
Meeting strangers in the street - CmdrKrool
http://blog.lauramichet.com/2014/08/17/meeting-strangers-in-the-street/
======
tvanantwerp
I started Ingress thinking it would be fun, good exercise, and force me to
explore my city more. Instead, I stared into my phone until I arrived at a
Zipcar parking spot which, through whatever agreement existed between Google
and Zipcar, was a point of interest in the game.

I quit, and I've never been tempted to play again. Just going for a walk
without my phone is much nicer.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I actually started to track down where you live to find what city you're
talking about. I was going to find that portal and prove to you that the fact
it's a Zipcar parking spot is a pure accident; there are lots of portals at
commercial spaces (bars, restaurants) submitted by users because there is
something special and important to local culture about them, and no one is
making any deals.

In the middle of my search I stumbled upon this:

[http://www.zipcar.com/press/releases/googleingress](http://www.zipcar.com/press/releases/googleingress)

[http://www.zipcar.com/ingressplayers](http://www.zipcar.com/ingressplayers)

I didn't knew about it before. I'm not sure what to think about it. Maybe it's
fair that they did it; I need to read more. But I'm getting worried.

The moment they'll try to monetize players will be the moment this game will
die. People will leave with a bad taste in their mouths. I'll leave with a bad
taste. Someone will step up, make a similar game. But it won't be the same
anymore. It won't be The Game.

So dear NIA, please don't screw up what you created. Don't sacrifice the game
to Moloch for a quick buck.

~~~
jamornh
I wonder how else they could monetize this game that would not leave a bad
taste in the player's mouth though. It is a free game after all and so far
there's no banner ads or any sort of direct monetization happening within the
app itself.

Since they need to pay for the servers and the app's development, what would
be the best way to sustainably develop this app while also not turn off
players by charging some money in some way?

~~~
hmsimha
I was under the impression that Ingress data would be used to augment/improve
google's maps and location information.

------
shanusmagnus
The writing on this piece is so elegant and smooth. I didn't even care about
the game really, I would pay money to read this woman's autobiography. Or
writing about eating candy bars. Or anything. And she has a blog! I'm having
one of my 'the internet is amazing' moments.

------
sakri
I've never heard of Ingress before, I wasn't sure if I was reading some genius
surrealist piece or if this was real.

~~~
lucaspottersky
exaaactly!!!

------
ourmandave
I played Ingress in way early beta when most the portals were just fire
stations, post offices, and landmarks. I found myself driving through local
towns until 3 AM to claim "just one more."

I quit after maxing out a level 8 because it was just so repetitious.

They've since added badges and upped it to level 16 but I can't find the
motivation. =(

~~~
platz
Initially it was exciting, but I got turned off when I realized how much the
two sides hate each other, and how much that hate festered into petty dramas.

The last thing I need is a reason to hate on and talk shit about other people
_for a completely made up reason_

~~~
MichaelGG
Wow, that's a strong reaction. I had no idea the sides in Ingress had led to
this. Perhaps Google will use it to illustrate the silliness in the "sides"
available in politics.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's ironic that the sides are basically _the_ proverbial Greens and Blues.

[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Color_politics](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Color_politics)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot_racing#Byzantine_era](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot_racing#Byzantine_era)

------
nicholassmith
I think, for me, the game falls into the same category as EvE. Fun to read
about, but I don't think I could ever commit that much time to it, but it does
sound like it's great fun.

~~~
fiatpandas
My thoughts exactly. Eve, Ingress, Dwarf Fortress, Diplomacy. All games I'd
prefer to experience through surreal long-form journalism and retelling rather
than through actual play.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Eve costs too much. Dwarf Fortress requires too much cognitive power up-front,
to start having fun playing it. Diplomacy... I'd love to play it, but it's
hard to find someone in the area.

So there it is. Ingress. Free. Easy to start. Too easy to incorporate in your
daily life. You start doing groceries in the other shop; it's few minutes more
of walking, but you pass by five portals on the route. You stop reading
Facebook on the tram, you hack portals instead - you'll need all that
inventory later. You go out to buy a beer. It'll be only five minutes, you
think. Ok, ten, because you need to retake that two portals on your way. You
come home an hour later, after flipping the entire neighbourhood.

