That video game was Ingress, the augmented reality game that makes battlegrounds from real world locations.
People take this shit seriously.
People traveled from as far flung as Germany to take place in this event.
Roughly 1000 people turned up to take part in a massive battle within the game. Apparently the Enlightened faction beat out the Resistance to increase their lead to 17-7 in a large scale battle that has been taking place at major landmarks all over the world. I have no idea what any of this means but it sure sounds impressive.
In case you’re not aware, the technology under the hood of Ingress is the same tech that Niantic is using to create Pokemon Go. It uses GPS technology to integrate real world locations with the game itself, which is precisely what Pokemon Go will do.
And as popular as Ingress is, can you even imagine the crowd that would come if this was Pokemon Go? Imagine if they gave away Mew or some shit for one hour only, at this precise location.
The Opera House wouldn’t be big enough. Seriously. Chaos.
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20 responses to “These People Came To Sydney To Play A Mobile Game”
On a plane just last night, mobile games all over the shop. Then there was me with my trusty 3DS. I swear if the next generation of StreetPass somehow clocked your flight times instead of other people with 3DS’es, I’d have a chance of grabbing all of those stupid hats.
‘Core’ gamers seem to forget, they’re not the be all and end all. It’s great there’s lots of PS4s in lots of living rooms all over the world but this is the secret sauce – gaming bringing people together in real life. The console/PC owner will be spoon-fed VR for the near-future, but stuff like this and Pokemon Go is much more exciting.
Ingress is about as core as you can get. What other game has you sneaking around your city at night carrying out missions, dead drops and meeting with international counterparts to move items across continents, country wide operations with hundreds of people working together to achieve a goal.
Both teams have fan built apps and background infrastructure. They get EMS dispatchers to ‘run’ events and have a hierarchical flow of information from the central command with maps and computers and projectors down to team leads to the lowest level. Apps ding and direct your to the next objective as soon as it’s available. It’s all just crazy. And people flew here from Germany. People I’ve spoken to in America fly around the country to attend these.
There was some sort of commando thing ‘GoRuck’ running all night that a mate attended. In the Bondi Beach surf at 4am then 3 hours of exercises. Then another one run during the day along with the event.
Only Minecraft has a bigger game map than Ingress.
but…. whyy???
Try it out. Best with a mate or two. Join the same team. You ‘try’ it out. It became a game I played for years. No idea how much fuel I burnt playing this darn game (driving into city, or another town across the state or whatever). Good for your health though. Play on foot.
I’ve never been to an anomaly before, just waiting for the one day I can even fill my inventory with Level 8 gear…
Reach out to your local community in comms, agents will have spare gear they’re willing to donate- they’ll meet up in groups of 8 or more, to get more.
I could never really get into Ingress, despite loving the very idea of it. I hope I don’t have the same problem with Pokemon Go, but I suspect I will.
I tried PoGo. Couldn’t enjoy it. It suffers from the same problems all the Pokemon games suffer. There is no strategy. It’s just walk around catch pokemon use them to take gyms and then add them to the gym to defend it.
Ingress is strategic. linking 3 portals together to make a field. The bigger the field the more points your team gets.
But it’s not just field size. population under the field effects how many points you get.
A field from Alice Sprigs to Wallaman falls and charters towers made about 50,000 mu, while a field from Charters towers to Ayr to Mt Bartlefrare is over 130,000 mu.
I was at this event (I’m in that photo) and honestly not entirely sure I had fun. There’s an ARG component to it that comes to the fore during these events, but the actual gameplay doesn’t really handle fifty people all trying to hit the same location at once. It devolves into one team mashing the ‘attack’ button and the other team mashing the ‘defend’ button and whoever has the most people wins. (You’re burning consumables, but the intent is that you’ll bring enough consumables to last all day because otherwise you can’t really do much.)
Personally I liked the other event they ran the next day much better – this spread people out all across the CBD, from Darling Harbour to Oxford St and from Central to the Opera House. You had to visit as many pre-determined landmarks you could in one day, but because other players were constantly capturing them, you wanted to try and register the landmark when it was at the highest level you could so you’d get the best gear from it.
I sort of agree. I didn’t attend but I know FS days we have can devolve into a bit of that sort of thing. But it’s a good way to expend the excess gear you get (my work portal is a P8 with VR mods)
I really do prefer planing and executing big fields. It’s a lot more fun and a lot more satisfying. Smurf tears are Oh so sweet.
The two teams had almost identical numbers, yet one team won by a huge margin. It definitely isn’t a case of “whoever has the most people wins.” Sorry you didn’t have fun.
Umm no they didn’t. funny how the winning team always claims this. it was more like 2 to 1.
Hahaha, it’s funny how the losing team always says that you mean. Your numbers are so far off, it’s insane. It was pretty even.
Numbers indicate enlightened had at most 10% more people on te ground. Not 2 to 1. But 1.1 to 1
There are never anomalies where people are outnumbered 2 to 1. 20% more is about the biggest difference ever seen in anomalies.
I’d take a good look at the photo – Enlightened, on the left, are way more bunched up than Resistance, on the right, particularly up the top, which indicates a numbers advantage. Based on the way the mechanics work, I’d expect big blowouts from even very slight numbers advantages. I’m not saying that’s the only thing going on here – I doubt Sydney’s Resistance would have won had everything been otherwise even – but based on normal gameplay, Sydney Enlightened seem to be either absurdly well-resourced, or there’s just way more of them.