Blog Post 7: GPS Game

Ingress Experience

Ingress had GPS-features for users to see what was near them on the phone to take over portals. In Ingress, taking over portals is called "hacking". Colors of the portals were different for both team. I went outside with a group of "Resistances" that was my group's team. The resistance had blue portals and the locations we went were mainly on campus and San Jose downtown.

A Group of Fellow Resistances

Experience With Peers

As we played on campus and downtown area, we didn't read the tutorials or some skimmed the tutorials so not many of us knew what was going on. Since tutorials didn't appear again and we didn't Google search a playthrough, we figured out along the way that the graphics with blue sparkles mean that an item was nearby, so we followed the trail of blue sparkling dots.

my username is meh108

In addition to following sparking blue trail, we also walked around to landmarks to uncover photos posted by other users.

La Lune Sucree Cafe in SJ downtown

Aside from my teammates findings, I would sometimes stray away from the group to find interesting features of the game. I found out that if I were in a location that had a weak location signal, such as walking towards Panda Express, the screen turns into a cool static warning message. This ruined my gameplay as my item searching was lost.

Game Mechanics

The gaming mechanics of Ingress were mostly cooperative play and gps/real world movement. With our combined skillsets of inductive reasoning and critical observations, we were able to have an enjoyable play-through and earned some items. The aesthetics, such as the design of blue dots, helped a lot.