All those games you mentioned are addictive like hell. Out of them, Ingress
has the lowest barrier to entry. It's so small that you can tunnel through it
by accident. At some point you just start playing and can't stop. There,
you're sucked in for life.

~~~
praptak
I disagree about DF. I just grabbed a tutorial and started playing. The real
curve starts later in the game when the crappy UI is no longer enough to drive
80+ dwarves.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think I'll take another shot at it. First time around, I got lost in the
complexity and gave up after a day spent on exploring available actions and
values to track.

~~~
praptak
Yeah, I can imagine how playing DF by exploring the actions might suck. There
are lots of them and most don't make sense, especially in the beginning of the
game.

The value of the tutorials is that they show the smallest working set of
actions and how they interact.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's me always trying to learn everything with minimum amount of tutorials
required. Orbiter and KSP have beaten me in the same way - I had to read up a
bit before being able have any kind of a meaningful gameplay.

------
borski
Not about the game, but this was an incredible read about meeting new people.
For me, it's the spice of life, and it's why I'm now a part-time Lyft driver.
Instead of being bored, I get to meet someone new, go for a ride, and have a
real conversation about things that aren't MongoDB and Go.

------
skinnybatch
This narrative serves as direct refutation to the argument that our ever-
expanding technology is making us exponentially increasingly disconnected and
isolated. Leave it to Ingress to bring about random meet-ups, bringing
together women with canes and religious men with yarmulkes, encouraging
clothing-wearers to engage with nudists, and pre-teen craigslist entrepreneurs
with failed slackrope walkers.

Is it a game I would want to engage in? Not really. I criticize several people
I know that became addicted to the Kardashian app… Create a fake persona, and
"do stuff" to gain popularity and virtual-Twitter followers? If you could only
see how far my eyes roll back in my head, as I describe this. On the contrary,
while capturing portals may not be how I want to spend my early morning hours
(most notable because I prefer to sleep between 12 am and 4 am to get to the
gym around 530-6 am), at least there is evidence that Ingress is connecting
people in the flesh, around real, tangible, visible objects and locations. At
least in its virtual combat, the terrain is real. Rather than an escape from
reality to a contrived, imaginary realm, Ingress facilitates a renewed
connection amongst its players, most notably between people that might not
otherwise have been connected.

------
clarry
Don't these people need to wake up in the morning for work/school/whatever?

~~~
300bps
As someone who needs 8 hours of sleep per night or I'm a walking zombie, I'm
amazed at people that regularly get by on 4-6 hours per night. These people
have 14-21 more hours awake than I do per week.

I suspect a lot of the people who play games like this fall into the needing
less sleep category. I'm definitely not one to criticize it - I'm after all
asleep during that time.

~~~
clarry
I'm just a little envious.

I tend to go to bed between 22:00 and 22:30. I get up at around 6:30.
Unfortunately this doesn't feel like it's getting me enough sleep; I'm still
very drowsy in the morning and don't feel as refreshed as I could. I also need
a nap in the afternoon. And on Sundays, I could sleep all day long if nothing
or nobody woke me up... sleep deprivation?

And yeah, I will totally feel like a zombie if I go to bed any later than I
usually do.

------
wpeterson
Is this a game purely for entertainment or a vehicle for gathering mobile
data?

~~~
userbinator
Google officially denies it, but I neither play it nor have read the ToS, so
it wouldn't be surprising if they were using your location data for something
else. If they were, it's certainly a clever and unique way of doing it.

~~~
personZ
[https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/](https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/)

Google makes no bones about continually recording your location history, and
they certainly don't need Ingress for that. They use the location history for
predicatively estimating your trips, etc.

~~~
ljk
not to be that guy, but just because it doesn't show your locations on a web
page does not mean Google's not keeping track of it, right?

~~~
sp332
Google might add you to some anonymized dataset, but I doubt they would track
you like that if you didn't opt-in. (Facebook, I wouldn't even trust that
far.) But you have to opt-in to this to access certain Google services, so
people might not realize how much location data Google is using. You can't
just turn it on for certain apps, it's all or nothing.

------
rblstr
I've observed a work colleague play this game. It looks incredibly boring, and
its not much fun to hang out with someone who is glued to their phone the
whole time, changing routes just so they can get more portals.

Whatever makes people happy I suppose.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It looks incredibly boring from the outside, because you're not part of the
game. The feeling changes the moment you start to play.

