Meeting strangers in the street
blog.lauramichet.com
blog.lauramichet.com
I quit, and I've never been tempted to play again. Just going for a walk without my phone is much nicer.
In the middle of my search I stumbled upon this:
http://www.zipcar.com/press/releases/googleingress
http://www.zipcar.com/ingressplayers
I didn't knew about it before. I'm not sure what to think about it. Maybe it's fair that they did it; I need to read more. But I'm getting worried.
The moment they'll try to monetize players will be the moment this game will die. People will leave with a bad taste in their mouths. I'll leave with a bad taste. Someone will step up, make a similar game. But it won't be the same anymore. It won't be The Game.
So dear NIA, please don't screw up what you created. Don't sacrifice the game to Moloch for a quick buck.
Since they need to pay for the servers and the app's development, what would be the best way to sustainably develop this app while also not turn off players by charging some money in some way?
The 20th century word, "dishonesty", is so much less cool-sounding.
I quit after maxing out a level 8 because it was just so repetitious.
They've since added badges and upped it to level 16 but I can't find the motivation. =(
The last thing I need is a reason to hate on and talk shit about other people for a completely made up reason
I met people treating this game too seriously. People who turned Ingress into source of interpersonal dramas. I met people from the other team, who looked at me with angry eyes when we shaked hands. And then I met others; I stood there at 3 AM in the park surrounded by a family playing for the other team. The father was telling me interesting stories while at the same time his wife and kid were kicking my butt in-game. We had a good laugh and went our separate ways. I had a lot of friendly chat exchanges with "enemy" players.
Like with all competing groups - whether political, sports, business or videogame - hating is a choice. Play by the rules, steer away from people who seek excuses to hate others, have fun and remember that both sides are playing the same game.
Upon arrival I met someone with a phone hiding in the shadows near a fence. I just stood there, countering her actions and waiting to be noticed. A kid yelled, "mom! are you coming?", to whom she replied "yes, just wait one minute". After that she noticed me standing there, so she told her kid to go and bring his dad. Moments later I was surrounded by three Ingress players and had to accept those portals are to be theirs that night.
We talked for about half an hour, exchanging stories about the city and Ingress community in it, all in completely friendly atmosphere. I haven't met them IRL again since then, but they take my portals over every now and then :).
It was only a few times and it was back when I was to low level to take down claimed portals.
I'd plan a route to open portals in surrounding towns on the intel map (after farming as many resonators as I could).
Of course I'd be farming while playing the route so I'd always have more resos than I'd planned and the next town "wasn't that far" and "I've already come all this way", etc. etc.
Forgetting that the drive home was now hella far.
So there it is. Ingress. Free. Easy to start. Too easy to incorporate in your daily life. You start doing groceries in the other shop; it's few minutes more of walking, but you pass by five portals on the route. You stop reading Facebook on the tram, you hack portals instead - you'll need all that inventory later. You go out to buy a beer. It'll be only five minutes, you think. Ok, ten, because you need to retake that two portals on your way. You come home an hour later, after flipping the entire neighbourhood.
All those games you mentioned are addictive like hell. Out of them, Ingress has the lowest barrier to entry. It's so small that you can tunnel through it by accident. At some point you just start playing and can't stop. There, you're sucked in for life.
The value of the tutorials is that they show the smallest working set of actions and how they interact.
Two hours later she returned, happily bearing cake, and said "Yeah I got distracted hacking portals". She'd walked something like six miles.
She's certainly keen, and enjoys it, though I've never really seen the point of it myself.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_rCdGYp3nbSUXFG4Ky96RZW1...
1. I really hate the map. 90% of the map is devoted to ocean and Russia, and the interesting bits are crammed into the remaining 10%. It's incredibly easy to misread the map and fuck up a move. Perhaps this is intentional, but it drives me nuts.
2. I didn't know any of the people, so I couldn't judge how honest or deceitful they were being. Maybe this would be better with friends whose tells I know better.
3. Sweet god, you're right, it takes forever - and yet you're feeling rushed the entire time, since you have to make sure you talk to at least the people you're nominally allied with for the next N turns, as well as hearing out potential new allies, and trying to make new ones of your own.
I guess I'm just too casual of a gamer for something like this, but if you think you're interested in playing Diplomacy, I very highly recommend that you try to find someone in your area to play with - there are probably six other people just like you wishing they had someone else to play with.
As for friendships, I think one has to state clearly at the beginning of the game that one has a strong chance to turn against their allies at some point. It's a feature of the game. There are ways to manage this risk for one's sanity. :)
Is it a game I would want to engage in? Not really. I criticize several people I know that became addicted to the Kardashian app… Create a fake persona, and "do stuff" to gain popularity and virtual-Twitter followers? If you could only see how far my eyes roll back in my head, as I describe this. On the contrary, while capturing portals may not be how I want to spend my early morning hours (most notable because I prefer to sleep between 12 am and 4 am to get to the gym around 530-6 am), at least there is evidence that Ingress is connecting people in the flesh, around real, tangible, visible objects and locations. At least in its virtual combat, the terrain is real. Rather than an escape from reality to a contrived, imaginary realm, Ingress facilitates a renewed connection amongst its players, most notably between people that might not otherwise have been connected.
I suspect a lot of the people who play games like this fall into the needing less sleep category. I'm definitely not one to criticize it - I'm after all asleep during that time.
I tend to go to bed between 22:00 and 22:30. I get up at around 6:30. Unfortunately this doesn't feel like it's getting me enough sleep; I'm still very drowsy in the morning and don't feel as refreshed as I could. I also need a nap in the afternoon. And on Sundays, I could sleep all day long if nothing or nobody woke me up... sleep deprivation?
