In the Scanner: The Ingress-PokemonGo Crossover

I play both Ingress and PokemonGo. They brighten up my walk, give me an incentive to get out and about (although, some days, that incentive is stronger than others), and help me break the cycle of negative thought that was helping perpetuate depression. There’s nothing like having to think strategically, or identify what that buzz was and if you’re going to catch it to nudge you out an unhealthy thought cycle, even temporarily.

So, in jumping back and forth between games at regular intervals, I noticed that where there were patches of xm on the Ingress scanner, there were usually pokemon that hadn’t shown up on the radar in the pokemon scanner. Cool, right?

Check this out. No pokemon near the local stop… and the closest one’s you can see in the scanner are for a stop that’s a couple of hundred metres away. Not a pokemon in sight, but Ingress shows this bubble of xm a short way up the walking path.

 

The first time, I walked up this path, I didn’t have Ingress running; I was just hoping there might be pokemon I couldn't see. And there were! After I’d noticed the correlation between xm and pokemon appearances, I thought I’d check out the theory that where pokemon gather in their reality, xm gathers in the Ingress reality, and I went back to this spot, and actually looked at it in Ingress.

At first I thought it was a bit of a coincidence, that there’d be nothing really connecting these two things, so I spent a few months checking it out, and it held… Well, for at least 80% of the time, and it makes things interesting. Now, if I’m walking a path with a while to go before the next portal, I remember to pay attention, because I know that where there’s a patch of xm haze , I might just want to flip to my other reality, and check it for the pokemon who’ve come creeping through the cracks from their universe into ours.

Going back to the example above, there are pokemon right where the xm has gathered. I was going to say to take a look at the third picture and the extra pokemon because there's no xm there, but, when I look back at the xm picture, there's the tiniest couple of specks of xm about where the pokemon is sitting, so my attempt to disprove the theory fails, right there - but you should know that it doesn't hold true all the time, just a lot of the time, okay?

In my head, I know there’s a technical explanation for it, something shared in the underlying code. Whatever – not my field. I’m a writer; I make up imaginary worlds and then make up an explanation for them, and I prefer to think of this weird coincidence this way. There are elements in our world, our real world (not code – shutup you pragmatic realists, okay? Let the rest of us have our fantasy We know it isn’t real, but everyone likes to dream.)

Anyway, the fantasy goes a bit like this: where the worlds of Ingress and PokemonGo touch on ours, where that influence, whether it be magical or energy-based, seeps through, those points coincide, and we see it reflected in our scanners. It’s how we recharge our xm in Ingress, and, in PokemonGo, it’s where we can usually find pokemon, away from a stop or gym.

This might not be how it actually works, either in the real, or the imagined worlds, but I can’t help wondering what it’s going to mean for Wizards Unite.