The funny thing is, this game makes hanging out with non-players a bit
annoying, because you're constantly forced to keep your phone in your pocket
by people who don't understand that you _can_ have a productive conversation
while hacking a portal at the same time.

~~~
rblstr
Not everyone can multi-task that well. I know at least 2 people, girlfriend
included, that can't do anything when on their phone. They'll literally stop
in their tracks when walking on the sidewalk or completely drop out of a
conversation when reading / writing a text message. Let alone playing a game.
I also think its a bit rude to play a game when in the company of someone else
trying to have a conversation.

~~~
pavel_lishin
My wife can't multitask - she'll call me when she's walking to relay a two-
sentence message because she can't type and walk.

I agree that it's rude to play a game when having a conversation with someone,
but it's not rude at all for two people to be walking along and playing the
same game.

------
liamshaw
Ingress reminds me of the pokemkon game that Google made up for April fools
day. I was very disappointed that that game wasn't real.

------
ivanche
TRWTF moment for me while reading this article was that my wife's uncle
actually broke his ankle while playing Ingress :)

------
nicwolff
Isn't Ingress just Shadow Cities without beacons and jumps?

------
michaelochurch
There was actually a bit of a social vision behind G+ Hangouts. The idea was
that people would start "hanging out" in each other's web spaces, like dorm
rooms.

I was skeptical of this but (as a Googler, and at the time, a drinker of the
Kool-Aid) I wanted to see it work. Hence, my suggestion that (a) we re-orient
G+ Games around high-quality games (such as German-style board games, 2D
adventures and collaborative RPGs, etc.) instead of giving preferential
treatment to Zyngarbage, and (b) integrate high-quality games (which we didn't
have, but third-party developers will build them if you create the platform)
with Hangouts. I _knew_ people wouldn't "Hangout" just to watch Youtube videos
(really, who wants to hear others' reactions to YT videos? the comments are
horrific enough without having to hear associated voices) but I figured that a
high-quality game experience around truly _social_ games (not anti-social
Zyngarbage that merely marketed itself through social networks, like Farmville
back when Zynga was more obviously Facebook's Tapeworm) gave Hangouts a chance
of looking more like that original vision. A high-quality and social German-
style board game experience is one thing that _would_ get a critical core of
tech-savvy people using Hangouts for multiple hours per day.

Then... I was erroneously tagged as a union activist and my psychotic manager
at the time had a field day with the "make 'im quit" game, but no need to say
more on that. The Internet has had more than two lunches on that one.

It's interesting to see Google making this ambitious of a venture into games
and the concept of a game. Augmented reality is an interesting field and it's
admirable that they're trying this space out. Say what you will about Google
(I've said plenty) but their ambition and commitment to R&D is a very good
thing.

~~~
GuiA
The stuff that you suggest sounds amazing, and like it would actually make me
want to use G+/Hangouts.

Sadly, the percentage of the population who would be into that is probably
single digit, and large companies rarely care about single digit niches :(

~~~
michaelochurch
_Sadly, the percentage of the population who would be into that is probably
single digit, and large companies rarely care about single digit niches :(_

I would argue that those single-digit percent niches can matter quite a bit.
People follow the upscale. Facebook started at Harvard, branched out to the
Ivies, then the top 100 colleges, and so on. At every step, it was associated
with a higher level of prestige than what it was expanding into.

If you start with cognitively upscale games, you get a core of highly
intelligent people who love your product and will evangelize it. Through that,
and by just having a great product, you move the rest.

Games is a really hard space for Google to get because it emerged as the anti-
Yahoo. Yahoos and AOLs and Facebooks want their users inside the walled garden
spending as much time as they can. Google established itself by being the "we
won't waste your time" search engine; its job is to get you where you want to
go, as fast as it can. So Games were really a new thing for Google and G+
Games wasn't a fit for its traditional ideology, and that may explain why it
made such bad decisions (and ultimately failed) in that space.

------
EGreg
_Whatever, kid. I’m a lady._

I did not realize until this point in the story that the author was female!

~~~
pedrosorio
The part where she talks about thinking she is being stalked and specially
when she is describing the google+ community "I noticed that they were
definitely all men" were highly suggestive (to me) that the author was a
woman.

------
kyberias
Who has the time to read this much nonsense?

~~~
dreamweapon
Even more so -- who has time to _program_ apps like these?

That's the weird part.

~~~
icebraining
People who get paid for it?

------
eplanit
Can somebody please post a TL;DR. I wish the author had.