And yeah, I will totally feel like a zombie if I go to bed any later than I usually do.
People also often organize at more humane hours, like early evening during the week or around noon during weekend. The thing about 4-am actions is that they're based on the expectation that the other team will be asleep. There's a big imbalance of power favouring offense over defense, so if your team is setting up a farm (quickly turning all portals in a portal-dense area into maximum level and installing protection mods), it can take one or two opposing players to undo the work of ten from your team.
Google makes no bones about continually recording your location history, and they certainly don't need Ingress for that. They use the location history for predicatively estimating your trips, etc.
Whatever makes people happy I suppose.
The funny thing is, this game makes hanging out with non-players a bit annoying, because you're constantly forced to keep your phone in your pocket by people who don't understand that you can have a productive conversation while hacking a portal at the same time.
I agree that it's rude to play a game when having a conversation with someone, but it's not rude at all for two people to be walking along and playing the same game.
I was skeptical of this but (as a Googler, and at the time, a drinker of the Kool-Aid) I wanted to see it work. Hence, my suggestion that (a) we re-orient G+ Games around high-quality games (such as German-style board games, 2D adventures and collaborative RPGs, etc.) instead of giving preferential treatment to Zyngarbage, and (b) integrate high-quality games (which we didn't have, but third-party developers will build them if you create the platform) with Hangouts. I knew people wouldn't "Hangout" just to watch Youtube videos (really, who wants to hear others' reactions to YT videos? the comments are horrific enough without having to hear associated voices) but I figured that a high-quality game experience around truly social games (not anti-social Zyngarbage that merely marketed itself through social networks, like Farmville back when Zynga was more obviously Facebook's Tapeworm) gave Hangouts a chance of looking more like that original vision. A high-quality and social German-style board game experience is one thing that would get a critical core of tech-savvy people using Hangouts for multiple hours per day.
Then... I was erroneously tagged as a union activist and my psychotic manager at the time had a field day with the "make 'im quit" game, but no need to say more on that. The Internet has had more than two lunches on that one.
It's interesting to see Google making this ambitious of a venture into games and the concept of a game. Augmented reality is an interesting field and it's admirable that they're trying this space out. Say what you will about Google (I've said plenty) but their ambition and commitment to R&D is a very good thing.
Sadly, the percentage of the population who would be into that is probably single digit, and large companies rarely care about single digit niches :(
I would argue that those single-digit percent niches can matter quite a bit. People follow the upscale. Facebook started at Harvard, branched out to the Ivies, then the top 100 colleges, and so on. At every step, it was associated with a higher level of prestige than what it was expanding into.
If you start with cognitively upscale games, you get a core of highly intelligent people who love your product and will evangelize it. Through that, and by just having a great product, you move the rest.
Games is a really hard space for Google to get because it emerged as the anti-Yahoo. Yahoos and AOLs and Facebooks want their users inside the walled garden spending as much time as they can. Google established itself by being the "we won't waste your time" search engine; its job is to get you where you want to go, as fast as it can. So Games were really a new thing for Google and G+ Games wasn't a fit for its traditional ideology, and that may explain why it made such bad decisions (and ultimately failed) in that space.
You'd be surprised. There are a LOT of "look at my reaction to some video" videos on YouTube.
I did not realize until this point in the story that the author was female!
That's the weird part.
I propose that getting a TL;DR will be worse than simply forgetting this article exists. A press release announcing Half Life 3 can be TL;DRed without any lack of information, but this article is more introspective and most of its value would be lost in truncation. I am beginning to believe that the high incidence of such entries is one of the primary factors separating HN from e.g. reddit et al.
The other aspect of my desire to read HN stems from its comments. Whether by communal composition or moderation, I find the comments here to be of significantly higher quality than I typically find elsewhere. This is one of precious few well-used forums in which people who fundamentally disagree can have a meaningful conversation. This happens with the bar of entry being the understanding of the article or link in question. Where goes the quality of diving into an article, so goes the discussion engendered thereby. The TL;DR attitude is why most popular subreddits are unreadable anymore.
I would like to apologize for the lengthy comment, and please don't take this as a slight to you or your curiosity. I've tried to point out why it may benefit you to take the time to dive into deep content. I hope you'll consider it in the future. It's significantly more rewarding than skimming links the way I used to.
Also, I wanted to make this comment long partly out of spite. If you'll read this, but not the article, there's some serious cognitive dissonance at play in your mind.
TL;DR actually read it.
But it's clear that most of it is due to ego.
Then I got into Ingress, a GPS-enabled game. I had lots of adventures and made new friends. My old friends tolerated me.
As my ankle healed I bought a scooter and used it to play Ingress.
A surprising amount of Ingress is photographing uninspired corporate art.
I started to believe life is about boredom and I was glad I was filling the boredom more creatively, although it's not really that creative I think sometimes.
Like you know, fixing global warming? Analyzing Ebola mutations? That sort of thing.
Ingress is almost definitely an information-collection system to improve mapping technology and determine human walking paths/flow, similar to information we have on traffic on roads. (As well as whatever other benefits Google can mine out of this info.)
The point is that it wouldn't hurt if they would start taking an interest in matters of actual social and economic import.
Rather than just (apparently) bro'ing out at 4am and "collecting a lot of XP." And waking up the whole damn neighborhood.
> Rather than just (apparently) bro'ing out at 4am and "collecting a lot of XP."
This "bro'ing out at 4 am" will have more "actual social impact" as a side effect of collected data and community created than most of the things programmers write for money.
Maybe go pick on web developers. Or sports events organizers. Or tourism industry. It's all bullshit compared to Ebola.