

Google's mobile game Ingress enables players to create user-generated missions - adrow
http://venturebeat.com/2014/09/25/googles-mobile-game-ingress-enables-7m-players-to-create-user-generated-missions/

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incision
I got an invite to Ingress pretty early on, played heavily for several months
then dropped it completely. I never got into the lore and didn't particularly
care for bar-hopping meetups. As a game it felt really uneven, free to enact
sudden changes in some areas but leave others frustratingly untouched.

Seems pretty polarizing though, among the people I played with many stopped
playing long ago while others remain completely immersed.

At the moment, I'm more interested in what Google is/was getting out of it? I
haven't kept up, but I can imagine all sorts of interesting data that the game
could generate from the obvious cataloging of landmarks to path finding or
network effects in the distribution of invites and codes.

I can't help but wonder if this feature is a move toward putting the game out
to pasture in a way by putting content generation in the hands of the players.

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fenomas
Considering that this is a game whose playing field is the entire planet,
content generation has always been in the hands of the players. What surprises
me most about Ingress is how _little_ of the game scales that way though.
Portals (the nodes players fight for control of) are submitted by players but
approved manually, which typically takes 4-5 _months_. Likewise the game's
major events ("anomalies") occur only in a few hand-chosen cities at a time,
so most players have never been near one.

As for what Google gets out of it, originally Niantic's model was to build a
business out of a sister app called Field Trip, which is a "show me something
interesting near where I am" kind of app. Ingress was there to gamify the
content generation, and presumably Field Trip would pay the bills somehow.
There was also a tie-up angle, where some company (Jamba Juice?) had all its
stores show up in-game as portals.

But Google acquired them before that process had gotten going, and hasn't done
anything of note with Field Trip, so presumably that's not the answer. My
suspicion is that they consider Ingress worthwhile just for the the data
generated, and for convincing a lot of people to run around with location
reporting turned on. You'd think that Google would also start doing something
with the user-submitted data (e.g. surfacing the portals in Google Maps as
"points of interest" or similar), but AFAIK that hasn't happened.

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shkkmo
Google didn't acquire Niantic. Niantic was launched as a 'startup' within
google.

[http://www.fastcompany.com/3004551/can-startup-live-
inside-g...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3004551/can-startup-live-inside-
google-niantic-labs-creators-field-trip-and-ingress-try)

~~~
fenomas
Ah, thanks. That makes it all the stranger that Field Trip seems to be (or
have become) an afterthought.

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tvanantwerp
I tried getting into this game early on. One option for players was to submit
local landmarks as locations of note for the game. I would photograph and
submit whatever landmarks nearby I could find. While waiting some weeks for
them to be approved, I noticed one day that a bunch of Zipcar parking spots
had suddenly become Ingress hotspots. I was so put off by the obvious
advertising ploy that I stopped playing right then, and never touched it
again.

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cromwellian
AFAIK, Google are not selling advertising in ingress like that, so I think
you're making bad assumptions. That doesn't leave out people spamming/gaming
the system just like blackhat SEOs try to game Google search. I don't think
the Ingress people really have the resources to curate all portal submissions.

It also could be to bootstrap the system, they just points of interest or
business entries from Google Map's database. Otherwise, the game would be
boring for most people with no portals nearby to play with.

(If you live in the suburbs, sometimes the nearest interesting thing is a
Safeway or Quiznos)

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healsdata
No, they made a deal with ZipCar to advertise in game via portals. And every
portal submission is reviewed by hand. The quality of the review varies, but
there's a 130 day delay right now.

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healsdata
The last thing Google needs in Ingress is more content than they need to
review. They're currently 130 days behind on reviewing portal submissions and
this is either going to take just as long, or delay portal submissions even
more.

Frankly, I'm shocked that they didn't start with procedurally generated
missions first so that everyone can participate and then add hand-curated ones
slowly to improve the quality. Instead, they did a big media blitz when a
large portion of their player base isn't anywhere near an existing mission.

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fixedd
Do we know yet that they're moderating the missions?

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healsdata
I'm only going off the article:

> The Niantic staff will curate missions to ensure that no one does anything
> nefarious, like putting a pornographic picture in the mission description.

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scrollaway
How's Ingress doing nowadays? I never got into it because it sucked so much of
my battery life, but I keep receiving their newsletter and it seems like a
surprisingly active community.

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fixedd
Don't know how long it's been since you played, but there are a LOT more
people playing now than even around the new year. The biggest difference to me
is that L7 and 8 aren't that hard to achieve any more. I've seen people go
from first login to L8 in a week, or so. Back when I hit 8 it took months of
regular, dedicated work.

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tantalor
The title is killing me.

"Ingress enables players to create missions" or "Ingress adds user-generated
missions". Pick one.