~~~
_archon_
I can't speak for others here, but part of the reason why I frequent HN in the
first place is that the articles are worth reading, and are necessary to read
in order to have a meaningful discussion in the comments. Telling you what the
author was writing about is easy. Conveying the tone and details is less so,
and you'd be better off to read it yourself as the desire for comprehensive
comprehension increases. Realizing this, when I see an HN thread, I evaluate
its interestingness and decide if I'm going to read it, or if the title gives
away the content, just the comments. HN is a community of diverse interests
serving interesting content to those interests, and I choose which ones I
pursue.

I propose that getting a TL;DR will be worse than simply forgetting this
article exists. A press release announcing Half Life 3 can be TL;DRed without
any lack of information, but this article is more introspective and most of
its value would be lost in truncation. I am beginning to believe that the high
incidence of such entries is one of the primary factors separating HN from
e.g. reddit et al.

The other aspect of my desire to read HN stems from its comments. Whether by
communal composition or moderation, I find the comments here to be of
significantly higher quality than I typically find elsewhere. This is one of
precious few well-used forums in which people who fundamentally disagree can
have a meaningful conversation. This happens with the bar of entry being the
understanding of the article or link in question. Where goes the quality of
diving into an article, so goes the discussion engendered thereby. The TL;DR
attitude is why most popular subreddits are unreadable anymore.

I would like to apologize for the lengthy comment, and please don't take this
as a slight to you or your curiosity. I've tried to point out why it may
benefit you to take the time to dive into deep content. I hope you'll consider
it in the future. It's significantly more rewarding than skimming links the
way I used to.

Also, I wanted to make this comment long partly out of spite. If you'll read
this, but not the article, there's some serious cognitive dissonance at play
in your mind.

TL;DR actually read it.

~~~
interrupt13
> I wanted to make this comment long partly out of spite

But it's clear that most of it is due to ego.

------
joesmo
Three sections in and the article still has no substance or point, other than
to bore the reader. The author needs to edit this and get to the point.
Terrible writing.

~~~
tortoises
The structure of this short story / personal essay is a series of chained
vignettes. They are linked together only loosely or suggestively. That is
probably deliberate. The story is about searching for an antidote to boredom,
and finding that antidote in a surreal, arbitrary game where you get to meet
unusual people. Therefore the structure of the short story, while initially a
little opaque, actually helps you get more simpatico with her state of mind as
she was going on this personal journey. I suppose it's not for everyone, but I
think the structure is actually quite clever.

------
dreamweapon
Don't Google engineers, with, as we are so often reminded, all that grey
matter shooting out of their ears (at such high velocity), have better things
to do with their time, and their staggering intellectual prowess?

Like you know, fixing global warming? Analyzing Ebola mutations? That sort of
thing.

~~~
MichaelGG
Right, because engineers trained on mobile systems and mapping technology
should just start "analyzing Ebola mutations". Might as well as why strong
construction workers aren't helping "build infrastructure in the third world"
instead of building condos for the rich.

Ingress is almost definitely an information-collection system to improve
mapping technology and determine human walking paths/flow, similar to
information we have on traffic on roads. (As well as whatever other benefits
Google can mine out of this info.)

~~~
dreamweapon
_Right, because engineers trained on mobile systems and mapping technology
should just start "analyzing Ebola mutations"._

The point is that it wouldn't hurt if they would start taking an interest in
matters of actual social and economic import.

Rather than just (apparently) bro'ing out at 4am and "collecting a lot of XP."
And waking up the whole damn neighborhood.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I can tell you what is even less important than this game. Most of the web
development. I mean, do we really need a millionth copy of the same basic CRUD
webpage or bullshit webapp just because a small company wants to outcompete
another small company on ad revenue?

> _Rather than just (apparently) bro 'ing out at 4am and "collecting a lot of
> XP."_

This "bro'ing out at 4 am" will have more "actual social impact" as a side
effect of collected data and community created than most of the things
programmers write for money.

Maybe go pick on web developers. Or sports events organizers. Or tourism
industry. It's all bullshit compared to Ebola.

~~~
dreamweapon
There's just something extra weird about the exuberant level of interest,
shown by members of a certain set who (according to their carefully crafted
image) are just way incredibly smarter than the rest of us, in projects so
utterly trivial.

~~~
scottlocklin
Maybe someone should come up with an honestly named version of this, "lab rat
in maze."

