes had spotted me, noticed I was the only white male walking past them that wasn't looking after kids and quickly made their way other to me to quickly annoy me by asking me for my phone number and stating "You're the guy of my dreams, you have long hair, etc..." which I ignored. Then, a few more of the chavettes started following, then the rest. We're talking double figures of annoyingly high pitched tweenage girls trying to get your attention. Luckily for me, once I had walked past the bandstand area and into one of the gardens, they had stopped following me and left the park, allowing me to finish what I went into the park to do.
On my way back home, I thought about the encounter I had in that park. It occurred to me that if it was the other way around, a gang of men annoying a lady walking through the park, it would be a 1 page article in the local weekly paper about "Sexual Harassment In Our Parks." and the classic domino effect would happen of angry letters to the police, increase of security on the park and so on. Also, the thought came to me of "What if I did report what I had experienced?" would my case be treated the same as any other human being, despite gender or race? or would my case be ignored because I'm a white male and I should "just get use to it"? The more I think about it, the more worried I get someone will related me to GamerGate.
I'm not looking for an answer by the way, I just wanted to write my thoughts down, tell you about a sweet smartphone game that doesn't have micro-transactions in it and a recent experience of mine.
