'Ingress' Brings Virtual Reality MMOs Into Real Life

We love video games because they can so easily transport us to worlds we'd otherwise never see, even with Mario's mushrooms. Yet the joys of gaming are marred by the fact that we have to play them on a screen. And no matter how big or curved your TV is, video games have a lot of trouble being as immersive as actual life.

That's what makes Ingress, an augmented reality game played in real life with the help of a smartphone, so compelling. Ingress is essentially a location-based capture-the-flag game powered by an augmented reality app that overlays games objectives and objects over a map. (The developer, NianticLabs@Google, has been described as an in-house skunkworks for Google.) In other words, it's like a massively-multiplayer real-time strategy game that you play with other people in real-life locations.

The backstory is pretty straightforward, even if the evolving storyline is constantly changing: A mysterious Exotic Matter (XM) has been unearthed by CERN scientists, and some researchers believe it is controlling how humans think. Thus, a global race is on between two factions: the Enlightened, which want to control XM to push humans into some transhuman utopia, and the Resistance, which doesn't trust the stuff. The goal of the game, then, is to control where XM spews out of the Earth, which is displayed in the Ingress app's cyberpunk-ish map screen.

Capturing an XM portal means getting close enough to hack it, which happens pretty quickly. Users can also set traps and use weapons in their quest to control as much XM as possible. Missions include collecing XM—a pretty passive act, to be honest—as well as portal hacking and connecting with other players.

The teams are naturally the key, and what pushes the game beyond a geocaching clone and into the realm of totally bitchin'. Ingress has been out for more than a year, but only launched into public a couple months ago. According to the app's in-game stats, some 2 million plus people have downloaded the app worldwide, split about 2:1 across the Resistance (which do sound like the good guys) and the Enlightened.

My first hack was on the portal pegged to Doritos event at an interactive festival in Austin, Texas; after a few seconds of a simulated attack that cost me a bit of XM, I scored a nice cache in return. These location-based tie-ins are key to the game, as they both give users landmarks to check out as well as offer the opportunity to create location-based campaigns and challenges. Plus, it's pretty cool to see how a game can tie into the same places you stare at every day.

After playing for a bit and following along with the ongoing team chat, it's clear that people take the game really seriously. The local area chat was cooking along nicely when we checked it, and more savvy users were talking specific strategy on how to take down new locations and expand their territory.

The immediate draw of the game is obvious: We make the geocaching comparison because, assuming you're a fan of geocaching, it's a similar principle of going on a gadget-navigated adventure to find treasures, which is fun as hell. But what's really cool about Ingress is how much deeper the game goes. With missions and social aspects, it's a game that's going to keep our attention for a while to come.

It's also a game that already has a blooming community and wild, convoluted backstory that's release in a few snippets at a time as the game progresses, and which involved. Want to find out more? The Ingress subedit is a good place to start, while the growing story is being documented on a Niantic Project wiki.