CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

Ingress is a game that can be played on your own, or as part of a group. You can seek out the company of other players, play with friends, or play on your own – whatever suits your play style, or life-style best – but what you can’t ignore is that Ingress is a team game. Regardless of whether or not you acknowledge the rest of your team, the fact remains that you are part of it. I find this aspect one of the nicest things about Ingress. I’m not a terribly social person, and there are days when I just need to be by myself, but I find I like the idea that there are people around who are on my side, even if I never see them. Sometimes, however, you can feel like you’re playing completely on your own, that no-one cares what you do, or don’t do, and like your team just doesn’t exist—but there are ways around that. Talk to other agents – there’s a faction tab in your Comms panel. You can use that to communicate to just your own side. If you’ve got time to spare, you can always check to...

Linking and fielding are two of the best ways to gain experience points, or AP, in Ingress, and you can be quite creative and make shapes built of interconnected triangles, or just see how big a blob of triangles you can make. If you’re ambitious, you can see if you build a patchwork of your team’s colour over an entire suburb, or city… just don’t expect to do it, without some serious opposition. But what does this have to do with keys? Well, last year, while attempting to build Blobby (an imaginary creature made up of a network of interlinked fields), I discovered the value of the opposite team leaving keys on the ground after they’d smashed a portal. I didn’t have to hack for them; I could just pick them up and rework the links. It made building my blob of blue triangles so much quicker and faster, that I was grateful. However, many months after my attempt to build Blobby, I’ve noticed that the opposition in my area seem to do this a lot: they’ll smash up a network of linke...

Ingress is an outdoor, augmented reality game, with strategic and tactical elements. Kind of like chess where everyone’s having their turn at once, or a game of Capture the Flag, if there were multiple flags and the field was world-wide and the teams unlimited in their numbers with everyone kinda doing their own thing within a team framework. Anyway, I find it fun, and I’m always taking note of what the other side is doing so I can learn new tricks… and then undo it. Right? Cos that’s the game. Anyway, way back in July, I noticed a continued pattern from the local greens (and one I see in some of the local blues, too, but not as many), and I’m seeing it not just the established players, but some of the newer ones to the area, as well. They’ll come in and smash a field, or a portal, but they won’t capture it, or, if they do capture it, they put a single resonator on it. It used to drive me crazy, because I couldn’t make sense of it - and then I found some Real Life constraints wh...